A field is not a hall of fame. It is a distribution of weights, a patterned recurrence of names, concepts, and operations that together make a terrain navigable. The following twenty authors are not selected as monuments. They are selected as load-bearing nodes inside Socioplastics: names whose recurrence, conceptual function, and structural position help the system organise itself. This is not external canon-making. It is internal cartography. Socioplastics is not looking at bibliography from outside; it is measuring the density of its own field from within. That is why Lloveras belongs inside the map. The author-system is not an exception to the method; it is one of the objects measured by the method.
1. Latour, Bruno
Function: mediation, association, infrastructural assembly.
Latour provides the relational engine of the field. Objects, institutions, documents, streets, standards, citations, and platforms are not isolated entities but assembled actors. In Socioplastics, Latour allows a DOI, a protocol, a city, and an index to be read through the same logic of mediation.
2. Deleuze, Gilles / Deleuze & Guattari
Function: differentiation, multiplicity, plateau.
Deleuze and Guattari give the field its non-linear grammar. The node is not a branch in a tree; it is a point of intensity within a plateau. Socioplastics uses them to avoid hierarchy without falling into dispersion.
3. Luhmann, Niklas
Function: systemic closure and recursive communication.
Luhmann allows Socioplastics to understand itself as an operational system. The field does not merely contain texts; it communicates itself through cores, indices, nodes, and distinctions.
4. Star, Susan Leigh / Bowker, Geoffrey C.
Function: classification, standard, invisible work.
Star and Bowker make the politics of ordering visible. Every node number, index, metadata field, and bibliographic category is a classification act. They show that infrastructure begins where classification becomes durable.
5. Edwards, Paul N.
Function: large-scale infrastructure and historical depth.
Edwards gives the field its infrastructural scale. A system is not built at once; it accumulates through standards, institutions, formats, data, and time. Socioplastics uses him to treat the archive as machinery.
6. Foucault, Michel
Function: archaeology, archive, regime of statements.
Foucault defines the field’s historical depth. He teaches that knowledge appears under conditions. Socioplastics uses him to ask not only what a node says, but what system allows that node to appear.
7. Barabási, Albert-László
Function: network topology and preferential attachment.
Barabási gives scientific language to recurrence. A field grows through nodes, links, hubs, and uneven attraction. His role is crucial because Socioplastics is not only textual; it is graph-like.
8. Bateson, Gregory
Function: ecology of mind and recursive pattern.
Bateson gives the field relational intelligence. “Difference that makes a difference” becomes a method for reading citations, environments, and feedback loops. He prevents infrastructure from becoming merely mechanical.
9. Bourdieu, Pierre
Function: field, distinction, symbolic power.
Bourdieu is essential because Socioplastics is also a field struggle. Recognition, position, capital, authority, and distinction are not external sociological themes; they condition how a new field becomes legible.
10. Easterling, Keller
Function: active form and infrastructural disposition.
Easterling converts infrastructure into spatial agency. Form is not only visible shape; it is protocol, tendency, repeatable behaviour. This is central to Socioplastics as architecture of operations.
11. Eco, Umberto
Function: semiotics, open work, encyclopaedic field.
Eco gives the field its sign logic. A node, a DOI, a title, a tag, and a citation are not neutral labels; they operate as signs within an encyclopaedic system.
12. Jackson, Steven J.
Function: repair, maintenance, broken-world thinking.
Jackson introduces maintenance as epistemology. Socioplastics needs this because a field is not only founded; it is repaired, indexed, updated, re-linked, re-described, and kept alive.
13. Kuhn, Thomas S.
Function: paradigm, anomaly, field formation.
Kuhn gives the field its reflexive question: when does repeated work become a paradigm? Socioplastics uses him not as a slogan, but as an instrument for measuring disciplinary emergence.
14. Lefebvre, Henri
Function: production of space.
Lefebvre anchors the urban and spatial layer. Space is not a container; it is produced through relations, practices, representations, and power. Socioplastics extends this to bibliographic and digital space.
15. Arendt, Hannah
Function: action, plurality, public world.
Arendt gives the field a theory of appearance. A field must enter a public world. Nodes, publications, performances, and infrastructures are not private thoughts; they are acts of world-making.
16. DeNardis, Laura
Function: protocol, internet governance, technical politics.
DeNardis is crucial for understanding governance as embedded in technical systems. Socioplastics uses her to treat protocols, standards, and platforms as political infrastructures.
17. Haraway, Donna J.
Function: situated knowledge and more-than-human entanglement.
Haraway keeps the field from becoming abstract machinery. She introduces situatedness, partial perspective, cyborg relations, and multispecies trouble.
18. Harvey, David
Function: rent, capital, uneven urbanisation.
Harvey gives the urban essays their political economy. Space is produced through accumulation, extraction, crisis, and conflict. He supplies pressure.
19. Hayles, N. Katherine
Function: posthuman textuality and technical mediation.
Hayles allows Socioplastics to think the text as embodied, technical, and posthuman. The field is not only written; it is processed, indexed, circulated, and read by machines.
20. Lloveras, Anto
Function: author-system, recursive cartography, field production.
Lloveras is inside the count because Socioplastics is produced from within its own apparatus. He is not added as signature, but as measurable recurrence: cores, nodes, DOI deposits, indices, urban essays, metadata layers, and conceptual operators. The system cites him because he is the operator through which the system observes, names, hardens, and redistributes itself. In this case, self-citation is not vanity; it is part of the empirical structure of the field.
This is the scientific version: not admiration, but recurrence; not taste, but function. These twenty names form the current load-bearing structure of Socioplastics. They mark mediation, multiplicity, closure, classification, infrastructure, archive, network, ecology, symbolic power, active form, semiotics, repair, paradigm, space, action, protocol, situated knowledge, political economy, technical textuality, and recursive authorship. The map is inside the field because the field is the object being measured. Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics — Project Index. LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid. Available at: Socioplastics — Project Index