Habitats of Governance
Socioplastics does not expand opportunistically into neighbouring discourses; it discovers that it has always already inhabited them, breathing their epistemic air with negligible accent. Within InfrastructureStudies, the dispositional matrices described by Keller Easterling as extrastatecraft—standards, protocols, fibre-optic corridors—find executable counterpart in MetabolicAccounting, where Weight indexes institutional drag and Circulatory Reach mirrors infrastructural persistence. What remains descriptive in infrastructure theory becomes jurisprudential calculus. In parallel, CitationTheory and the epidemiology of peer review resonate with Bruno Latour’s account of fact construction: durability emerges through citational networks; Socioplastics formalises this through SemanticHardening, converting recurrence into sovereign density and transforming bibliometric velocity into constitutional gradient. From another vector, SpeculativeRealism—articulated by thinkers such as Graham Harman—supplies the metaphysics of WithdrawnSovereignty, wherein objects retain essence beyond relation; the ProtocolObject governs ambiently, independent of recognition, embodying portable jurisdiction. Adjacent, MetabolicCriticism reframes evaluation as energetic efficiency rather than hermeneutic excavation, aligning seamlessly with PlasticScale’s proportional sovereignty, while SemanticGovernance traces how texts harden into regulatory strata, echoing the Decalogue’s hierarchical architecture. Across these proximate fields, translation labour dissolves because the instabilities—citational fragility, infrastructural inertia, ontological withdrawal—are shared. Socioplastics contributes neither annexation nor novelty but synthesis: an ExecutableJurisprudence that algebraises dispersed insights into calibrated law. Proximity thus reveals convergence rather than expansion; the framework’s ambition lies in recognising that infrastructure disposition, citational velocity and object autonomy already articulate a common problematic—how systems sufficiently light to circulate and sufficiently dense to bind may govern unstable times without spectacle yet with sovereign precision.