TOMBOLO: PlasticScale in the Conceptual Commons

PlasticScale emerges within the dense ecology of systems-oriented thought not as insurgent doctrine but as relational architecture, articulating its identity through calibrated adjacency to antecedent frameworks. From Niklas Luhmann’s autopoiesis it extracts recursive self-constitution while relinquishing the dogma of operational closure, substituting instead a permeable kernel sustained through contextual coupling. From Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory it assimilates distributed agency yet resists descriptive neutrality by instituting a minimal functional core—ten invocational operations that render the system designable rather than merely traceable. Cybernetics contributes recursive feedback, though PlasticScale displaces equilibrium as normative telos, privileging proportional integrity over homeostasis and legitimising amplification when scalar coherence is maintained. Infrastructural studies furnish attentiveness to substrate and latency, but where they excavate existing assemblages, PlasticScale proposes generative infrastructure auditable through the Proportional Scale Index (PSI). Its distinctive contribution resides in three interlocking innovations: PSI as operational metric transforming scale from metaphor into calculable relation; non-hierarchical scalar regimes—Micro, Optimal, Intensive—configuring plural operational fields; and autophagic metabolism, whereby systems digest their own residues to sustain adaptive continuity. A synthetic case may be observed in urban governance, where micro-interventions propagate through scalar modulation, monitored by PSI, and metabolised into institutional learning without forfeiting contextual permeability. Thus PlasticScale positions itself as conversational partner rather than antagonist within the systems landscape, enacting the very proportional intelligence it theorises and offering a calibrated grammar for designing coherence amid transformation.

Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics