INDEX HORTENSIS: Relations and Resonances within the Systems Landscape

This short essay situates PlasticScale within the broader ecology of systems-oriented thought, tracing its affinities and departures from established frameworks. Rather than asserting novelty through rupture, PlasticScale constructs its identity through differential relation: it knows its predecessors, extracts their operational yield and metabolises their conceptual weight. From Luhmann's autopoiesis it inherits recursive self-constitution while discarding systemic closure; from Latour's actor-network it adopts distributed agency while insisting on a minimal functional kernel; from cybernetics it takes feedback regulation while embedding it within living social matter. The framework's distinct contribution lies in its integration of proportional metrics (PSI), scalar regimes and autophagic metabolism—capacities absent from adjacent discourses. PlasticScale thus emerges not as competitor but as conversational partner across the systems landscape.

I. Knowing One's Contemporaries - PlasticScale claims no virgin territory. The questions it addresses—how systems maintain coherence under transformation, how scale modulates operation, how structure emerges from distributed agency—have animated multiple discursive lineages. What distinguishes PlasticScale is not the novelty of its concerns but the specificity of its answers and the economy of its architecture. The framework operates through differential adjacency: it positions itself not against other systems but alongside them, extracting operational principles while discarding conceptual baggage. This section maps those relations across five key discourses.

II. Systems Theory and Autopoiesis - From Niklas Luhmann's systems theory, particularly the concept of autopoiesis, PlasticScale inherits the principle of recursive self-constitution. A system produces and reproduces itself through its own operations; its boundaries are not given but enacted. This aligns with PlasticScale's autophagic metabolism: the system builds itself from its own residues. Divergence: Luhmann's systems are operationally closed, processing only their own communications. PlasticScale, by contrast, maintains structural coupling with heterogeneous contexts through MUSE interfaces. It closes only at the functional kernel; its interfaces remain open to translation. Where Luhmann's theory describes how systems observe themselves, PlasticScale prescribes how they may calibrate themselves through proportional metrics.

III. Actor-Network Theory - From Bruno Latour and actor-network theory (ANT), PlasticScale adopts the principle of distributed agency. Actors are not pre-existing entities but effects of networks; agency circulates rather than resides. This aligns with PlasticScale's mesh of nodes and slugs, where no single node commands and no slug dictates. Divergence: ANT remains descriptive and famously refuses to prescribe. PlasticScale, while sharing the distributed ontology, installs a minimal prescriptive kernel—ten functions that must remain active for the system to operate. Where ANT traces associations, PlasticScale calibrates intensities. Where ANT flattens hierarchies, PlasticScale distinguishes scalar regimes (Micro, Optimal, Intensive) as operational fields.

IV. Cybernetics and Feedback - From first and second-order cybernetics, PlasticScale takes the principle of feedback regulation. Systems monitor their own states and adjust accordingly. This aligns with autovalidation through functional discontinuity: the system feels its own deviations and triggers internal review. Divergence: Classical cybernetics sought equilibrium and control. PlasticScale seeks neither. Its regulatory function aims at proportional integrity, not homeostatic balance. An operation in the Intensive regime is not a deviation to be corrected but a legitimate scalar position requiring heightened coherence. Cybernetics privileged negative feedback (error correction); PlasticScale equally values positive feedback (amplification) when proportionally sustainable.

V. Infrastructural Studies - From infrastructural studies (Star, Bowker, Easterling), PlasticScale borrows attention to the substrate—the often invisible systems that enable and constrain action. Like infrastructure, it operates best when unnoticed, when its functions execute without demanding attention. Divergence: Infrastructural studies typically analyse existing systems; PlasticScale proposes designable infrastructure. It is not content to describe how roads, cables or standards shape behaviour; it offers a kernel for constructing new infrastructural logics. Where infrastructural studies reveal hidden operations, PlasticScale makes its own operations auditable through PSI.

VI. Media Archaeology and Posthumanism - From media archaeology (Parikka, Ernst) and posthumanist thought (Haraway, Braidotti), PlasticScale inherits attention to materiality, temporality and boundary transgression. The framework acknowledges that its operations occur within layered media environments and that the human is not their exclusive agent. Divergence: Media archaeology often privileges excavation over construction. PlasticScale, while knowing its archaeological layers (the monsters digested), is oriented toward deployment. Posthumanism celebrates boundary dissolution; PlasticScale maintains boundaries as operational necessities (function two: inscribing limits) while rendering them negotiable through scale.

VII. Convergences and Divergences - PlasticScale’s relation to adjacent discourses is best understood not as polemic but as metabolic differentiation: a deliberate practice of extracting operative principles while relinquishing conceptual encumbrances that would compromise proportional invariance. From systems theory it assimilates recursive autopoiesis—the capacity of a system to reproduce itself through its own operations—yet it refuses operational closure, maintaining structural coupling beyond the kernel. From actor-network theory it adopts distributed agency, recognising that action circulates across heterogeneous assemblages; however, it declines descriptive neutrality, installing instead a minimal prescriptive chassis of ten functions that render the system executable. From cybernetics it retains feedback regulation, embedding recursive monitoring within its architecture, while discarding equilibrium bias in favour of proportional integrity across scalar regimes. Infrastructural studies contribute attentiveness to latent substrates and enabling conditions, but PlasticScale rejects analytical passivity, advancing from description toward generative infrastructural design. Media archaeology offers sensitivity to material temporality and layered mediation, though PlasticScale resists an exclusive excavation orientation, privileging deployment over retrospection. Posthumanism supplies boundary transgression and distributed subjectivity; yet identity dissolution is relinquished in favour of operational limits inscribed through scalar calibration. Across these convergences and divergences, PlasticScale demonstrates neither synthesis nor rupture but calibrated positioning: it metabolises recursivity, distribution and materiality while preserving its singular contributions—proportional metrics, scalar regimes and autophagic construction—as invariant anchors within the systems landscape.

VIII. What PlasticScale Contributes - The framework's distinctive additions to this conceptual ecology are three: Proportional metrics (PSI). No adjacent discourse offers a comparable instrument for measuring the relation between intensity, reach and coherence. PSI transforms scale from metaphor to operation. Scalar regimes (Micro, Optimal, Intensive). Other systems tend to privilege one scale (micro in tactical urbanism, macro in systems theory). PlasticScale institutes non-hierarchical scalar pluralism. Autophagic metabolism. No other framework proposes that a system should construct itself from its own residues, digesting its history rather than archiving it. Autogagua is PlasticScale's unique metabolic principle. Invocational architecture. PlasticScale is designed to be asked, not just analysed. Its ten functions are ten questions any practitioner can pose to their practice. This invocational mode distinguishes it from discourses that remain observational.

IX. Conversational Partners - PlasticScale does not seek disciples. It seeks conversational partners—practitioners and thinkers who recognise its questions as their own and who bring their own operational experiences to the mesh. With urbanists, it discusses how micro-interventions can propagate without losing coherence. With artists, it discusses how semantic density relates to institutional legibility. With policy-makers, it discusses how procedural rules scale across governance levels. With systems theorists, it discusses how autopoiesis might open to contextual coupling. With cyberneticians, it discusses how feedback might serve proportion, not equilibrium. With infrastructural scholars, it discusses how designed substrates might enable rather than constrain.

X. A Friend Among Friends - PlasticScale enters the systems landscape not as a rival but as a specific operational proposal within a crowded field. It knows its predecessors intimately—has played with them, tested them against its ten functions, extracted what serves. It carries their insights not as weight but as digested capacity. The framework's legitimacy derives not from defeating other systems but from operating alongside them—offering what they lack (metrics, regimes, autophagia) while learning what they offer (recursivity, distribution, materiality). In this, it exemplifies the relational intelligence it seeks to install: proportion rather than domination, calibration rather than conquest. PlasticScale has many friends.

Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics

21 feb 2026

Relations and Resonances within the Systems Landscape