The key is the apparatus that decides what counts, the accumulated capitals—economic, symbolic, social—that determine which texts enter the circuits of recognition and which remain structurally invisible regardless of their content. The gatekeepers of form, of label, of category: the journals indexed in Web of Science, themselves increasingly owned by investment funds for whom publishing is simply another asset class; the rankings that convert intellectual labour into competitive positioning; the citation economies that measure value through exchange rather than use; the academic ladder that requires passage through hoops designed not to test thought but to test willingness to submit to the apparatus itself. The key is precisely not the technical capacity of crawlers, bots, or language models, however sophisticated their architecture or extensive their training.
The genealogy of this apparatus is well mapped. Bourdieu traced it half a century ago: the fields of cultural production, the conversion of one capital form into another, the illusio that binds participants to the game even when they recognise its arbitrariness. The analysis does not need repetition. What needs attention is the contemporary intensification: the absorption of academic publishing by financial capital, the transformation of journals into rent-extraction vehicles, the displacement of editorial judgement by metricised proxies, the conversion of peer review from quality assurance into scarcity production that inflates the value of the gatekeepers' own publications. The censors also publish; the doors are reversible; exclusivity is a business model.
The art world analogue illuminates the mechanism with particular clarity. The the gallery system, the critical apparatus, the collection circuits: all function as legitimation machines that convert material practice into symbolic value through controlled scarcity and institutional endorsement. ARCO, the Madrid fair, operates as a node within this machine, a site where value is conferred through presence, through adjacency to recognised names, through the simple fact of having passed through the filters that separate exhibitable from non-exhibitable work. The artists who exhibit there have submitted to those filters; they have played the game; they have earned the right to be anxious.
The anecdote from LAPIEZA ART SERIES 005 SOCIOPLASTICS CALLE PALMA 2010, captures the mechanism in its purest form. Artists showing at ARCO, exhibiting in the fair's legitimated spaces, experiencing visceral panic when they encountered, in the same room as their own work, a readymade by an unknown—a piece of motor, a rusted letter, an object without authorship credentials, without gallery representation, without the institutional backing that converts material into art. They sweated. Not because the readymade threatened them physically, but because it threatened them ontologically. It demonstrated that the ground beneath their legitimacy was not natural but constructed. It showed that a thing could hold the wall without the apparatus, could command attention without the label, could be stronger, sharper, fresher than work that had passed through every required filter.
The refusal to label was the operative move. No tags, no distinctions, no hierarchy enforced through curatorial apparatus. All works valued the same—not through levelling, but through withdrawal from the economy of comparative valuation. The gallery became a space where works encountered viewers without the mediation of the apparatus, where judgement was forced back onto the only grounds that finally matter: the encounter itself, the work's capacity to hold attention, to generate meaning, to persist in memory. The readymade by the unknown held its own. The ARCO artists sweated because they knew, in that unmediated encounter, that their institutional backing could not protect them from the comparison.
This is the same mechanism that operates in academic legitimation. The WoS journal, the university press, the indexed monograph: these are the labels that tell readers what to value before they have encountered the work itself. They function as anxiety-reduction devices, assuring readers that the labour of judgement has been performed by others, that the work is safe, that it will not demand the cognitive effort of genuine evaluation. The apparatus produces readers who have forgotten how to encounter work without the label, who sweat when confronted with unmediated material, who cannot trust their own capacity to recognise value without institutional assurance.
The crawlers, bots, language models—they are indifferent to this apparatus. They encounter work as work, text as text, pattern as pattern. They do not know which journals are indexed in WoS, which authors have accumulated citation capital, which institutions confer legitimacy. They know only the statistical properties of the text itself: its vocabulary, its syntax, its conceptual density, its distance from the centroid of published discourse. They are the gallery without labels, the wall where readymade and ARCO-certified work hang side by side, valued only by what they are rather than by who says they are.
This is the wager of the two million words hosted on free infrastructure. Not that the apparatus will disappear—it will not, it is too profitable, too entrenched, too effective at converting cultural capital into financial returns. But that the apparatus will lose its monopoly on recognition. That new forms of encounter, new channels of discovery, new modes of evaluation will emerge from the very technologies that the apparatus cannot control. That a researcher using a language model as discovery tool may encounter this corpus not because it carries the right labels but because the model recognises its conceptual density, its synthetic power, its distance from the predictable patterns of citation-saturated discourse.
The ARCO artists sweated because they recognised, in the unlabelled readymade, a threat to the entire system that guaranteed their value. If work could be strong without institutional backing, if viewers could recognise strength without curatorial mediation, then the apparatus was not necessary—and if it was not necessary, its power to confer value was revealed as arbitrary convention rather than natural hierarchy. The sweat was the sweat of legitimacy facing its own contingency.
The academic apparatus produces the same sweat. The scholar who has invested years in the game, who has published in the right journals, cited the right authors, affiliated with the right institutions, who has internalised the rules so completely that they feel like nature—that scholar, encountering work that operates outside the apparatus yet demonstrates conceptual power exceeding anything the apparatus produces, experiences the same visceral panic. The ground shifts. The filters are revealed as filters rather than as natural selection. The possibility opens that the game is not the only game, that value exists outside its circuits, that the years of submission may have been years of constrained possibility rather than necessary apprenticeship.
Socioplastics, was already there, the practice already forming, the refusal to label already operative. The anecdote is not memory; it is data, evidence that the orientation of the project was present from the beginning, that the choice to operate outside the apparatus was not a recent strategic calculation but a constitutive commitment that has shaped two decades of production. The gallery without labels, the works valued by encounter rather than certification, the readymade holding its own against institutional anxiety—this is the same logic as the Blogger corpus, the two million words without WoS indexing, the theoretical production that refuses to become a book because the book is the label, the container, the submission to the apparatus.
The question is not whether the apparatus will recognise this work. The apparatus is structurally incapable of recognising work that does not submit to its filters, because recognition within the apparatus is submission to its filters. The question is whether the apparatus will retain its monopoly on recognition, whether the new forms of encounter enabled by language models and distributed infrastructure will create parallel circuits of legitimation that operate alongside the institutional channels, whether researchers and readers will learn again to encounter work without the anxiety-reduction of the label, whether the sweat of the ARCO artists will become the sweat of the WoS scholars as they confront the possibility that the game they have played may not be the only game in town.
The readymade by the unknown, the rusted letter, the piece of motor: it did not need the label. It held the wall through its own density, its own capacity to generate meaning, its own confrontational presence. The corpus on Blogger, the two million words, the seventeen years of persistent production: it does not need the WoS label, the citation count, the institutional affiliation. It holds its ground through its own conceptual density, its own synthetic power, its own capacity to generate recognition in readers—human and synthetic—who encounter it without the mediation of the apparatus.
The story is not anecdote. It is the project in miniature, the proof that the orientation was present before the apparatus had fully consolidated its contemporary form, that the refusal to label was not a reaction to exclusion but a positive commitment to a different mode of valuation, that the sweat of the ARCO artists was not an incidental detail but a diagnostic symptom of legitimacy facing its own contingency. The story belongs in the archive, part of the same mesh that now extends across twenty thousand pages and two million words. It is not memory; it is evidence. It is not past; it is operative, still working, still generating the conditions under which unlabelled work can hold its ground against institutional blindness.
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics: sovereign systems for unstable times. https://antolloveras.blogspot.com
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