The close relationship between crustal magmatism, an expression of heat dissipation, and tectonics, an expression of stress dissipation, leads to the question of their mutual relationships. Indeed, the low viscosity of magmas and the large viscosity contrast between magmas and surrounding rocks favor strain localization in magmas, and then possible "magmatic" initiation of structures at a wide range of scales. However, new data about 3-d pluton shape and duration of pluton construction perturb this simple geological image, and indicate some independence between magmatism and tectonics. In some cases we observe a direct genetic link and strong arguments for physical interactions between magmas and tectonics. In other cases, we observe an absence of these interactions and it is unclear how magma transfer and emplacement are related to lithospheric-plate dynamics. A simple explanation of this complexity follows directly from the pulsed, incremental assembly of plutons and its spatial and temporal characteristics. The size of each pluton is related to a magmatic pulsation at a particular time scale, and each of these coupled time/space scales is related to a specific process: in small plutons, we can observe the incremental process, the building block of plutons; in larger plutons, the incremental process is lost, and the pulsation, which consists of a cycle of injections at different timescales, must be related to the composition and thermal regime of the source region, itself driving magmatic processes (melting, segregation, and transfer) that interact with tectonic boundary conditions. The dynamics of pulsed magmatism observed in plutonic systems is then a proxy for deep lithospheric and magmatic processes. From our data and a review of published work, we find a positive corelation between volume and duration of pluton construction. The larger a pluton, the longer its construction time. Large/fast or small/slow plutons have not been identified to date. One consequence of this observation is that plutonic magmatic fluxes seem to be comparable from one geodynamic setting to another and also over various geologic time spans. A second consequence of this correlation is that small plutons, which are constructed in a geologically short length of time, commonly record little about tectonic conditions, and result only from the interference between magma dynamics and the local geologic setting. The fast rate of magma transfer in the crust (on the order of cm/s) relative to tectonic rates (on the order of cm/yr) explain why the incremental process of pluton construction is independent of – but not insensitive to – the tectonic setting. However, in large plutonic bodies, which correspond to longer duration magmatic events, regional deformation has time to interact with the growing pluton and can be recorded within the pluton-wall rock structure. Magma transfer operates at a very short timescale (comparable to volcanic timescales), which can be sustained over variable periods, depending on the fertility of the magma source region and its ability to feed the system. The fast operation of magmatic processes relative to crustal tectonic processes ensures that the former control the system from below.