English integrated edition · v003
Chapter 12. Latent Differentiation Space: How Differences Not Yet Extracted Are Preserved and Triggered, and How They Change Positions
A person's differentiation position presents only the relations among differences that have already entered comparison, weight assignment, and positioning in the present. Differences not extracted at this moment do not thereby disappear. A medical history someone has left behind, care and disputes still remembered by a family, materials scattered across institutions, and evaluations sustained among local acquaintances may all become matters at issue again in later concrete relations. Latent differentiation space is neither mysticism nor another mysterious space.
What latent differentiation space preserves is a reserve of differences not yet extracted within the current relational field and not yet brought into the current differentiation space. These differences have not yet produced the direct consequences now at hand, but neither are they a blank with no conditions that can be investigated and nothing that can be explained. Whether they become relevant later depends on who preserved the materials, what event raises a demand for them, which people or institutions retrieve and use them, and whether they can connect to concrete consequences.
This distinction does not divide a person into a present part and a mysterious inner part. Differentiation space and differentiation position concern differences already extracted, assigned weight, and brought into positioning in the present. Latent differentiation space concerns a structure of differences that have not yet entered the current chain of consequences but may be extracted anew after conditions change. Only through preservation, triggering, extraction, weight assignment, and connection can latent differences potentially reorganize an existing differentiation position.
Differences in latent differentiation space must first have traceable conditions in reality. Bodily traces, existing records, relational memories, institutional materials, language habits, or local exchanges can show that a difference already had a basis for preservation or connection. Whether the current event triggers it is a separate question: what demands have specific people made, have materials been retrieved, and can the difference connect to eligibility, responsibility, risk, or consequences for action? Real differences not yet apparent, an event's actual triggering of differences, and an analyst's selection of what to trace on the basis of materials are three levels that must not be conflated.
Analysts have no authority to add contents to latent differentiation space. If a factor has never been raised, and no conditions of preservation, relations carrying it, events that might trigger it, or other supporting materials can be found, it cannot be listed on an ad hoc basis as a cause not yet manifested just to maintain the original conclusion. Newly obtained archival records, objections from those concerned, traces of preservation, or materials from the handling of a matter can support the formation of a new judgment; they cannot be retrospectively presented as grounds the analyst had already possessed. Latent differentiation space retains the real conditions under which differences can be extracted; it is not a storeroom for protecting an original explanation.
The pressures a person currently faces often make the few relations carrying the greatest weight seem to be their entire situation. Take a nonlocal worker living with his child in a city. In the specific circumstances where local requirements for the relevant year and admission category call for continuity of social insurance and rental documentation, he may currently be pulled by the demands of his child's school admission, continuity of social insurance, the filing of rental records, wages, and debt. A change of job may affect the contribution arrangements this family currently uses; maintaining stable employment also involves wage income, whose level affects rent and debt repayment. Together, these relations constitute his differentiation position at this moment. The pulls already apparent seem complete because family members, the workplace, the school, the landlord, creditors, or relevant institutions are currently using them. It is through people arranging work, residence, school admission, and debt repayment on this basis that these differences connect to present restrictions on action.
Yet this position does not encompass all the differences that can be extracted concerning him. An old injury may already be causing persistent bodily pain and limitations on movement, and may have left scattered medical materials. Past relations involving land back home may be remembered in different ways by relatives, neighbors, or acquaintances in the village. Among the various materials needed for the child's progression to the next level of schooling, some also remain scattered across social-insurance records, rental filings, school records, and proof of residence, without having been retrieved together at the current stage. Their not being treated as the most urgent grounds for current arrangements does not mean they do not exist in reality. The pain is real, as are the memories back home and the materials not yet retrieved. It is only within the specific procedures or judgments that have not yet drawn on them that they have not entered the chain of consequences; they must not be flattened onto the same plane as differences currently producing high-weight consequences.
In analyzing the current situation, therefore, we must neither treat differences not yet apparent as consequences already in effect nor exclude them from understanding simply because the procedures currently in view have not yet retrieved them. We need to ask which relations are currently handling a person's position and which preserved differences these relations have not yet extracted. The former explain the current differentiation position; the latter constitute the scope that latent differentiation space is meant to trace. Making this distinction helps analysts avoid mistaking a temporary state for a settled fate. The position currently formed through the pulls of school admission, social insurance, rent, and debt does exert force, but it may be rearranged by a determination of work-related injury, a review for progression to the next level of schooling, or a land dispute. Change occurs when differences that had not entered current handling are extracted and connected to consequences; it does not arise from nothing.
For family members, this distinction has very practical significance. Choosing not to change jobs for now in order to maintain income does not mean that the old injury, relations back home, or materials for progression to the next level of schooling that have not yet been submitted have ceased to be relevant. These differences simply have not been brought to the foreground by the current arrangements. If different events arise later, differences previously downweighted or not yet retrieved may call for time, money, care, and residence to be rearranged. When this happens, and whether consequences can result, still depend on specific conditions.
Nor may analysts, simply because they know that latent differences exist, declare the current position impossible to judge. What current relations are already handling, and which consequences have already fallen on whom, can still be traced clearly. Analysts also need to identify differences not yet brought into these forms of handling and the conditions still missing if those differences are to become relevant.
II. Latent Differentiation Space Is Not a Hidden Essence, but a Structure of Differences That Can Be Extracted
Some differences have been retained through bodily conditions, records, relational memories, institutional materials, language habits, or local reputation, and may therefore be used again in later concrete relations. Latent differentiation space presents precisely this structure of extractable differences. It is neither a hidden essence nor a reference to a true self already concealed within a person; still less does it portray family, locality, or community as a deep force that determines everything from behind the scenes.
The same difference does not automatically have the same meaning in different relations. Before a doctor, an old injury may be a bodily condition; at the workplace, it may be used to describe a prior medical history; in a determination of work-related injury, it may become material for judging responsibility; before family members, it may concern rest, care, and income. Different participants retrieve and handle the same materials in light of different questions. These interpretations are not governed from within by some hidden essence.
Records, too, are only one path by which differences are preserved. Someone has kept diagnostic reports, leave forms, or payment receipts; a school retains enrollment and academic records; relatives remember accounts of care and the division of a family household; local acquaintances retain impressions of exchanges. All these may give later participants materials to inquire into and accounts to compare. Yet bodily pain, accents, work habits, and everyday exchanges that have not been entered into an archive may also be raised anew by specific people in subsequent events.
Latent differentiation space is therefore neither a comprehensive archive nor a collection of every possibility. Analysts need to ask whether a difference has a path of preservation, whether what is preserved suffices for identification, whether someone later has the authority or motive to retrieve it, and whether it can gain recognition once retrieved. Without these conditions, a supposedly latent difference cannot simply be written up as an influence about to occur.
Write-back sedimentation and latent differentiation space must not be conflated either. If past breaches of trust, disciplinary sanctions, or evaluations have already entered subsequent everyday judgments, they already form part of the current differentiation position. Only when those materials are temporarily unused in present relations but may be retrieved anew in a new event do they also raise the question of latent differentiation space. These are not two mutually isolated sets of contents, but a distinction between different states of handling the same differences.
For silent differences to become apparent again later, someone or some concrete relation must first preserve them. The nonlocal worker's old injury may persist as bodily pain and restricted movement; it may also leave traces in medical consultations, examinations, the application of medicated plasters, taking leave, or what coworkers saw and heard. Ordinarily, no one may have gathered and organized these materials, but they have not disappeared from the reach of later inquiry simply because the person concerned continues moving goods and going to work.
The materials needed for a child's progression to the next level of schooling are usually kept separately by different institutions and family members, and vary with the specific verification requirements for the locality, relevant year, and category of progression. Social-insurance contributions are recorded by the relevant institutional system, rental filings arise from rental relations, and proof of residence, school-enrollment information, school notices, and report cards each have their holders or custodial institutions. Ordinarily, these materials are scattered formalities and documents. Only when eligibility is checked may the school or relevant reviewers ask parents to bring specified materials, according to the relevant category, into a single process of judgment.
Past relations concerning land back home are often maintained through a different kind of relation of preservation. Old land deeds may be kept by family members, accounts given when the household was divided may be remembered by those who took part, and village officials, neighbors, or relatives have their own impressions of who cared for the elderly and who received more land. These accounts are not necessarily consistent, nor do they necessarily have equal efficacy. Precisely for this reason, later disputes involve who can testify, what materials can be used, and which accounts are accepted.
Preservation does not mean something has already entered current judgment. Bodily pain can be endured by the person concerned, documents can sit at home, relatives' memories can go unmentioned for years, and local evaluations may persist only intermittently among acquaintances. Finding a path of preservation does not entitle analysts to write it up as having already determined present eligibility, responsibility, or circumstances.
Nor does preservation guarantee that something can be extracted later. Materials may be lost, memories may contradict one another, holders may be unwilling to provide them, institutions may not recognize them, and people able to explain what happened may be unable to come forward. Whether a latent difference can survive and whether it suffices for use in later relations are two questions requiring separate judgments. Even if materials remain, only part of their contents may be identifiable, or they may be useful only in one kind of handling. Describing preservation as stable efficacy overlooks the differences between those who preserve, how things are kept, and the rules of use. These differences are precisely the preconditions for whether what is preserved can later translate into consequences.
Silent differences do not gain weight for no reason. Usually, only when a new event raises a question of eligibility, responsibility, risk, resources, trust, or handling do participants have reason to look back for materials not previously used. A worker from elsewhere may ordinarily experience an old injury only as pain. If he is injured again while moving goods, work is interrupted, his workplace demands an explanation, and his family also needs money for medicine and treatment, a determination of work-related injury may then bring his prior medical history into judgments of responsibility.
In determining whether an injury is work-related, the people involved need to ask when the injury occurred, whether it was connected with work, whether there had been similar injuries before, who was present, and what labor the workplace had assigned. This determination does not result from the old injury acting on its own. Only when medical materials, leave records, coworkers' testimony, and the person's own account are brought into the same procedure can they move from previously silent differences into matters open to discussion.
Reviews for progression to the next level of schooling also change the relevance of materials. Ordinarily, social-insurance records, rental filings, proof of residence, and report cards exist separately; they need not constitute the family's most immediate pressure every day. Only when an application deadline approaches, when a school begins verification under the relevant local category of progression, or when continuity is broken in an item of documentation actually required by the applicable rules, do parents, schools, and relevant reviewers bring these materials into judgments about eligibility for progression and whether the family stays or leaves.
When land back home is to be requisitioned, compensation distributed, a road built, or land holdings readjusted, relatives may again discuss who received what in the past, who cared for the elderly, and who took which side in a dispute. These past relations are raised anew because of the present distribution of benefits. Whether they gain weight in that distribution still depends on the specific participants, the existing materials, local rules, and how mediation proceeds.
Triggering is only a condition for making a difference relevant again, not a guarantee that the consequences are settled. Material required for submission may gain recognition, or it may fail to change the outcome because the evidence is insufficient, procedural requirements are not met, or other differences carry greater weight. To write triggering as an inevitable reversal of position is to mistake an analysis of conditions for prophecy. Even after the event occurs, those involved may retrieve only some of the materials or understand them differently from one another. Triggering opens the possibility of renewed handling; it does not remove the checks, disputes, and further handling that follow.
Doctors, workplace managers, those involved in determining work-related injuries, family members, creditors, schoolteachers, reviewers, relatives, or local mediators each face different questions. It is for these reasons that they request, retrieve, ask about, or use particular materials concerning differences. Latent differences are extracted by these concrete actors in relations; they do not surface by themselves. Only by specifying who extracts them can we understand why they become visible at this moment.
The extraction of an old injury makes this especially clear. A doctor asks about prior injuries to judge a bodily condition. A workplace may use this information to argue that the injury is not recent, and participants in a determination of work-related injury may use it to discuss responsibility. Family members, meanwhile, may demand rest, care, or compensation in light of pain and income. When different people retrieve the same old injury, it enters different judgments and cannot be compressed into a single meaning.
In the relevant procedures for progression to the next level of schooling, schools use enrollment information and grades. In accordance with local requirements for the relevant year and category of progression, the relevant reviewers check household registration, the parents' or guardians' social-insurance records, and proof of residence to judge eligibility. Whether a landlord cooperates with the filing of rental records affects whether parents can submit the corresponding materials; information on social-insurance contributions retained by the workplace is part of the labor relation. Who holds the materials, who presents them, and under what procedure they are used change how they subsequently work; the materials do not gain weight on their own.
When past land relations are extracted, relatives may raise care, financial contributions, or old agreements in dividing property. Village officials may ask about earlier accounts during mediation, neighbors may provide what they saw and heard, and courts will handle the matter according to evidentiary and procedural requirements. Local reputation can influence how others regard someone's account, but it cannot replace judgments about materials within a concrete procedure. The efficacy of different relations of handling must not be conflated in the account.
Extraction carries the questions and purposes of specific participants; it must not be understood as the self-manifestation of abstract differences. Analysts need to ask who raised the question, who holds the materials, who can testify, who has authority to decide whether materials can be adopted, and what rules constrain the final handling. Together these steps determine whether a latent difference can move from silence into visibility. Even if the same group of people all see the materials, their responsibilities and available actions differ, so the materials need not acquire the same weight. Distinguishing the extractors, purposes of use, and authority over handling prevents multiple relations from being compressed into the simple statement that "a difference was seen."
The extraction of a difference does not mean that it has already changed a position. Only when it is assigned operative weight and connected to consequences can it change the position; when it acquires higher weight, it may exert a stronger pull. Someone noticing or asking about an old injury may lead only to a medical consultation or a conversation. Only when the relevant people connect it to such consequences as responsibility for a work-related injury, compensation, life during a work stoppage, debt deadlines, and family income will it exert a stronger pull on the differentiation position.
The same medical materials may lead to different outcomes. If the handling process confirms that the injury is work-related and meets the applicable conditions, the person concerned may gain access to treatment, rest, or compensation. If the relevant parties determine that it is a pre-existing illness or an injury the person already had, the conditions for a claim may be weakened. A prior medical history alone cannot rule out a work-related injury: judgment still requires checking the specific injury's relation to work and the applicable conditions. What changes the position here is how specific people use materials under rules and connect their judgment to consequences that can be carried out, not the materials themselves.
The same applies to parents' or guardians' records of continuity of social insurance, rental filings, and proof of residence relevant to a child's application for school admission. In circumstances where local requirements for the relevant year and admission category call for these materials, their being seen does not mean that whether the family stays or leaves has already been decided. Only when schools and the relevant review procedures connect the materials to eligibility for progression to the next level of schooling, schools in the relevant catchment area, residential arrangements, freedom to change jobs, or rental costs can they acquire higher weight. At the same time, the different materials affect one another: if one is incomplete, the efficacy of other conditions may be restricted.
If relatives' mention of past land relations remains mere casual conversation, it need not change anyone's actual position. Only when these relations are used in judgments about compensation distribution, responsibility for elder care, cooperation among relatives, or future wedding and funeral exchanges, and gain recognition from those concerned, can old affairs become pressures in present relations. Even then, other materials, rules, or relations may counteract them.
Weight is not a fixed numerical value naturally carried by materials. It depends on who is handling what question now, which rules permit use, whether the materials are credible, and whether they can connect to eligibility, responsibility, risk, evaluation, handling, or channels. To write "being seen" directly as "determining the result" skips the most important processes of weight assignment and connection.
Only after latent differences have been preserved, triggered, extracted, and connected to consequences can they potentially reorganize a differentiation position already formed. Reorganization can appear on five interrelated but noninterchangeable levels. This does not mean that all prior relations disappear. At the level of the dominant pull, the nonlocal worker was originally pulled mainly by the demands of his child's school admission, social insurance, rent, and debt. Only after specific people retrieve the old injury in determining whether it is work-related and, on the basis of materials, rules, and judgments of responsibility, connect it to compensation, life during a work stoppage, or income arrangements can bodily condition, the contract, circumstances at the scene, and workplace responsibility temporarily exert a stronger pull.
Connection chains may also be rewritten. Only when medical personnel, the workplace, and relevant procedures separately handle medical records, matters concerning leave, and what was seen and heard at the scene may these materials connect to income, debt, and family care. Which links are actually adopted still depends on those handling them, the materials, and the rules. One cannot assume in advance that every chain will form.
The constraint domain may widen or narrow. When a work-related injury is recognized, the relevant handling may open channels for medical treatment, rest, or compensation. When it is not recognized, stoppage of work, debt, family expenses, and pain may jointly compress choices. Lock-in structures may also form, strengthen, or loosen. If debt after illness, the job, medical expenses, loans from relatives, and care arrangements interlock in concrete handling, leaving the existing arrangements becomes more difficult. Only if those involved confirm new channels for treatment, compensation, or support may the previously interlocking restrictions partly loosen. These consequences need not take shape all at once: they may appear first in income arrangements and gradually affect residence, work, and the division of labor within the family.
Write-back sedimentation, in turn, may leave materials available for later retrieval. A determination of work-related injury, a refusal of compensation, an outcome concerning progression to the next level of schooling, a failed attempt to borrow money, or a local dispute may be recorded, remembered, or made into a basis for later evaluations by those concerned. When these contents are already exerting continuing effects in new relations, they become part of the current differentiation position. Only if temporarily unused may they again constitute a later latent differentiation space. There is no fixed moment for this transition: the same outcome of handling may already be operative in some relations while remaining unextracted material in others. One must therefore return to the concrete relational field to judge whether it is actually producing consequences or merely retaining the conditions for later use.
Passing a review for the child's progression to the next level of schooling may reinforce the family's arrangements for remaining in the city. If the review runs into obstacles, social insurance, renting, work, education, and the division of labor between spouses may all be renegotiated. Once a dispute over land back home arises, the city job has not been canceled, but responsibilities among relatives, past relations, and local evaluations may re-enter certain decisions. None of the five layers is an action accomplished by latent differences themselves. Only when specific people, institutions, or procedures extract materials, assign weight, and connect them to consequences can reorganization occur partially, after a delay, or temporarily; other conditions may also counteract it.
Looking only at high-weight differences already apparent in the present makes it easy to treat a temporarily formed position as a complete one. When explaining through a class image, analysts may first see labor, wages, resources, employment, and risk, yet underestimate the possibility that ethnicity, locality, language, religion, medical history, and past relations will gain weight in a new relational field. This does not deny the partial explanatory power formed through the relevant real differentiating units and the processes of extracting, assigning weight to, connecting, and compressing them. That capacity does not belong to the class image, nor can it turn class theory into an ordinary limited model.
Different explanations bring different differences into the foreground. State-centered explanations often first handle registration, household registration, law, eligibility, and administrative boundaries, while real communities, responsibilities among relatives, local memory, and long-term interaction may recede. Market-centered explanations readily foreground prices, credit, contracts, and purchasing power, while family care, risks after illness, local reputation, and ceremonial cash-gift exchanges may be underestimated. If one starts from the family, blood ties, support for elderly relatives, familial affection, and respectability may in turn occlude labor discipline, institutional eligibility, debt deadlines, and personal boundaries. All these explanations can grasp some present differences, but they cannot treat what has now been extracted as a permanent account of a person's entire position.
Analysis of latent differentiation space needs to bring temporal conditions back into judgment. Differences not currently used need not remain unimportant forever. Yet before there are paths of preservation, triggering events, extractors, and connections to consequences, they cannot be treated in advance as causes already operating. Remaining sensitive to future change does not mean including every possibility in an explanation. It means investigating which differences already have traceable ways of being preserved, what events may make them relevant, who would raise them in those events, and which concrete consequences they might connect to if adopted. Only by following these conditions can future changes be placed back within concrete relational processes for examination, so that judgments neither close themselves off nor expand arbitrarily.
Within these limits, analysts need to distinguish between "not yet apparent" and "completely unknown." For the former, at least some traceable relations of preservation can be identified: what kinds of materials remain where, who still knows the relevant course of events, and what kinds of events might prompt questions about them. The latter lacks sufficient grounds and cannot be filled with arbitrary guesses merely because the theory acknowledges that society contains differences not yet extracted. Analysts who merely add to the list of possibilities without explaining the sources of materials, the conditions of events, and those who use the materials only expand the zone of vagueness; they do not increase explanatory power. In analyzing latent differentiation space, analysts must accept stricter limits on themselves: they must not treat unpreserved accounts as evidence, procedures that have not yet occurred as completed handling, or claims that someone might make as already recognized.
Current explanations must acknowledge the limits of their field of view, yet must not use those limits as a reason to abandon judgment. Analysts must explain what has already been extracted, what has not, and which materials, events, and people handling them may force a judgment to be revised. This is not an omniscient perspective; it simply helps analysts avoid treating a compressed view of the present as the whole of reality. At the same time, the existence of latent differences must not be used to downplay current high-weight differences. Once a child's school admission, employment income, rent, debt, or bodily condition is exerting specific pressure, it should be analyzed according to how it has entered into consequences. The original judgment needs to be questioned when new materials or a new relational field emerge; it should not be declared invalid in advance.
Analyzing latent differentiation space does not mean predicting everything that will happen, nor saying that all differences are equally likely to gain weight. Whether latent differences can gain weight depends on the existence of a path of preservation, a triggering relational field, an actor carrying out distinction extraction, and the possibility of connecting to consequences. The absence of any one of these four conditions may still prevent an existing difference from entering actual judgment.
For example, even if an old injury exists, without medical materials, coworkers' observations, leave records, or accounts of the work site that can explain the injury, the relevant procedures may have difficulty handling it as a recognized difference bearing on responsibility. The pain is not denied. But whether it can connect to compensation, responsibility, or channels for rest remains constrained by materials and rules.
The same applies to past local relations. Someone may remember an earlier division of a household, care, or wedding and funeral exchanges. But if accounts contradict one another, there are no materials, no one is willing to testify, or the institution handling the matter does not adopt the relevant contents, these relations may not enter judgments of reputation, property division, or mediation on a stable basis. Things that once happened cannot simply be equated with differences that can be effectively extracted.
Even a person's long-term care for the elderly, help to relatives, financial contributions, or labor may fail to become qualifying grounds in property division, elder care, or family evaluations because records, recognition, or explanations from key participants are missing. This does not mean the contribution did not exist. It means that preservation, extraction, weight assignment, and connection still separate its existence from its consequences.
The analysis of latent differentiation space opposes substituting uncertainty for concrete analysis, but does not oppose uncertainty itself. It is not an all-purpose explanation: latent differences, even when they exist, do not necessarily gain weight. Only by specifying conditions, participants, materials, and consequences one by one can we know which silent differences may be relevant and which are merely empty possibilities conjured up in imagination.
This limit also applies to analysts' own judgments. A difference cannot be placed on the same level as those already assigned high weight in the present merely because it might be useful later. Nor can one presume that material will certainly be submitted and adopted merely because it was once preserved. Analysts should leave room for possibilities, but those possibilities must have conditions that can be checked.
Analysis of latent differentiation space should therefore both retain the possibility of future revision and explain when an inference cannot be drawn. Requiring every judgment about change to return to concrete materials, specific participants, and concrete consequences for examination does not mean making the theory conservative. This examination does not require advance knowledge of every later event. It requires that, when proposing possible changes, one clearly state which existing relation supplies the grounds, which kind of retrievable material supports them, and which necessary conditions have yet to appear. Precisely because some conditions are still absent, analysts must describe possible reorganization separately from reorganization that has already occurred.
The question of latent differentiation space thus comes down to network paths of preservation, transmission, and renewed extraction. Such tracing first requires relations of preservation to be made concrete. Medical history may be retained in bodily conditions and medical materials, but medical records are materials that medical personnel create through diagnosis and treatment, keep, and provide when rules permit; they are not inherently powerful. Past relations may be sustained through relatives' memories and local reputation, but relatives' memories are accounts preserved by different people through exchanges, disputes, care, and recounting; they are not a single unchanging archive. Ceremonial cash-gift exchanges may be preserved by participants or left in relevant records. People may also carry language and ancestral origin into later relations through family forms of address, school life, household registration, surnames, or family narratives.
Analysis of latent differentiation space therefore cannot stop at saying "there are still differences not yet apparent." It must examine who preserves differences and what people can actually find out, distinguishing who holds the materials, whether they can be found, whether they are complete, and who later checks them. Materials and relations do not flow on their own. Someone keeps documents, someone remembers exchanges, someone demands proof, someone provides an account, and someone checks and adopts materials under rules. Only through these concrete acts of handling can previously silent differences be brought back into visibility. The stability, retrievability, and degree of recognition of different forms of preservation also lead to different later results.
Transmission, too, is not a line that extends automatically. One must establish what event raises a demand for retrieval, who can present the corresponding contents, and who can make them visible. Parents preparing materials for their child's progression to the next level of schooling may submit proof to a school. A person involved in the handling of a work-related injury may provide diagnostic reports, leave documents, or an account of the scene according to procedure. Relatives in a land dispute may also bring old land deeds, past accounts, or neighbors' observations into negotiation. Each such introduction requires specific people to act and may be interrupted by insufficient materials, procedural restrictions, or others' lack of cooperation.
After renewed extraction, differences must still undergo identification and use. Which rules assign them weight, what kind of handling adopts which materials, which consequences a difference may involve, and on whom those consequences fall must all be clearly distinguished in concrete handling. Schools, workplaces, those handling medical matters, relatives, and other people concerned do not face the same question or handle the same material under the same rules. Some need only establish a fact, some must judge eligibility, some must allocate responsibility, and some are concerned with how family life bears the consequences. These different purposes of handling bring the same difference into different relational positions.
Only by putting strict requirements concerning conditions, materials, participants, and actual consequences into practice can differences not yet apparent be understood as a relational structure open to inquiry, rather than some mysterious background. Nor does the analyst face a secret list waiting to be uncovered. Analysis of this kind can remain sensitive to future changes, neither treating the position at hand as a closed conclusion nor portraying the future through imagination detached from conditions. Paths of preservation, transmission, and renewed extraction do allow differences beyond the current position to remain available for possible handling anew, but these paths themselves guarantee no result in advance.