Chapter 03 The Temptation of a Single Axis: How an Effective Concept Is Elevated into a Presupposed Main Line
I. The Structural Difference Between Class Theory and Other Presupposed Axes
Class theory seizes on wages, labor, property, debt, housing, risk, and exit costs. These differences are real, and they are often weighty. It does touch reality, yet from the outset it organizes the differences extracted within a limited scope into a total class image and requires other relations to be measured against that image. Class theory does not first exist as an ordinary limited explanation and only occasionally expand later; its capacity for distinction extraction within a limited scope is from the beginning situated within a structure of total-image subsumption. Concrete explanations formed around state institutions, market exchange, national communities, cultural relations, and family relations can provide limited accounts within bounded questions. These broad concepts do not become the highest main line on their own. A corresponding presupposed axis forms only when interpreters, organizations, or institutional procedures elevate one of them in advance above all questions. Concepts are not actors; it is the people and procedures that use concepts that extract, assign weight to, connect, translate, and adjudicate materials.
Accordingly, this chapter does not line up class theory and other concepts as a series of “models that later overstepped their bounds.” What is distinctive about class theory is that total-image subsumption is its basic structure; other concepts, by contrast, may be turned by their users into corresponding subsumptive explanatory constructions. Class theory lowers the standing of other differences; interpretive procedures that adopt these presupposed axes do the same, but the structural sources of the two must not be conflated. The class image cannot be remade into a safe limited explanation simply by restricting its scope. What can re-enter concrete analysis are differences such as wages, labor, property, debt, housing, risk, and exit costs, together with the consequences they produce in different relations. Renaming these differences as a safe form of class theory still treats the result as an acting subject. The differences extracted by class theory can be tested case by case: Are wages overdue? Is housing unstable? Is a debt deadline approaching? Has protection been interrupted? On whom does the cost of exit fall?
These questions have weight in their own right. Only when they are returned to concrete relations can we distinguish which consequences are produced by labor relations and which are also shaped by address, care, institutional eligibility, and support available through local relations. Therefore, the limited explanatory capacity formed by real differentiating units and by the processes through which they are extracted, assigned weight, connected, and compressed cannot exonerate the total-image structure of class theory. Class theory can extract real differences such as labor, wages, and property, yet it also presses housing, debt, medical history, household registration, family responsibilities, and support available through local relations—matters that could have been questioned separately—into one and the same position. Concrete differences that have been extracted can enter a bounded explanation; the class image cannot be remade into a safe ordinary limited model. When class theory gathers differences into a class image, the image appears especially powerful because the relations extracted are genuinely weighty.
This power cannot grant the image ontological status. Any concrete judgment involving wages, labor, property, debt, or risk must still make clear in what relations it becomes weighty, and which other differences present at the same time alter the outcome. Distinguishing class theory from other presupposed axes is not a preemptive absolution of those other concepts. The state, the market, the nation, culture, and the family can all be elevated into subsumptive images; what cannot be done is to use “they do this too” to flatten the inherent structure by which class theory itself moves from distinction extraction to a total image. If class theory is described as something that can become safe again once its scope is restricted, the class image is once more given a place of adjudication. What needs to be restricted is not the image, but the differences, relations, and consequences extracted by each concrete explanation.
II. Formation Procedures, Working Lines, and Temporary Centers
A presupposed axis does not appear out of nowhere. Certain differences first become connected to consequences within a relational field, and interpreters therefore give them priority when selecting material. Organizations and institutional procedures then fix weights and reconnect the material, arranging relations that could originally have been tested side by side into a hierarchy of primary and subordinate. Family, locality, institutions, the body, language, memory, and faith could each originally have connected to consequences. Once the presupposed axis has formed, the interpretive procedure need not deny them; it translates them into appendages of the main axis. This procedure calls counterexamples exceptions, withdraws standing from other explanations, and enables the image to spread rapidly, even issuing judgments before all the material is in. Every action in this formation chain has an actor: interpreters select material, organizations fix weights, naming processes arrange relations, and institutional procedures preserve and transmit judgments. It cannot be said that the state, the market, or the family compressed society by itself.
Relevance within a limited scope by itself does not entail uniqueness. Between the fact that a given difference really becomes weighty and the claim that it should override all differences lie procedures of selection, weight assignment, connection, naming, and transmission. These procedures can be questioned, and material can overturn them. Once a presupposed axis is complete, the order of the material is rewritten as well. Relations that should originally have been questioned are treated as examples proving the main line; counterexamples that could change the judgment are required to explain themselves. Explanation is thus no longer a search within the material for the relations that are more weighty; it becomes an arrangement, under the main line, of where every item of material is to be placed.
This arrangement also changes what questions people can ask. When the axis comes first, the question often becomes how to prove it; when the material comes first, the question is which relations have already entered into consequences and which have not yet connected. On the surface, both forms are analysis, but in practice their attitudes toward counterexamples and what remains unknown are entirely different. Once organizations and institutional procedures fix a particular axis, it is written into tables, slogans, organizational language, and everyday judgments. People begin to use this classification to decide which materials matter, which suffering is merely incidental, and which responsibilities can be omitted. These acts of preservation and transmission make the presupposed axis more than a viewpoint: they turn it into a procedure that repeatedly arranges the questions. Every step in forming a presupposed axis can be interrupted: bring in omitted material, recheck weights, ask whether the relations are truly connected, and preserve the standing of counterexamples to explain.
These efforts do not guarantee permanent correctness, but they prevent an explanation from declaring itself complete before it has begun. Interpretive procedures that adopt a presupposed axis also change how experiences not absorbed by the main line are understood. Such experiences are often judged unimportant, immature, or temporary deviations. Preserving their standing does not require treating all material as equally weighty; it prevents weights from being fixed before the evidence arrives. If an interpreter is to assign a higher weight to a given main line, the process by which that weight was acquired must be laid bare: Which consequences support the judgment? Which relations were omitted? And who preserved this selection of material as common sense? These questions do not abolish the main line, but they prevent it from impersonating an answer before it has been explained.
Analysis still needs a main line. Without distinctions between primary and subordinate matters, people cannot judge what in an event first connects to consequences, nor can they track how relations change a person's position. Compression is not an error; a limited explanation is not an error either. The difference lies in where the main line comes from. If it emerges from a concrete relational field, consequences that have already appeared, and traceable relations, it must accept correction by new material and counterexamples. An interpretive procedure that adopts a presupposed axis, by contrast, decides the answer before analysis and then stuffs the material into predetermined positions.
A temporarily weightier line may appear in a child's school admission, exchanges surrounding weddings and funerals, or the fear of resigning. But no line can acquire complete explanatory authority before the question has unfolded, nor can it acquire standing through the fame of a concept. No judgment can trace every relation at once. The main line therefore becomes a necessary working line whose function is to narrow the range that must be questioned immediately, not to close the other entrances. Since it is a working line under a limited field of vision, it must answer why this relation is taking effect first at this moment rather than another, while leaving room to look back and check: Could omitted material change the consequences? Could another node invalidate the original weight? When conditions change, where must the judgment be withdrawn?
Acknowledging this limitation and making the main line retractable does not make a judgment weak, still less does it allow the line to be declared society's hidden skeleton. Sometimes a main line appears clear at the beginning of an event but later has to yield to new material; when material genuinely changes the judgment, the analysis adjusts with it. It is refusing this movement that makes a working line degenerate into a preset scale. Once a main line appears, it is therefore necessary to distinguish whether it is explaining consequences or merely naming them. Explaining consequences can yield testable judgments; naming them only pastes a known name back onto the material. The more convenient a main line is, the more this distinction is needed. The main line must serve the question, not make the question serve the main line. Once the order is reversed, analysis may look faster, but in reality it is merely repeating an existing verdict.
A presupposed axis sometimes forms quickly and sometimes through long repetition. In a single event, a difference may temporarily occupy the center because a deadline is approaching, resources are concentrated, or enforcement is coercive. Only after repeated events, when interpreters transplant that temporary center into every question, does the axis change from a convenience within an event into a preset arrangement. To judge this change, one must compare whether the difference retains the same weight in different relational fields, rather than looking only at whether it is conspicuous in one case. The same person may be held by different relations at different times: during wage arrears, wages and payment records come first; when a child enters school, address and documentary requirements come first; after illness, the body and care responsibilities may come first. If an axis analysis preserves only the entry point of the first question, it will treat later new material as deviation. A genuinely limited judgment must be able to explain when the main line is valid, when it recedes into the background, and which relations re-enter into consequences.
Eliminating a presupposed axis does not mean rejecting long-term structures. Stable institutional, community, family, and market relations may recur across events; they must still be explained through carriers, materials, and intermediary pathways, and compared across different periods and against counterexamples. Long-term continuity requires more complete tracing of relations; it does not grant any name the right to rank every event in advance.
III. The State Axis: Institutional Thresholds and the Administrative Plane
In certain areas and specific school-admission years, when families from elsewhere apply to enroll their children, they may be required to submit some combination of household-registration or residence documents, rental or property documents, social-insurance or employment documents, application materials, and student-status materials, and may be affected by local quota and allocation rules; the specific items vary by area, year, and admission category. Together with rental deadlines, work arrangements, family care, and the means of obtaining documents, these institutional differences alter whether a family can get through the procedure. The administrative plane forms when an interpretive procedure compresses all consequences into “the will of the state.” Institutional thresholds can still be seen, but they are used to replace other relations: whether a landlord cooperates, whether relatives can provide care, whether work hours can be adjusted, and whether parents can obtain information are all demoted to background. The policy examples here are used only within the jurisdictions, periods, procedures, and material requirements specified by the admission policies discussed in Chapter 20.
The state is neither the sole cause nor an abstract actor that commands reality. Concrete institutions, service windows, records, quotas, and implementation arrangements enter into consequences along different relations. The consequences of the same set of administrative documents may also differ from one family to another: one person may be blocked by difficulties in obtaining proof, another by unstable housing, and another by being unable to arrange care and work at the same time.
When all these different consequences are reduced to a single abstract will, the points at which change is actually possible disappear. Administrative procedures appear to deal only with materials, but in practice they also arrange waiting, travel back and forth, qualifications, and visibility. Families from elsewhere face a chain of concrete thresholds: who can issue proof, preserve records, and complete documents within the deadline, and who loses options because residence and work are unstable. The question of school admission cannot stop at administrative criticism; when the means of obtaining documents, residential stability, working hours, and care arrangements are interconnected, changing one item may not be enough.
Only by tracing how these elements connect can we know which link causes a family to lose its options, rather than attributing every difficulty to an abstract name. Interpreters who adopt a state axis also readily make the direction of reform falsely simple, as if changing one institutional rule would automatically change every consequence. Institutional adjustment may be necessary, but one must still ask whether service windows, document preservation, support available through local relations, family time, and working conditions have changed together; otherwise, the threshold has merely moved to another place.
In the school-admission relational field, the high weight of institutional materials does not deny the roles of local familiarity, sources of information, and family arrangements. Precisely because these relations can change the consequences of the same institutional threshold, an administrative explanation cannot write itself as the whole explanation. Criticism of administrative thresholds must therefore be concrete: which documents, which window, what deadline, and whose work arrangements are they connected to? Only then will institutional pressure not be replaced by an abstract state.
IV. The Market Axis: Monetary Pressure and the Transactional Plane
Cash gifts exchanged at weddings and funerals involve amounts, income, and burdens, so the market axis has something real to grasp. But a cash gift is connected not only to costs and returns; it is also connected to who once attended, who once failed to attend, degrees of closeness and distance, local reputation, dignity, and future mutual aid. If interpreters convert every exchange into a transaction, they grant the transactional plane complete explanatory authority. This image can present the monetary burden, but it cannot replace relational memory and recognition; translating the latter wholesale into costs does not make them disappear.
When interpreters designate monetary pressure in advance as the highest scale, the market axis forms, and the remaining consequences are arranged as incidental psychology or culture. Money is not false, and costs are not irrelevant. The problem is only that once cost is designated as the final scale in advance, memory, recognition, and mutual aid within relations can appear only as accessories, and originally different consequences are flattened. The language of transactions easily makes relations look clean, because amounts can be calculated and burdens compared.
Cash-gift relations, however, also preserve past exchanges and future expectations; they may create pressure, but they may also connect to support in times of difficulty. Looking only at price makes these different directions of relation lose their names at the same time. An interpretive procedure that adopts the market axis will also judge relations that people are unwilling to put a price on as unimportant. Dignity, memory, and mutual aid within cash-gift exchanges may of course conflict with burdens, but they cannot therefore be declared illusions. In later exchanges they may still change who can ask for help, who is trusted, and who bears shame.
When interpreters select material only along the market axis, they readily overlook that monetary relations do not occur only at the moment of payment. Who can postpone payment, who can borrow, who receives help because of a reputation, and who loses the ability to refuse because of an owed favor all carry price into longer relations. The memory, dignity, and mutual aid within cash-gift exchanges enter consequences through subsequent exchanges; the payment relation is thereby extended into a relation of continuing support and obligations. Cash gifts at weddings and funerals also remind us that relations are not the opposite of cost.
Costs can create pressure, and relations can create pressure; the two may also reinforce each other within the same exchange. Elevating either one into the sole scale only makes the other difficult to examine. Judging market pressure likewise requires tracing concrete payments and the support and obligations carried forward through relations: who can refuse, who must maintain the exchange, and who loses subsequent options because of one expense? These questions are closer to consequences than the name of a transaction.
V. The National and Cultural Axes: Memory, Responsibility, and the Plane of Identity
A national community may be formed through long-term interaction, multiple layers of relaying, language, rites and customs, shared memory, shared experiences of harm, shared protection, demands of responsibility, experiences of boundaries, and intergenerational write-back. The name of a nation may be compressed or put to use, but a real national community cannot therefore be reduced to a bloodline myth, a state registration, subjective imagining, a cultural label, or a class occlusion. Conflicts do involve language, memory, and harm, as well as institutions, resources, local relations, and individual experience. If interpreters designate nation or culture in advance as the highest scale for every conflict, they compress complex relations into a plane of identity; what is criticized is this procedure, not the reality of community. Concrete explanations formed around cultural relations can show how rites and customs, expectations, shame, and long-term evaluation enter action, but they cannot deliver the final judgment on every concrete consequence.
A national community is even less synonymous with a “plane of identity.” National or cultural clues may be highly weighty in some questions, especially when language, experiences of boundaries, and shared responsibility directly change action. But this weight must be demonstrated by concrete relations; an identity name cannot guarantee it in advance. A community does not disappear because it contains internal differences. Long-term interaction can preserve language, rites and customs, protection, responsibility, and experiences of boundaries, and can also lead people to respond differently to harm and commitment.
Compressing all this into cultural identity cannot explain the source of shared responsibility, nor can it show how institutions and resources intervene. A bounded explanation of nation and culture can show when shared memory enters a conflict and can ask who is using the name and who bears the consequences. Presetting them as the sole main axis instead reduces a real community to a label that can be invoked at will, obscuring both interaction and responsibility. Protecting nation and culture does not mean exempting them from examination. A community may take up protection and responsibility, but the community may also be exploited through names, organizations, or propaganda.
Distinguishing these two things is precisely what prevents criticism of such use from becoming an erasure of the community itself. If the national or cultural main line does not accept the limits of the material, it will often read every difference as a question of friend and foe or identity. This reading may look firm, but in practice it removes the community’s internal responsibilities, local differences, and institutional conditions from what can be said. The reality of a community does not provide an all-purpose answer. It only means that long-term interaction and responsibility can genuinely enter into consequences; in each case, they must still be examined together with institutions, resources, and local relations.
VI. The Family Axis: Everyday Relations and the Psychological Plane
When a person is afraid to resign, family relations, shame, a sense of security, parental expectations, and care responsibilities may genuinely influence their actions. An explanation that takes the family as its axis can present part of the inner relations, but it cannot psychologize rent, debt, industry cycles, medical protection, and the pressure of supporting the elderly. When interpreters first describe every difficulty as family structure or psychological dependence, the procedure forms a psychological plane and pushes labor institutions, housing costs, and relations that provide protection into the background. Once the interpreter lets the family concept deliver the final judgment on every relation, the explanation has already gone beyond acknowledging family relations.
The family should neither be denied nor naturalized or romanticized. It can carry responsibility, harm, memory, and a sense of security, while intersecting with institutions, work, and resource conditions. Family influence likewise does not cancel external conditions. Whether a person can change jobs, whether protection can continue, and whether rent rises all return to family relations; calling them purely internal problems merely locks different pressures inside one psychological name. The force of family relations also requires concrete tracing.
Whether parents can help, who bears care, and how shame limits requests for help can all change a person’s action space; but they never occur alone. Rent, debt, medical care, and fluctuations in an industry can in turn rewrite what the family can bear. An explanation that takes the family as its axis often seems persuasive because it is close to everyday life. Precisely for that reason, it is more important to distinguish responsibilities that have actually arisen within the family from the interpreter’s practice of sending every external pressure back into the family. The former can help us understand action; the latter merely occludes how institutions and resources limit choice.
Within family relations, support and constraints may exist at the same time. Some people gain care and a way out through the family, while others bear heavier responsibilities because of the same relation. This difference cannot be decided in advance by the name “family”; one must see how resources, time, the body, institutional eligibility, and emotional demands intertwine. Family questions should likewise not be obscured by an overall characterization of the family as either warm or oppressive. Who can provide care, who can exit, and who bears responsibility for debt and medical care often determine action more directly than an abstract image of the family. Explaining these relations clearly is the only way both to avoid denying the family and to prevent the family from subsuming other causes. Family clues can explain why some people stay, remain silent, or cannot exit, but they cannot remove the need to ask about rent, debt, protection, and work relations.
VII. Comparison and Concrete Judgment After Removing Presupposed Axes
Replacing class with the state, the state with the market, or the market with nation, culture, or family does not change the method of a presupposed axis. These concepts have different contents and can grasp different relations; what they share is that the interpretive procedures using them elevate one line in advance as the highest axis. Choosing another total image is not a way out. As long as other differences must first prove that they serve the main axis and counterexamples are downgraded in advance, the structure of subsumption remains. This does not mean that all concepts are alike. Class theory grasps real differentiating units such as wages, labor, and property; its limited explanatory capacity comes from these real differences and from the operations performed on them, but total-image subsumption is inherent in its structure; class theory cannot be remade into an ordinary limited model that becomes safe merely by restricting its scope. Concrete explanations formed around the state, market, nation, culture, and family, by contrast, can provide limited accounts within bounded questions. What must be taken apart are the procedures of presupposition and subsumption.
Interpreters are easily attracted to a presupposed axis precisely because this procedure quickly supplies a position, a distinction between friend and foe, and a verdict. Speed does not prove completeness. If an explanation no longer waits for material or deals with counterexamples, it has merely exempted itself from the duty of accepting correction; its explanatory power has not increased. Changing the name does not change this shortcut to a verdict; it only changes the answer. Class, state, market, nation, culture, and family are not the same concept, nor should they cancel one another. What must truly be rejected is granting any name the power to adjudicate before the material. Different main axes need not simply replace one another. In a concrete event, institutions, prices, memory, family, and local relations can become weighty at the same time, and can also constrain one another. If one highest line is selected first, that mutual constraint is mistaken for disorder; only by tracing relations can we know how they enter consequences together.
Removing a presupposed axis does not make analysis lose direction; it forces the direction to explain itself. If a relation is weightier at this moment, material must support it, and one must trace the nodes that make it weighty; when the material and nodes change, the original judgment should change with them. Merely replacing the presupposed axis changes only which material is seen first; it does not change the adjudicative procedure. What needs to change is the adjudicative procedure itself: a main line cannot acquire standing before the relational field, nor can other relations be declared subordinate in advance. The sense of completeness supplied by a presupposed axis may be convenient, but rejecting it keeps relations not yet heard in a position where they can be tested.
A main line may appear, but it cannot be preset. Judgment must always face concrete tests: which differences truly connect to consequences, which become weighty in the current relational field, which relations change a person’s actual position, and which counterexamples are sufficient to force revision. If a line can absorb only material that supports it while calling other consequences noise, it has already left concrete analysis. A bounded main line does not require all material to speak with one voice; it allows different relations to coexist and allows a line that was originally weightier to become lighter when new material arrives. This adjustment to counterexamples and new material is precisely taking responsibility for consequences. Comparison and correction are not abandonment of judgment; they free judgment from dependence on a line that is always right and prevent a limited field of vision from masquerading as the whole field.
A limited explanation can identify a relation that is weightier, but it must state its boundaries and cannot first call other relations outer shells. This means that the boundary of the main line must be stated clearly: which stretch of relation it handles, which questions it does not handle, what material it depends on, and what counterexample would force it to change. These limits prevent a limited explanation from being elevated into the whole explanation. Once a main line can be corrected, it need not fear the existence of other explanations; different explanations can thereby be compared according to what each has extracted, what it has overlooked, and on which consequences it has greater force. Only when one line is first elevated into the whole do other explanations become enemies or noise.
If a main line emerges from consequences, it need not promise to remain valid forever. It can withdraw when a stretch of relation ends, or be rewritten when a new node appears. A main line that can be compared is a bounded main line: it does not fear another explanation pointing out omissions, nor material forcing it to contract. This mutability is what prevents the image from hardening, and is the condition that allows a limited explanation to retain its boundaries.
Removing a presupposed axis does not invalidate concrete judgment. For a child’s school admission, one must trace how household registration, social insurance, rental registration, quotas, care, and working hours connect; wedding and funeral cash gifts involve income, burdens, memory, closeness and distance, and future mutual aid; fear of resigning requires examining how rent, debt, industry cycles, medical protection, old-age support for parents, and shame enter action. Social complexity cannot be an excuse for refusing judgment. Judgment must instead make clear what it has extracted, which differences it has assigned weight, through which relations they enter consequences, and what material would overturn the original arrangement. This does not scatter every event into fragments; it returns concrete relations to a testable position. Concrete judgment does not mean listing items one by one. Tracing differences and their connections is meant to find what can change consequences and what is merely a substitute for a name; it can still reach clear conclusions, but it does not hand the conclusion in advance to a broad concept. The three cases do not point to an all-purpose answer; they require interpreters to trace separately how institutional eligibility, relational exchanges, and pressures on action connect.
Removing a presupposed axis requires interpreters to acknowledge that adjudication has costs. Compressing a question into a single cause too early makes nodes that could have been changed invisible; pulling relations apart is precisely how one avoids substituting a convenient answer for actual responsibility and consequences. The common requirement is simply that a broad concept must not decide their outcome before tracing begins. Conclusions may differ, and the weightier differences may differ as well. Concrete judgment must ultimately land where action is possible: which materials need to be added, which node can be changed, which relation needs to be taken up and sustained, and which responsibilities can no longer be occluded by a name.
This requires an explanation to take responsibility for the consequences it identifies; it does not reduce theory to administrative advice. After removing the presupposed axis, judgment can remain very sharp. It can point out how a particular institution traps people, how a debt relation tightens choice, or how a relation transfers risk; it simply cannot smuggle these definite judgments into a single total name that has already adjudicated every question. The responsibility of judgment lies here: explain why these differences are weightier at this moment, rather than mistaking greater weight for exclusivity.
VIII. Society Is a Differentiation Network
Society cannot be adjudicated by a presupposed axis, nor can the state, market, nation, culture, and family simply be placed side by side and added together. That would merely replace one single image with a rough list. Judgment must return to concrete differences that can change positions, relations, and the consequences of action, and to the processes through which they connect. Society is a differentiation network: differences are extracted, assigned weight, connected, and transmitted within concrete relations, and consequences take shape through these processes. This judgment is not another highest image that subsumes every explanation. When analysis unfolds from it, every explanatory line must state what it has extracted, what it has downplayed, and when material should rewrite it. If an explanatory line cannot state its boundaries, it readily treats the part it sees as the whole. Returning to concrete differences rejects concepts passing judgment on society before the material.
To speak of a differentiation network is not to rename everything a network, still less to substitute a new name for the old total image. Analysis must still return to how differences are extracted, in which relations they become weighty, and how they change positions and action. Precisely because there is no presupposed axis, every proposed main line must accept comparison, counterexamples, and correction. Concrete differences do not by themselves constitute a completed total image. They are extracted and change positions only within events, nodes, and relations. Starting from this, one can make forceful judgments while preserving an opening through which those judgments can be corrected; that is why judgment remains possible after rejecting presupposed axes.
Returning from a presupposed axis to concrete differences does not require starting from zero every time. Existing concepts can provide an entry point, and known relations may temporarily be weightier; but an entry point cannot close off further inquiry, and temporary weight cannot become permanent supremacy. Social analysis must preserve a place for material to re-enter. The process by which concrete differences connect does not automatically provide an eternal main line. It requires interpreters continually to explain their selection of material and their boundaries, and requires readers to be able to point out relations that have been downplayed. This mutual correction is what keeps judgment within social consequences.
To develop judgment through the social differentiation network, one cannot use complexity as an excuse. Analysis must still question relations, positions, and consequences within complexity, and refuse to let any preset name replace this work. Returning to concrete differences does not break society into mutually unrelated fragments. Differences affect one another within relations and transmit consequences to new positions; what must be rejected is only the practice of compressing these connections in advance into a single main axis.