Chapter 10. Relational Fields: How Social Objects Undergo Distinction Extraction, Weight Assignment, and Positioning Anew
I. Begin with Concrete Objects Rather Than Identities
A relational field is not a scene, place, or background. It is the concrete relational state within which an event is already situated and specific participants, drawing on rules that can be invoked, materials, responsibilities, and time constraints, are carrying out distinction extraction, weight assignment, connection, compression, and positioning with respect to social objects.
The relational field itself is not an actor. It is the specific participants within relations who require materials, adopt records, make judgments, assign operative weight, and connect consequences. They may be the people concerned, family members, colleagues, managers, medical staff, service-counter staff, teachers, neighbors, or case investigators. They handle the problem at hand according to rules that can be invoked, materials at hand, and responsibilities they must bear.
Here, "social object" refers to people, groups, institutions, events, or things that enter relations of identification and handling. A social object is not a fixed identity; nor does it constitute what society fundamentally is, complete prior to relations. An object carries many distinguishable differences. Which differences are raised, checked, adopted, and connected to consequences still depends on what problem specific participants are handling.
Even in the same physical place, different participants, rules, materials, or ways of handling matters may form different relational fields. A change of place, however, does not necessarily change the relational field. If the same set of materials, responsibilities, and relations of handling continues, an object will not be handled anew simply because it has moved to another room, counter, or road. Beginning with identity makes it easy to mistake an already formed designation for the object itself. Only by beginning with the concrete object can we see how the designation actually forms.
A person, group, institution, or thing does not first carry a complete, unchanging identity and only then pass through different relations. A person has an occupation, gender, income, household registration, and educational qualifications, as well as bodily conditions, medical history, an accent, debts, kinship relations, a local reputation, past experiences, other people's memories, institutional records, and risk labels. These do not all act at the same moment, much less all enter consequences automatically. A difference's ordinary silence does not mean it does not exist. It may remain in the body or in relatives' memories, be preserved in a record, or simply not yet have been treated by anyone as a problem requiring handling. To understand why a person is trusted, refused, or required to provide proof, we cannot begin by asking what kind of person they really are. We must examine who extracted what within which relations, and what judgments they made on that basis.
This holds not only for people. Groups, institutions, events, and things also reveal different usable differences in different relational fields. With a knife in a kitchen, the person cooking considers its use, sharpness, feel in the hand, material, and ease of handling. These differences bear on whether it can cut vegetables, is comfortable to grip, and is durable. When it is carried through airport security, staff are more likely to check its length, sharpness, capacity to cause harm, and how it is carried, and judge whether it can pass on that basis. In a criminal case, investigators may examine bloodstains, fingerprints, purchase records, relations involving its holder, and where it appeared; the same knife may then be handled as evidence. Once it is placed in a museum, researchers and managers attend to its age, craftsmanship, provenance, decorative patterns, and historical connections, and it may be classified as a cultural artifact. The knife has not become four knives. What differs is which differences participants adopt and how they connect them to consequences in tool use, security screening, recognition as evidence, or collection and preservation. The object has not become multiple entities. What changes is which differences participants adopt and handle in different relations. People, institutions, and groups should be understood in the same way: no single label can determine all relations. Different participants extract different parts from complex differences and bring them into comparison and handling.
II. Distinction Extraction: Extracting Operative Differences from Potential Differences
Distinction extraction does not manufacture differences out of nothing. Within a relation, specific participants extract certain items from differences that already exist but may not be conspicuous, using them as grounds for judgment. Many differences do not ordinarily change circumstances because no one is currently using them for comparison, handling, or the allocation of responsibility, not because they do not exist. Each instance of distinction extraction has a concrete point of entry: someone submits an application; someone requires materials to be presented; someone checks against existing records; or someone brings a previously unraised difference into discussion during a conflict. Different points of entry bring differences into relations in different ways. The same materials need not be approached through the same question at different points of entry.
Several steps must be distinguished. First, a difference already exists. Second, someone notices it. Third, someone requires materials relating to it. Fourth, a participant accepts the materials. Fifth, the materials are actually adopted as grounds for judgment. Sixth, only then is the difference connected to eligibility, responsibility, risk, channels, or other consequences. These steps cannot replace one another. Being seen does not mean being required; materials being required does not mean they are accepted; acceptance does not mean consequences have already changed.
Body temperature is ordinarily just a bodily condition. It does not usually determine a person's post or generational rank among relatives. In circumstances involving infectious-disease prevention and control, staff, or the managers of schools, hospitals, stations, or communities may require body temperatures, travel histories, contact histories, test records, and records of protective measures, using these to decide whether someone can enter, needs to register or undergo isolation, or requires other arrangements. In this process, body temperature itself acquires no fixed power detached from relations. Someone first notices a risk, someone requires records, and someone accepts or rejects materials under the rules; only then is it connected to entry and exit, care, the bearing of risk, and the handling of responsibility. Merely writing that "body temperature is important" leaves out how distinction extraction occurs, as well as the conditions under which consequences may differ when materials are not adopted.
The same holds for medical history. It may remain a personal experience that others do not necessarily know or need to know. In an insurance claim, those handling it may judge responsibility on the basis of prior medical history, disclosures made when taking out insurance, and examination materials. In a pre-employment medical examination, medical staff and employers may make arrangements according to examination results and job requirements. In determining workplace-injury status, medical records, how the injury occurred, diagnoses, and work records may enter judgments of responsibility and compensation. In romantic and marital relations, the people concerned may consider medical history in relation to trust, care, and life together. Medical history alone does not determine which consequences it enters. This also depends on who adopts what materials, which rules apply, and what responsibilities they are willing to bear. If materials are insufficient or contradictory, or those handling the matter refuse to adopt them, a medical history, though it exists, may not connect to the consequences originally expected.
Nor can an accent be understood as a permanently operative marker of identity. Among people from the same hometown, someone may use an accent to confirm a sense of familiarity. In a job interview, an interviewer may use it as one point of reference for judging familiarity with local rules. In local conflicts or migration management, someone may use it as a marker of an outsider. At the boundaries of a society of acquaintances, an accent may also affect whether someone is treated as an insider. Ancestral origin, surname, language, and kinship relations may likewise be adopted during war, political campaigns, ethnic conflict, or in an environment of hostility to outsiders as grounds for distinguishing inside from outside, friend from enemy, and reliable from unreliable. The danger of distinction extraction does not lie in differences suddenly becoming false. It lies in specific participants connecting them to exclusion, punishment, or protection and thereby changing other people's action space.
Distinction extraction has clear boundaries for judgment. A difference's having been noticed does not mean it is necessarily operative; the existence of materials does not mean their evidentiary effect is already complete. Who extracted the difference, on the basis of what materials, at which step the materials gained acceptance, and whether they actually entered the handling must still be explained separately. Only by keeping these steps distinct can we avoid misrepresenting "being seen" as "having already determined the consequences."
III. Weight Assignment: Extracted Differences Are Not Equally Important
The extraction of differences does not mean they acquire equal operative weight. Weight assignment means specific participants giving different differentiating units different operative weight within a relation, on the basis of rules that can be invoked, materials, responsibilities, and foreseeable consequences. This operative weight is neither a fixed numerical value that differences carry by nature nor a moral ranking from high to low.
Different participants may give the same difference different operative weight. Someone treats a record as a condition that must first be checked, while someone else gives more attention to the immediate responsibility for care. Someone handles matters under formal rules, while someone else judges according to favors owed among relatives or local memory. These weights can conflict; they cannot be written as a fixed table applicable to every relation.
Within family relations, blood ties, generational rank, care, support for older relatives, unfulfilled obligations, sacrifice, and social standing are often put first. Outside the home, a person may be an employee, trader, teacher, patient, or debtor. At home, their parents may ask whether they have sent money, can care for older family members, have started a family, or have brought shame on the family. These judgments are not necessarily reasonable or fair, yet they may change the responsibilities the person must bear, the support available to them, and whether they can refuse an arrangement. At work, managers and colleagues may adopt job positions, attendance, performance, wages, obedience, the allocation of responsibility, and labor discipline as grounds. Someone with local prestige who fulfills their family responsibilities may still have their arrangements changed at work because of repeated lateness, failure to meet performance standards, or inability to complete tasks. Their local prestige has not disappeared. Rather, attendance and task completion have been given greater operative weight in this handling.
Even within the same handling process, different participants face different responsibilities and therefore need not put the same difference in the same position. In a hospital, doctors must consider the illness and examination results; service-counter staff must consider payment and medical-insurance materials; family members must face signing documents, providing care, and making decisions. Medical records, symptoms, examination results, ability to pay, disclosure of risks, family members' signatures, and medical-insurance eligibility may jointly affect whether treatment can continue, how costs are borne, and how responsibility is divided.
In schools, concrete life must also be converted into materials and eligibility that can be adopted. A family's many years of life in a city do not automatically mean that its child can enter a particular school. A child cared for within the family enters the handling of student registration, classes, grades, discipline, and eligibility at school. Age, student registration, household-registration materials, proof of residence, guardianship qualifications, grades, and disciplinary records may be adopted.
In local society, people may repeatedly adopt accent, local belonging, ancestral relations, exchanges at weddings and funerals, records of keeping one's word, and histories of mutual aid. Wealth does not necessarily bring immediate local recognition, nor does poverty necessarily mean a complete loss of local support. Exchanges, care, favors owed, and reputation not preserved in institutional materials may still affect trust and mutual aid among acquaintances. Weight assignment is not confined to formal institutions. Favors owed and repeatedly mentioned among relatives, old incidents in local society, and colleagues' impressions of a person's reliability may all be given operative weight in concrete judgments. Whether they enter consequences, however, still depends on the people who actually adopt them, the accounts that can be invoked at the time, and whether other materials can counterbalance them.
Formal rules, responsibilities to relatives, and local memory may also conflict with one another. Materials that meet procedural requirements may not eliminate relatives' demands for care; existing local evaluations may not replace checks on formal eligibility. In analyzing these conflicts, we cannot presuppose which side always carries more weight. We must examine which participant is handling what consequences, what responsibilities they are willing to bear, and which rules constrain them. The scope of weight assignment is always provisional. It explains only how certain differences enter real consequences here and now; it cannot turn weight into a numerical value permanently carried by an object. Without specifying participants, materials, rules, and consequences, saying that "a difference carries great weight" is merely an empty label.
IV. Connection: How Differentiating Units with High Weight Affect Consequences within Relations
Connection occurs when participants place differentiating units that have been adopted and given operative weight into other materials, rules, responsibilities, and relations, allowing their effects to extend beyond the original step of handling. A difference's gaining weight does not make consequences occur automatically. Only when relevant responsibilities are recognized, records adopted, procedures actually initiated, or support provided by someone can a relational chain extend further.
In an account book, debt may be no more than an amount owed. In market relations, lenders, borrowers, guarantors, or partners may examine credit, interest, guarantees, and the capacity to fulfill obligations. When a debt cannot be repaid, more than a single transaction is affected; eligibility for future cooperation may also be affected. In legal relations, the people concerned, their representatives, judges, or enforcement personnel adopt IOUs, transfer records, contracts, witnesses, and procedural materials to judge who bears what responsibility, which facts can be recognized, and which obligations must be fulfilled. In family relations, parents, spouses, and children may consequently recalculate medical expenses, tuition, rent, and everyday spending. In kinship and local relations, whether one borrows and whether one repays may in turn affect social standing, mutual aid, reputation, and future trust. Debt does not transmit itself through the network. Within each relation, specific participants separately take debt, credit, evidence, or reputation as points of reference and connect them to cooperation, responsibility, care, trust, or available exits.
A relational chain is not a straight line laid out in advance. Someone may first cut family spending under repayment pressure and only later seek contracts, transfer records, or witnesses. Or legal proceedings may already have begun before relatives learn of the debt and decide whether to help.
When medical records enter leave applications, reimbursement, insurance, workplace-injury determinations, or compensation lawsuits, they may also connect bodily facts, workplace responsibilities, institutional materials, monetary compensation, family care, and the allocation of risk. Medical records used for leave are not necessarily used for insurance or compensation at the same time: different procedures have different requirements for materials, responsibility, and timing. Where medical records are incomplete, those handling matters may not adopt certain facts about treatment. Where there are gaps in the records, responsibility may be difficult to pursue. Where materials do not meet requirements, experiences of treatment may not enter a channel for compensation.
Insufficient materials, unrecognized responsibilities, records not adopted, or the intervention of supportive relations may all interrupt a relational chain that had seemed likely to extend. Once the person concerned supplements the materials, family members change their decisions, those handling the matter check again, or a new procedure begins, later arrangements may reconnect previously interrupted links. These interruptions, branches, and reconnections are precisely why connection cannot be written as inevitable, one-way causation. Connection may also bring constraints. Once one set of materials is given priority, there may temporarily be no grounds for bringing in other materials; once one responsibility is recognized, difficulties in other relations may be downweighted. Analysis must ask not only how one condition gains weight, but also which conditions have not yet been adopted in this handling, which relations have not yet been connected, and who has not been heard.
V. Compression: Identity Is a Designation for a Complex Configuration of Differentiating Units
People cannot unfold all an object's differences in full every time. Doctors cannot begin diagnosis and treatment with a person's entire family history; workplaces cannot begin every assignment of posts with the entirety of kinship relations; schools cannot incorporate each family's complete life history into the handling of student registration. To deal with problems within limited time, participants often compress a complex configuration of differentiating units into a designation. Compression itself is not an error. It makes limited handling possible, and designations have their convenience and scope of application.
For example, symptoms, medical records, examinations, payments, risks, and treatment plans may be compressed into "patient." Within treatment relations, this allows medical staff, family members, and service-counter staff to attend first to the illness, payments, and care. Yet being called a patient does not erase the person's circumstances as a parent, debtor, tenant, or member of local relations. Job positions, contracts, attendance, performance, wages, and labor discipline may be compressed into "employee" for handling matters of posts, attendance, and labor discipline. This likewise does not erase the person's care responsibilities, illness and pain, pressure from relatives, or available exits.
In other relational fields, debt, repayment, credit, evidence, and the capacity to fulfill obligations may be compressed into "debtor," allowing questions of lending and borrowing, evidence, and fulfillment to be handled. Accent, household registration, length of residence, kinship networks, and local recognition may be compressed into "nonlocal" or "local." Even being called a nonlocal cannot cancel the work, memories, mutual aid, and recognition already formed locally. Job positions, wages, employment, working hours, and production arrangements may also be compressed into "worker."
Compression retains only what has been extracted within the current relational field. When compression begins to occlude, the problem is not the existence of the designation. It is that participants no longer ask on what materials it was formed, to which handling it applies, or which differences capable of changing consequences it has hidden. Once a designation is mistaken for what the object fundamentally is, concrete handling may bypass necessary checks and treat a limited designation for handling as the complete person or their complete social position. It is only an entry point for handling, formed by compressing a complex configuration of differentiating units within a particular relational field. If analysts treat it as the final conclusion, they can no longer see how materials are adopted, how responsibilities are allocated, or which other differences may change circumstances. A designation cannot become what the object fundamentally is.
Designations must also be distinguished from positional consequences. Compression first produces a designation for handling. Only when specific participants use that designation to arrange eligibility, responsibility, trust, exclusion, or care do positional consequences form. The existence of a designation does not mean all consequences have already formed. The same designation may also connect to different consequences in different relational fields: someone called a patient need not face the same responsibilities, channels, or exclusion in all relations.
VI. The Class Image: The Power and Danger of Compressed Projection
Differentiating units extracted by class theory, such as labor, wages, employment, property, debt, risk, and domination, carry real weight. Once adopted by specific participants, these differentiating units may affect whether a person can wait, exit, bear failure, or obtain support. Analysis cannot deny the importance of these differences because it opposes the class image's total subsumption. The designation "worker" can have limited explanatory force when used to analyze factories, wages, labor discipline, and relations of exploitation. It compresses job positions, wages, employment, working hours, and production arrangements onto the same line of analysis, making certain inequalities, forms of domination, and risks visible. Yet a concrete worker may also face family relations, local relations, national memory, language, religion, bodily illness and pain, debt structures, responsibilities to relatives, care for parents, children's school admission, and local reputation. Only when participants adopt these differences in different relational fields can they enter the handling of recognition, responsibility, channels, and available exits. A designation within labor relations cannot cancel these differences in advance or replace checking them one by one. Opposing total-image subsumption does not mean declaring wages, property, debt, and risk unimportant. It requires analysis to return to concrete relations and examine which differences are actually adopted and connected to consequences.
The problem with the class image is not that the set of differences extracted behind it by class theory is unreal. It is that class theory extends the compressed projection formed through this distinction extraction within a limited scope into a total explanation. Class theory is precisely Model C: total-image subsumption. It is neither Model A nor Model B, nor an ordinary limited model. Its ability to extract real differentiating units that may carry high weight does not change this structure.
When analysts make a class designation bear the whole explanation, differences such as care, debt, local reputation, language, religion, national memory, and bodily pain may lose the opportunity to be examined independently within the theory. They have not disappeared. Analysts simply cease to examine, item by item, how specific participants adopt these differences and how that adoption changes consequences. The class image is not an actor that extracts, compresses, or subsumes on its own. It is analysts adopting class theory who perform this theoretical handling.
Returning to concrete relational fields does not mean abandoning judgment or refusing comparison. Analysis must still ask who adopted which differences, on what materials and rules, and to which kinds of consequences they connected them; it must also ask whether the original judgment needs revision when counterexamples arise. In this way, labor, wages, property, debt, and risk retain weight that can be examined, without being gathered into a total image as the sole explanation.
VII. Positioning: Social Position Is a Structure of Consequences, Not a Name
A position is a structure of consequences. When participants extract differences within a relation, give them operative weight, connect relevant conditions, and handle matters using a designation, a person, family, or organization may be placed in an actual position. A position is neither an abstract noun nor a slot occupied by nature.
A designation produces positional consequences only when specific participants use it in handling. The various kinds of consequences cannot all be replaced by an identity designation, nor can they be equated directly with one another. Eligibility concerns whether one can enter school, receive reimbursement, apply, or enter a channel. Responsibility concerns whether one must repay money, sign documents, provide care, fulfill contracts, or bear consequences. Opportunity concerns whether one can find employment, gain promotion, cooperate, form ties through marriage, and gain trust. Exclusion concerns whether one is refused, suspected, isolated, or kept outside. Shame, reputation, punishment, and recognition also have their different consequences. Only by distinguishing these consequences can we see how a position concretely limits or opens up action.
Positional consequences within a concrete position may be inconsistent with one another. Gaining one form of eligibility does not mean having access to all channels; being able to provide proof does not mean having the conditions needed to wait. Being called a patient is more than a change of name: the person may enter treatment, payment, disclosure of risks, care, and the allocation of responsibility. They may gain eligibility for treatment yet be unable to make it all the way through that channel because the conditions for payment, care, or leave are insufficient.
Likewise, bearing one responsibility does not mean other relations have already been explained; gaining recognition in one respect does not necessarily exempt one from responsibilities involving relatives, debt, or care. Being called a debtor is more than a change of name: it may bring consequences involving repayment, debt recovery, law, credit, and reputation. Yet a debtor may bear responsibility for repayment while retaining some support from relatives or local mutual aid. Someone called a nonlocal may encounter eligibility, boundaries, trust, and exclusion in certain relations. They may face boundaries concerning materials for school admission or residence, while also gaining trust through work, neighbors, and people from the same hometown. These inconsistencies are not exceptions to the theory. They are structures of consequences that must be preserved.
Position can neither be reduced to a single scale from high to low nor be recast retrospectively as a fixed identity. Analysis must trace back along the process through which a designation formed: who gave it, on what materials, within which relational field it is operative, which channels and responsibilities it changed, and which differences have not yet been adopted. Only by reconnecting distinction extraction, weight assignment, connection, and handling can position be kept from slipping into another theory of identity.
VIII. Write-Back: How the Results of Positioning Affect the Next Instance of Distinction Extraction
Write-back means preserving the results of current determinations, records, handling, or actions as differences that can be extracted again in the future and may change subsequent judgment, eligibility, risk, evaluation, and action space. Write-back is not simple archiving, much less a doctrine of predetermined fate. It explains how prior handling leaves materials that later participants can face anew.
Two levels must be distinguished here. When earlier handling leaves records or evaluations that are preserved as differences capable of being extracted again in the future, write-back has already formed. Only when later participants identify and extract these contents anew, and decide according to subsequent relations, rules, and materials whether to interpret, adopt, or assign weight to them, can the contents of write-back connect again to real consequences. A record's existence does not mean it will necessarily be adopted; its adoption does not mean it cannot be revised.
If a court records someone as untrustworthy, relevant people may later adopt that record when the person borrows money, cooperates with others, travels, spends, or undergoes workplace evaluation. If a workplace records someone as unstable, managers may interpret their conduct through existing impressions when handling leave requests, considering promotion, or assigning tasks. If a child is labeled a problem student, teachers, classmates, and parents may later use the label to explain the child's words and actions in advance. If someone is locally regarded as not keeping their word, neighbors and relatives may also treat past evaluations as points of reference in wedding and funeral exchanges, borrowing, partnerships, and job introductions. The records, comments, and memories in these examples do not themselves read, decide, or punish people. Later participants extract them anew and place them back into new judgments or the handling of eligibility, trust, or responsibility.
The renewed adoption of old records carries risks. A limited handling in a past relational field may be treated by later participants as a conclusion established in advance, occluding new materials, new actions, and changed relations. If old records simply replace fresh checking, the problem is not the existence of records, but participants' treating a limited judgment as a conclusion requiring no examination. Write-back also preserves the possibility of correction. New medical records, materials supplemented later, sustained actions, changed relations, and newly recognized facts may all cause old evaluations to lose their former operative weight. Checking again does not guarantee that the old judgment will be overturned, but it prevents us from writing write-back as irreversible fate.
A person is not understood from scratch in every relation. Past positioning may settle into files, reputation, memories, prejudices, and expectations of oneself. Later participants may in turn extract these sediments and handle them anew according to new relations. Write-back explains how relational fields not only handle the present but may also make present results conditions for future relations.
IX. From Relational Fields to Differentiation Positions
This chapter does not offer a theory of multiple identities. Such a theory can say that a person is a son at home, an employee at work, and a patient in hospital, but this does not yet explain how those designations produce consequences. Relational-field analysis asks which differences are extracted by whom, how they are given operative weight, how they connect to materials, responsibilities, and channels, how they are compressed into designations, and how handling leaves results that can be adopted again. Multiple relations at the same moment need not fit neatly together. Some materials are being adopted, some relations have not yet been articulated, some responsibilities already press on the present, and some support may still appear later. Relational-field analysis must preserve these inconsistencies and incompletions, because they are the concrete conditions that explain why people can or cannot change their circumstances.
A nonlocal worker may simultaneously be a father, debtor, patient, tenant, someone from the same hometown, workplace employee, a child's guardian, and a member of a kinship network. He does not enter these relations one after another in sequence. Continuity of social insurance, rental materials, and the ability to take leave needed for a child's school admission may simultaneously affect work arrangements, income, debt, care, and local support. Illness may in turn connect medical records, payment, leave, reimbursement, and family responsibilities. Participants' handling in different relational fields may intersect and jointly affect whether he can wait, refuse, supply further proof, migrate, or seek help. These ways of handling matters may also be inconsistent: workplace arrangements, family members' care decisions, schools' requirements for materials, and support from local relations need not point toward the same result. No identity designation can flatten all these relations into one. Nor does this analysis treat multiple relations as a list of identities that can be exhaustively compiled once and for all. Every relation must be brought back to the materials actually adopted at the time, rules that can be invoked, responsibilities that must be borne, and consequences already formed or not yet formed. Only then can we distinguish a designation temporarily useful in handling from one mistakenly elevated into the object's entire position.
The scope of a relational field is constrained by participants' purposes and procedural deadlines. Analysts who track only the first materials to appear may miss care, debt, or community relations raised later. Yet including every possible background would lose the event's boundaries. A sounder approach is to make the current point of entry explicit, expand or narrow it as materials change, and retain the reasons for earlier omissions. Different analysts may choose different points of entry into a relational field, but their choices must be open to mutual checking. As long as each makes the question, materials, timing, and omissions explicit, it is possible to compare which scope better explains the consequences. If a scope can be maintained only by excluding counterexamples, it needs to be redefined. A relational field's objective limits come from the event's relations, not an analyst's declaration.
A relational field is not a static container. The submission of supplementary documents, an objection, a revocation, or a new event may each bring different objects of handling into the same position. Once the relational field changes, the original weights and relational chains can serve only as starting points to be checked; they cannot be carried over directly as new conclusions. Relational fields may also nest within one another. Handling a workplace injury simultaneously involves medical care, labor, family, and debt, but analysts may first trace one of these according to their question and then explain at which positions it connects to other relational fields. Nesting does not mean combining all backgrounds into an infinite scene. It means making explicit how different questions meet at concrete nodes.
The analysis of relational fields concludes here. It concerns how differences undergo distinction extraction, weight assignment, connection, compression, positioning, and write-back anew, and how every step preserves specific participants, materials, rules, responsibilities, and consequences. It cannot recast multiple forms of handling as an identity, an image, or an abstract noun determining everything in advance.