Chapter 11. Differentiation Positions: How Multiple Weights Combine to Form a Person's Actual Position
The low-dimensional position marked out by the class image can become the dominant pull within a differentiation position in some relational fields, but it is not the person's entire differentiation position. A person's actual position results from multiple sets of differentiating units being extracted, assigned weight, and connected within concrete relations. The low-dimensional position discussed here carries real weight: analysts adopting this position can bring labor, wages, debt, housing, risk, and relations of domination into judgment. But this position cannot replace all of a person's relations in advance, nor can it turn family responsibilities, bodily conditions, local relations, institutional materials, and past records into the same thing.
I. A Position Is Not an Identity Badge
A person may simultaneously be called a worker, father, nonlocal, debtor, patient, tenant, someone from the same hometown, or guardian. Each designation captures certain real relations: worker connects to labor, wages, and employment arrangements; father to responsibilities for care and family expectations; nonlocal involves household registration, accent, length of residence, and local recognition; debtor involves money owed, credit, capacity to fulfill obligations, and deadlines. The question is not whether these designations are true or false, but that any one of them can compress only some relations. Nor need the same designation carry the same operative weight in different relational fields. Wage relations may be raised first when someone changes jobs, yet may not suffice to replace medical records and determinations of responsibility in medical handling. When specific participants invoke care responsibilities through the designation "father," this still does not by itself explain who devotes time to care and who bears its costs. Designations also easily compress distinct responsibilities into interchangeable descriptions. Calling someone a father does not automatically answer which materials are missing for a child's school admission, who provides care, or who can help submit supplementary documents. Calling someone a worker does not automatically answer how wages, working hours, workplace injuries, and changes in work enter family arrangements simultaneously. A designation can be an entry point into analysis; it cannot end analysis in advance.
A nonlocal worker living with his child in a city wants a job that pays more and is closer to where they live. Neither "worker" nor "father," taken alone, adequately explains his predicament. Wages affect rent, rent affects the filing of rental records, filing affects the materials for the child's school admission, and continuity of social insurance also affects admission conditions. Debt, support for aging parents, and wedding and funeral exchanges back home also involve income, time, and local reputation in their respective ways. These relations do not appear in turns; they make demands simultaneously within the same choice. An identity badge offers partial identification. Actual position concerns how relations combine in the present: placing designations side by side still cannot directly establish which channels a person has, what responsibilities they must bear, what they can refuse, how long they can wait, or under what conditions they must bear risk. These consequences depend on whether specific participants adopt the relations captured by the designation and connect them to materials, rules, deadlines, and handling. Emphasizing that a position is not an identity badge neither invents another identity nor requires all designations to be abolished. Analysis cannot stop at a static list of roles. It must keep asking who uses which designation in what relational field, which materials and consequences the designation connects to, and which relations it does not include.
Comparison between positions must especially avoid comparing names alone. Two people both called tenants may face different available exits because their contracts, landlords, incomes, care arrangements, and residential materials differ. Two people both called parents may likewise have different capacities to wait because school procedures and support from relatives differ. A differentiation position is formed through the combination of relational consequences, not the replacement of an identity badge.
II. Differentiation Space: Where Differentiation Positions Form
A differentiation position forms within a scope of relations that allows differences to be compared with one another, acquire operative weight, and connect to consequences. This scope is neither a geographical location nor a container detached from reality. Concrete relations, institutional nodes, rules of evaluation, historical indices, and consequences for action jointly open it up. Only when certain differences enter the same judgment can they be compared in weight and connected to eligibility, responsibility, risk, recognition, or exclusion.
Differentiation space is the relational space in which differentiating units can be represented, compared, assigned weight, and positioned. Such a space presupposes that differences have entered the same set of comparative relations. It neither selects differences nor assigns weight on its own. In practice, hospitals, schools, workplaces, families, reviewers, relatives, or other specific participants extract certain differences within the materials, rules, and relations available to them, bringing those differences into comparison.
A differentiation position, in turn, is the position formed for a person, family, organization, or event within a particular differentiation space. Space explains which differences can potentially be handled together; position explains how they are connected at a particular moment and produce actual consequences for the object. The two must not be conflated: the former is not a physical place, and the latter is not a fixed coordinate.
During insurance claims handling at a hospital, medical records, insurance terms, prior medical history, payment records, diagnostic results, and determinations of responsibility may enter judgment together. In screening job applicants, those responsible may read educational qualifications, age, skills, gaps in employment, former workplaces, bodily conditions, and relations through which recommendations are made. In judgments about courtship and marriage, those involved may also weigh income, housing, debt, family responsibilities, local reputation, and capacity for care together. Materials appearing together does not mean they have equal weight; their operative weight still depends on current relations, materials, and consequences. Nor need the same material be adopted in the same way in all relations. Medical records may be regarded as crucial to one claim, yet a change in the conditions of review may alter how they work. When a recommendation relationship is raised, it still matters who recognizes it and what eligibility and consequences it can connect to. Differentiation space presents the relational conditions under which things can currently be handled together, not a static list.
Differentiation space must also be distinguished from latent differentiation space. The former carries relations among differences already extracted in the present, available for comparison, and currently forming positions. The latter involves reserves of differences not yet extracted by the current relational field but potentially adopted anew in the future. Past medical history, old local grievances, school disciplinary sanctions, debts involving relatives, language differences, and past credit records have not disappeared when they have not entered current judgment. When and by whom they are extracted again still depends on later relational fields and materials.
III. Differentiation Position: An Actual Position Formed by a Five-Layer Structure
A differentiation position is not the sum of multiple identities. It is an actual position jointly formed by the dominant pull, connection chains, the constraint domain, lock-in structures, and write-back sedimentation. These five layers constitute an analytical structure for unpacking how a position forms. They are neither five independent entities nor fixed stages that everyone must pass through in sequence. When one layer stands out, the others may still operate at the same time.
The dominant pull identifies the high-weight relation currently most capable of changing consequences. Connection chains trace how it affects responsibilities, materials, eligibility, channels, and evaluations. The constraint domain shows how these relations narrow or adjust the range of possible action. Lock-in structures explain why the costs of change rise once multiple relations support one another. Write-back sedimentation explains how past determinations are preserved as materials that may be adopted again later.
Take a teacher in a county town. "Teacher" is only a designation. At school, he may face curricula, grades, assessments, parents' expectations, and inspections by higher authorities. Within institutional arrangements, whether his post is on the authorized staffing establishment changes stability and the conditions of handling. Back in the family, expectations of providing support, being considerate, stepping forward, and maintaining stability also affect choices. Acquaintance relations, reputation, and exchanges with relatives in local society may enter judgment as well. Together, these relations form a position that cannot be explained by the name of an occupation alone. When materials are not adopted, connections are interrupted, new supportive relations enter, or past evaluations are checked again, a seemingly firm position may change. The five-layer structure merely shows where changes may occur. It guarantees no particular conclusion and cannot presuppose a fixed sequence of change. The effects of the same support in different relational fields must still be checked anew against specific participants, materials, and conditions of handling. Analysis must explain under what conditions each layer is operating, rather than nail people into a structure.
The formation of a position is not driven by the five layers in succession. When the dominant pull connects to more materials or tighter deadlines, the constraint domain may narrow and existing connections may deepen; when one chain is cut, the strength of a lock-in structure may decline. These interactions between layers allow the formation process to be checked layer by layer, but do not constitute a causal staircase in which one step necessarily leads to the next. When someone seems trapped, only by first identifying the dominant pull currently adopted and then tracing the chains it connects to can we judge the range of action and the relations through which it narrows. Lock-in should be discussed only where multiple relations actually interlock. Before past evaluations enter analysis, we must also establish whether they have been preserved and adopted anew. This order prevents a conspicuous phenomenon from being prematurely treated as the entire cause; it does not force experience into a table. A differentiation position is therefore neither a social rank, a list of factors, nor a name for fate. It requires high-weight differences to be placed back within concrete relations: who presents materials, who adopts records, who gives operative weight under which rules, who thereby gains or loses channels, and who bears the consequences. The five-layer structure serves precisely to prevent a designation from replacing these questions.
Nor can a differentiation position make value choices on someone's behalf. Analysis can explain which relations constrain waiting, exit, or what a person can bear; it cannot infer from this which interests the person will necessarily pursue. How people order family, nation, work, faith, and private life must still be identified from their actual actions and statements, not prearranged by a positional model. Where a judgment of position involves a community, the positions of members must also be distinguished from the community as a whole. Members may bear different responsibilities and preserve different memories; they may also exit or dissent. A community's name cannot eliminate these differences. A differentiation position can explain only how concrete members are pulled by relations; it cannot generate a unified personality for a community.
IV. Dominant Pull: What Is Holding a Person in Place?
A differentiation position often has a dominant pull within it, but dominance does not mean exclusivity. A difference's current prominence usually relates to the intensity of consequences, deadlines, substitutability, the scope of connections, and the depth of write-back. Operative weight forms through specific participants' adoption of materials, setting of conditions, and handling within relations. It is not an attribute differences carry by nature, still less something concepts determine on their own. A child's school admission may become the dominant pull because registration has a deadline, materials may not be substitutable, and schools or relevant institutions may include continuity of social insurance and rental filings in their review. Debt may also become the dominant pull because repayment deadlines involve credit, relatives' evaluations, negotiations within the family, and later cooperation. These differences carry weight precisely because specific participants handle matters on the basis of materials, rules, and existing relations, bringing the differences into visible consequences.
Returning to the nonlocal worker's choice, low wages are an important problem, but not necessarily the only or strongest pull. When the child's school admission, continuity of social insurance, and rental filing all face deadlines, a new job with higher wages may bring greater risk if it interrupts social insurance. Multiple relations are jointly changing the operative weight of income; this does not mean income has lost its importance. Judging the dominant pull requires more than asking what matters most. We must also ask which conditions make it gain weight now, who adopts it, whether other arrangements can substitute for it, and which connections would loosen if its consequences changed. Such questions acknowledge the existence of other differences and the possibility of their gaining weight again, avoiding the error of making current dominance the whole explanation. Counterexamples return judgments of the dominant pull to the current relational field. If the previously most urgent condition is dealt with, or a previously unnoticed responsibility suddenly connects to consequences, the dominant relation may shift and previously downweighted relations may gain weight again. Operative weight indicates only what more directly changes consequences for action under present materials, deadlines, and conditions of handling. It is neither a ranking of how real responsibilities are nor a hierarchy of value. Conflating the two instead occludes how judgment forms and mistakes current dominance for the whole explanation.
V. Connection Chains: How One Pull Brings a Series of Consequences
The dominant pull does not exist in isolation. Once a nonlocal worker considers changing jobs, social-insurance contributions and personal entitlement records, some materials required for the child's school admission, whether the family stays in the city, rental choices, pressure from rent, debt repayment, and support from relatives may all be affected in turn. Which formal materials are affected still depends on local policy, timing, and the specific matter. These relations form connection chains, expanding an apparently single choice into a question of multiple consequences. But a chain does not propagate on its own. Whether a material is required, a record recognized, or an eligibility issue can be remedied depends on specific participants' adoption and handling. The chain may also break at one point. If the new job maintains social insurance, a risk may diminish. If relatives are willing to share care, time pressure may change. If materials are checked again, an existing judgment need not continue as usual.
The same holds for a debtor who has been ill. Bodily conditions may connect to medical expenses, medical expenses to borrowing from relatives, stopping work to interrupted income, interrupted income to debt deadlines, and then to negotiations within the family and judgments of credit. This is not inevitable causation along a single line, but a pathway along which relations may branch, reconnect, or be cut. A list of identities separates relations; connection chains require us to show how they connect. Merely describing the object as "worker, father, debtor" is still insufficient. We must identify which relation, through which materials and rules, brings another relation into consequences. Only then can the process through which a position forms be examined. Consequences that have already formed must be tracked separately from those that might merely occur. The fact that two relations can conceivably connect is insufficient to write them as necessarily connected. Materials, procedures, participants, and conditions of recognition still stand between them, and each condition may change whether the chain can form; each must be checked. Connection chains require us to see the links and acknowledge their limits. Missing materials, differing rules, participants' refusal, or delays may all prevent a relation from passing through a node, or cause it to branch, reconnect, or break along the way.
VI. Constraint Domain: How Differentiation Positions Limit People's Range of Action
A position explains not only how the object is designated but also what ranges of action are currently possible for that person. A nonlocal worker's change of job may alter social-insurance contributions or personal entitlement records, affecting the child's application where local admission rules require the relevant materials. A move may also change procedural conditions if it affects rental or residential materials. Leave, income, rent, and asserting one's rights belong to consequences involving work and markets; the local relations affected by absence from weddings and funerals belong to informal evaluation. The two cannot be combined into the same institutional rule. Different relations narrow these choices to different degrees; this is not abstract freedom or unfreedom. A constraint domain is not a closed container, much less an absolute prohibition. People may still change jobs, move home, take leave, assert their rights, or return to their hometowns. What differs is the waiting, refusal, costs, risks, and conditions for seeking help that each action entails. Describing constraints as leaving no room at all would erase people's actual efforts to find support, supplement materials, negotiate deadlines, or reorganize relations.
The question of returning home to care for one's father reveals this difference. Deductions from pay for taking leave affect rent and debt, while staying in the city may change relatives' judgments of responsibility. This cannot be reduced either to filial duty versus its neglect or to a choice about income. Different responsibilities, materials, and time conditions make simultaneous demands on action. Analysis should show how these demands constrain one another, without passing moral judgment on the person concerned. Constraints are never equal: someone may be able to bear a temporary loss of income but not a break in the continuity of materials. They may refuse a local demand yet face long-term responses within family relations. Differences in the feasibility of waiting, substitutability, and the allocation of responsibility make apparently similar choices difficult in different ways.
Beyond the feasibility of waiting, substitutability, and the allocation of responsibility, the availability of support is another dimension affecting difficulty. Differences in it give constraint domains different forms. Some people can obtain relatives' help, supplement materials, or negotiate deadlines; others lack these conditions. Similar designations therefore need not yield the same range of action. Even when support is obtained, it may change the difficulty of the action concerned if it carries new deadlines or demands for a response. The analysis of differentiation positions seeks precisely to identify the concrete relations from which these differences arise, rather than attribute them to personal qualities.
A differentiation position indicates how action space is constituted through concrete relations. It does not draw conclusions on people's behalf or decide in advance which choice should be accepted. When conditions loosen, support increases, or materials are corrected or supplemented, the constraint domain can widen. When deadlines approach, responsibilities increase, or access to channels is refused, it may narrow again. These differences of degree cannot be omitted.
VII. Conflict: How Pulls in Different Directions Tear at People
The pressure of a differentiation position often comes not only from one relation carrying too much weight, but from multiple high-weight relations making demands in different directions. Ill parents require care, while the workplace requires punctual attendance. After illness, rest is needed, while debt deadlines demand uninterrupted income. A better job is elsewhere, while a child's school admission requires continuity in materials. Conflict occurs between concrete responsibilities, materials, and time conditions, not only within a person's mind. The attendance and ceremonial cash gifts required for local weddings and funerals may also conflict with rent, debt, and spending on children in urban life. Local relations are not false, and urban pressures are not excuses. Once adopted by different participants, both may produce consequences for the person concerned. Arranging the conflict into a neat either-or choice instead occludes why it is difficult for someone to meet both sides' conditions at once.
Institutional materials and the facts of everyday life may also be inconsistent. Someone may have lived in a city for years, with their children, work, and neighborhood relations all local, yet a specific review may still fail to include all these lived relations if the relevant materials are incomplete. This does not mean life outside the materials does not exist. It means the two have not yet been adopted equally, and conflict thereby enters the position. Conflict analysis must preserve the inconsistency itself. The deadlines of different relations need not be synchronized, participants need not interpret the same material alike, and people able to provide support need not appear at the same moment. Only by refusing to flatten these differences can we avoid writing a differentiation position as a chart that automatically supplies answers. Sometimes conflict does not require an immediate, once-and-for-all choice. Instead, it forces the person concerned to delay, compromise, or reallocate responsibilities between different deadlines. These practices also carry consequences and may be evaluated by later participants as irresponsible, lacking stability, or disregarding personal ties and feelings. If later participants incorporate the person's way of handling matters, delays, compromises, or allocation of responsibility into subsequent evaluations, the results of this handling may become materials for the next round of positioning.
VIII. Occlusion: How High-Weight Designations Deprive Other Differences of a Voice
High-weight designations can make explanation more efficient, but may also deprive other differences of the opportunity to be examined independently. "Worker" can capture labor, wages, employment, domination, and risk. If someone treats this designation as the whole explanation, family responsibilities, local reputation, bodily illness and pain, debt structures, and children's school admission may be downweighted. Likewise, "unfilial," "untrustworthy," or "nonlocal" may rapidly organize judgment, but cannot exhaust the object's position. Designations and images neither occlude nor speak on their own, nor do occluded differences actively fall silent. Occlusion forms only when specific participants, institutions, or analysts adopt a designation, ignore some materials, or relegate some relations to a secondary place. The relevant differences consequently lose the opportunity to be raised separately, checked, and assigned weight. Only by stating this can responsibility be placed back with the people actually handling relations.
For example, quickly treating someone who has not repaid on time as "untrustworthy" may help handle credit risk. But if debt following illness, workplace injuries, unpaid wages, and gaps in protection are not examined, judgment may retain only part of the consequences. Calling someone who does not return home "unfilial" may also occlude labor discipline, debt deadlines, bodily conditions, and the pressures of city life. What a designation captures and what it downweights must both be questioned concretely. A designation can still offer partial identification; the point is that it must not overstep its authority. The analysis of differentiation positions does not require designations to be abolished. It does require that no designation end judgment or replace checking materials and relations before differences with substantial consequences have been examined. Once analysts raise downweighted materials and relations again, the understanding of the existing position may change. This is one condition for avoiding dangerous compression. Beyond everyday designations, analysis may also close off the examination of materials too quickly with an image. If analysts retain only the most conspicuous relation and stop asking about downweighted responsibilities, medical history, local exchanges, or institutional conditions, they may reproduce occlusion. Re-examination does not elevate all differences to equal weight. It refuses to let a designation serve as an exemption from the responsibility to compare.
IX. Lock-In: Why Some People Cannot Move
Differentiation positions form lock-in structures, but lock-in is not a natural fate. A nonlocal worker knows the job is poor yet finds it hard to leave. This may be because continuity of social insurance, a child's school admission, rent, debt, and family spending interlock. A debtor who has been ill needs rest but faces interrupted income, repayment deadlines, borrowing from relatives, medical bills, and job arrangements. A teacher in a county town who wants to leave may also be constrained by a post on the authorized staffing establishment, a mortgage, age, family expectations, and local respectability. Lock-in forms when multiple relations, materials, deadlines, responsibilities, and past records support one another during the same period. No single relation, viewed alone, need suffice to keep someone in place. When several relations demand handling simultaneously, the costs of change may rise and existing channels become harder to adjust. Explanations invoking weakness of character, insufficient will, or moral failure once again occlude the conditions through which the position forms.
Lock-in can loosen. New supportive relations, corrected or supplemented materials, adjusted deadlines, release from debt, changes in work arrangements, or renewed checks of past evaluations may release one of the interlocking connections. They may also open an entry point into handling that previously could not be adjusted. They do not guarantee immediate improvement, but show that lock-in should be understood as a relational structure, not a fixed attribute of the object. "Why some people cannot move" should begin as a question about consequences for action: which channels would action cost them, who must bear what costs, which materials will be adopted anew, which support has not yet appeared, and whether existing arrangements can be corrected or replaced. The lock-in structure can then be examined without erasing the conditions for change. Lock-in also varies in strength. Some relations merely tighten simultaneously for a time; others are harder to loosen because of past records, long-term deadlines, and responsibilities involving multiple parties. Calling all of them "unable to move" erases differences. More precisely, we should identify which connections interlock most tightly and where entry points for adjustment have already appeared.
The stability of differentiation positions also has levels. Some pulls operate only within a single procedure; others persist for years through family, work, and local relations; still others are preserved across generations as historical indices. A difference must not be written as an unchangeable underlying entity merely because it lasts longer. We must examine which carriers still preserve it, which people can still extract it, and whether new relations give it different operative weight.
X. Write-Back Sedimentation: How Past Positioning Becomes New Differentiating Units
A person is not read from scratch every time. Past determinations, records, evaluations, or exchanges may be preserved as materials for the next judgment. A court record classifying someone as untrustworthy may enter later judgments of credit, and a school's evaluation of a "problem student" may affect teachers' understanding of new behavior. Local reputation may be raised again in wedding and funeral exchanges, borrowing, and cooperation; a workplace's impression of "instability" may affect leave, promotion, and task assignments. Write-back sedimentation does not mean that records, files, reputations, or memories punish or decide on their own. Only when specific participants adopt a record anew, judge on its basis, and connect that judgment to consequences can past positioning exert force in the present. This distinction allows analysis to ask who retrieved what materials, whether the conditions under which they formed were checked, and whether supplementation, presenting a defense, or correction was permitted.
Past positioning becomes a differentiating unit for the next judgment, but should not be treated as forever correct. A leave request, an argument, an unpaid debt, or an absence from a wedding or funeral may all be reinterpreted when entering later judgment. Its background, deadlines, allocation of responsibility, and subsequent changes may all affect how it is adopted. Without renewed checking, sedimentation may prematurely fix an old judgment as a new position. Write-back sedimentation explains the temporal dimension of positions without making history continue automatically. Relations, materials, and participants still mediate between preservation and renewed adoption. These mediating steps may deepen an existing position or provide an entry point for correction. Analysis of differentiation positions must therefore track both how sedimentation forms and when it may be reevaluated. Examining write-back sedimentation also requires more than checking whether materials exist. We must examine how they are preserved, when they are retrieved, whether their original background is retained, and whether the person concerned can offer a different account. These conditions determine whether past positioning is mechanically repeated or checked anew and adopted differently.
XI. Positional Displacement: A Differentiation Position Is Not Fate
Differentiation positions have a sedimentary character, but are not fate. Writing position as fixed fate would nail people into an ontologized classification, repeating the very error this chapter seeks to avoid. Positional displacement does not occur because a name suddenly changes, nor does will bring it about from nothing. It occurs after changes in the relational conditions that originally produced consequences: the conditions of distinction extraction, weight structures, relational connections, and write-back mechanisms. Paying off debt may change credit relations. Once household-registration or residential materials are completed, the channels for a child's school admission may also change. Recognition of a workplace injury and the handling of compensation may change the allocation of responsibility. Sustained local exchanges may weaken old evaluations. Acceptance by a new community may also reduce some of the force of existing positioning. These are only possible paths; they do not promise that every change will bring improvement. Personal wishes can prompt action to seek materials, negotiate relations, or obtain support. Wishes themselves, however, cannot replace social-insurance conditions, debt handling, institutional recognition and adoption, divisions of work among relatives, or renewed checks of past records.
Positional displacement should not be written as an inspirational story, nor is it impossible. What must be established is which relations are loosening, which materials have been supplied, which responsibilities have been reallocated, which old evaluations have lost support, and which new relations are beginning to recognize the object. We must also identify whether these changes have actually connected to consequences. Changes need not be synchronized. A position may move only partially and slowly, bringing new risks. A change in one relation need not immediately release the remaining constraints. A new channel may also bring new responsibilities and reviews, causing previously unadopted materials to enter judgment anew. Completing materials may open only an entry point into a procedure; reduced debt may still leave pressures of care and housing; new recognition may not yet have formed in another relation. Nor do the original differences necessarily disappear after displacement. Reduced debt may leave credit records; changed divisions of work within a family may leave new care responsibilities; the reorganization of relations involving national communities or local society may also preserve old memories. Analysis of displacement therefore cannot exaggerate one change of conditions into a complete reversal at a stroke. It must record together the constraints that loosen, those that remain, and those newly generated. The possibility of positional displacement does not guarantee improvement. Its core requirement is that analysts not naturalize an existing position and keep checking whether the conditions that formed it have changed. Displacement must be understood within the reconfiguration of multiple weights; partial changes must not be used to conceal continuing constraints.
XII. From Differentiation Position to Latent Differentiation Space
Differentiation position concerns relations among differences that have already entered comparison, weight assignment, and positioning in the present. Yet a position may still carry differences that have not become apparent. Medical history, ancestral origin, accent, language, old debts, old evaluations, and past relations need not carry high weight in the current relational field, but may be extracted anew under conditions involving insurance, workplace injuries, courtship and marriage, progression to the next level of schooling, borrowing, partnerships, weddings and funerals, or migration. These differences not currently adopted should not be described as a mysterious essence, nor directly treated as known components of the current position. Whether they gain weight depends on whether paths of preservation exist, whether triggering conditions arise, who can present or adopt the relevant materials, and whether they can connect to new consequences. Analysis of differentiation positions must therefore acknowledge the boundaries of current positioning without cramming every possibility that has not yet appeared into present explanation.
This chapter thus preserves a necessary boundary: relations already compared and positioned within the current differentiation space differ from reserves of differences not yet extracted by the current relational field. The former explain how actual positions are formed; the latter indicate that conditions capable of altering a position may still lie beyond it. Neither can replace the other. This boundary also limits the explanatory scope of the chapter. Differences not yet adopted in current relations cannot be treated directly as causes of present consequences, nor can we conclude that they carry no weight simply because they have not become apparent. Differentiation position can explain how a current position forms. For differences not yet apparent, we can only retain the conditions under which they may be extracted anew.