Chapter 18. Class-Image Formation: How High-Weight Differentiating Units Are Brutally Projected into Class Images
I. Strictly Speaking, Class Does Not Exist at All
Once differences in life enter institutions, they are preserved as materials, segmented into formats, handed to people authorized to make determinations, and connected to consequences that can be put into effect. Household registration, social insurance, rental registration, labor contracts, medical records, wage transaction records, student files, and court enforcement records all preserve differences and make some of them regain weight later. If these preserved differences remain connected over time to labor, property, income, housing, education, debt, and relations of domination, they make certain circumstances bear heavy consequences over the long term.
Strictly speaking, class does not exist at all. Wages, property, employment relations, debt, housing, risk, and relations of domination all really exist, and they are often very weighty. How much a person earns, whether their work is stable, whether their labor relation is recognized, whether they own real property, whether they rent, when debts fall due, whether their child can enter school, whether their social insurance is continuous, whether they can recuperate after illness, who can arrange other people's time, and who can push risk onto others: these are all real and weighty differences. What does not exist is a “class” as what society fundamentally is.
Society is not laid out in advance by total images such as class. In a concrete event, what must actually be traced is which differences are preserved, extracted, assigned weight, connected, and brought into consequences. Differentiating units have a basis in reality, but they are not new underlying particles of society. Labor relations, sources of income, possession of property, housing conditions, debt deadlines, the bearing of risk, the capacity to wait, the width of available exits, concrete differences within relations of domination, institutional eligibility, family fallback support, household registration, accent, medical history, local relations, kinship responsibilities, national memory, and community recognition form traceable social consequences only when they are extracted, connected, and written back within concrete relational fields.
Class theory extracts a set of high-weight differentiating units from differences that have remained connected and gained weight together over time in reality. It casts them onto axes of economic relations, labor, property, and domination, compressing, projecting, and naming them to form a class image. The differences extracted and projected onto the same axis do not thereby lose their respective origins and consequences. The importance of labor, property, income, housing, education, debt, and relations of domination is beyond question.
The danger arises when class theory treats the result of projection as an entity and the compressed image as an underlying reality, causing the image to be mistaken for what society fundamentally is. In this reifying inversion, a person's complex position in the social differentiation network is rewritten as a single low-dimensional position. People are simultaneously situated within labor, family, household registration, locality, language, the body, debt, education, ethnicity, religion, institutional materials, and community memory. Yet class theory may cram all these differences onto axes of economic relations, labor, property, and domination, then say, “This is who you are.”
Rejecting class does not mean denying the wage, property, and housing differences and debt pressures people already bear, still less denying that employment, risk shifting, and relations of domination constrict their choices severely. What is rejected is the assumption of a pre-existing social entity behind these relations, as if people were born into a natural group and their subsequent wages, medical histories, household registration, and family responsibilities were merely its manifestations. The actual order is exactly the reverse: differences are first preserved, recognized, amplified, or downweighted within concrete relations; only then does class theory select a set of them and supply a unified image.
Differentiating units must not be mistaken for another kind of underlying atom either. A differentiating unit is not something with a fixed weight apart from its relational field. The same material, debt, or housing situation changes eligibility, risk, and available exits only when connected to concrete nodes and relational chains. Arranging differentiating units anew into an eternal foundational table would merely create another plane alongside the class plane.
II. What Is Brutal Projection?
Brutal projection is not ordinary compression. Social analysis certainly requires compression: without it, reality cannot be discussed, remembered, or compared. Every concept extracts some differences from countless details and places them within intelligible relations. Compression itself is not the problem. Yet after extracting a few axes, class theory elevates a low-dimensional image into society itself.
These operations are interconnected. Class theory first selects axes such as economic relations, labor, property, income, and domination, examining wages, employment, assets, housing, debt, and who dominates whom. These axes do carry considerable weight, but they are not everything. Meanwhile, household registration, locality, language, medical history, family responsibilities, national memory, religious relations, community recognition, institutional materials, and historical indices of kinship are pushed into the background. They have not disappeared; they have lost their own explanatory standing within the class image. Once a few axes have been selected, other differences find it harder to retain independent explanatory power.
Continuous differences are then cut into coarse categories by designations of different kinds. “Worker” and “boss” primarily point to employment, jobs, and relations of domination; “landlord” and “tenant” primarily point to property, leases, and control over residence; “debtor” primarily points to creditor–debtor relations, deadlines, credit, and responsibility; “the bottom stratum” and “the middle class” primarily belong to the naming of strata. These designations can serve limited analysis for particular purposes, but they are not the same kind of classification, nor do they automatically form groups, communities, or class entities of the same nature. Designations make identification faster while cutting differences into coarser categories. Once group labels are fixed, an individual's continuous differentiation position is more readily seen as an already constituted group position.
Class theory then inverts the order, treating the result of projection as an entity, as if classes existed first and people subsequently entered them, or an underlying group entity came first and concrete differences afterward. Reifying inversion makes this way of dividing things seem self-evident. The truly dangerous change follows: household registration, gender, national memory, and local relations are permitted to appear only as subordinate explanations within the total class image. Class theory thus makes other real differences conform to this total image's mode of display. Only when class theory requires other differences to submit to the total image does the center of explanation truly shift from relations to the image.
Ordinary compression leaves a path back to verification: people can still ask which differences were not extracted, which relations gave them weight, and when the original explanation needs adjustment. Brutal projection closes that path. It does not treat downweighted household registration, medical history, family responsibilities, or local relations as realities that might correct the image; it requires them only to confirm the existing image. Differences that could have supplied counterexamples thus become footnotes beneath the total image.
III. The Appeal of the Class Image and the Cost of Compressing Multiple Chains
The class image appears to be something real because the set of differences behind it often gains weight together, is repeatedly connected, and becomes linked to heavy consequences, not because a real class underlying society is at work. Class theory does extract labor relations, sources of income, possession of property, housing stability, debt pressure, educational opportunities, buffers against risk, the ability to exit, and relations of domination, and projects them onto a single plane.
If these differences go unseen, many heavy pressures are rewritten as personal failures. Low wages are attributed to inadequate ability, and being unable to find suitable work after unemployment to a lack of effort; debt after illness is attributed to a failure to plan, and incomplete school-enrollment materials to parents not caring enough; failure to assert one's rights after a work injury is attributed to not knowing how to fight for them, and an inability to pay rent to careless spending. These explanations sometimes grasp a little of the truth, yet can all too easily bypass harder relations. Through the aspects of people’s circumstances presented by the class image, people recognize much suffering as the result of differences connected over time, rather than isolated events. But the grounds of explanation lie in real differentiating units and their processing; explanatory power does not belong to the image.
A person cannot wait because rent is due next week, wages have not yet been paid, their child must submit materials, demands for debt repayment have already arrived, and their parents are still waiting for money for medicine. Someone with savings can take time to find work after losing a job; someone without savings quickly enters a countdown.
A person does not dare to resign because, in circumstances where social-insurance materials are required locally for the relevant admission year and category, work supplies not only wages but also a connection to social insurance. Social insurance connects to the child's enrollment materials, and enrollment connects to whether the family can remain in the city. Resigning is more than changing jobs: it loosens a whole series of connected materials and eligibility conditions at once. People who own housing, have support from relatives, and hold stable eligibility can bear uncertainty; for people who rent, owe debts, and cannot let their social insurance lapse, a single change may bring cascading consequences.
In concrete arrangements connecting sick leave, attendance, performance, income, and living expenses, people return to work before they have recovered because sick leave affects attendance, attendance affects performance, performance affects income, and income affects debt and rent. The body needs rest, but debt and household expenditure require them to recover their capacity to work immediately. Some people can start again after a failure; others fall into debt, come to be regarded as untrustworthy, become caught in family quarrels, and face relatives’ evaluations after failing once. These circumstances cannot be explained by character alone.
The capacity to wait may come from savings, stable housing, relatives who can provide temporary help, social insurance that can remain uninterrupted, or a work relation still recognized by institutions. It is not an abstract psychological quality. Nor can the width of available exits be summed up by saying that someone has “better conditions.” Some people can change jobs, wait to recover from illness, or supplement materials; for others, an interruption in wages brings rent, debt, and care responsibilities pressing in at once. The capacity for trial and error is likewise provided or taken away by these relations.
These differences often occur together. Extraction, weight assignment, connection, and compression of real differentiating units form partial explanatory power. As a low-dimensional output, the class image can present the weighty relations extracted; this constitutes its explanatory appeal. Yet this partial explanatory power comes from real differences and their processing. It cannot prove the existence of a class entity, nor does it mean that a class underlying society is arranging them. From the outset, class theory's basic structure belongs to Model C: total-image subsumption. Treating it as an ordinary limited model on this account would overlook the problem that it elevates a partial selection into the whole of society and requires other relations to retreat into subordinate positions.
The problem with class theory is not that it extracts labor, income, property, housing, debt, and relations of domination. These differences must be seen. The danger is that, after projecting them into a low-dimensional image, class theory uses that image to explain all of society. People with similarly low incomes are not necessarily in the same circumstances. Someone with local household registration, a kinship network, and stable rental relations does not occupy the same position as a tenant from elsewhere who has no support from relatives and whose child's enrollment materials remain incomplete. Their incomes and labor positions may be similar, but household registration, urban eligibility, kinship networks, rental registration, school materials, and local recognition place them in different differentiation positions.
Similar incomes indicate proximity along one axis only. They do not guarantee the same capacity to wait, institutional eligibility, or family buffers. The same wage may connect to entirely different consequences for a person with local household registration, stable rental arrangements, and kinship support than for someone with incomplete materials, an uncooperative landlord, and heavy care responsibilities. Naming both together certainly makes identification easier, but it conceals the nodes that separate their circumstances.
Being workers likewise does not mean being in the same circumstances. Statistical classifications can exist, as can similar economic pressures. But classifications and similar positions do not automatically generate a natural community, unified interests, unified consciousness, unified responsibility, a unified capacity for action, or a historical mission.
The class image appears weighty because real, weighty differences repeatedly gain weight together in concrete relational fields, after which class theory projects them onto a plane of economic relations, labor, property, and domination. But these differences do not always connect in the same way. The factory, school enrollment, courtship and marriage, and debt after illness are not four interchangeable backgrounds. Each extracts different materials, qualifications, and relations. In the factory, labor discipline, wages, jobs, and attendance may carry great weight; in enrollment, household registration, social insurance, rental registration, and student-registration materials may carry great weight; in courtship and marriage, real property, debt, family responsibilities, local reputation, and bodily condition may carry great weight; in debt after illness, savings, medical insurance, loans from relatives, lost work time, labor contracts, and bodily recovery gain weight together.
Class theory compresses differences that originally passed through different nodes and relational chains into the same plane, making them look like a single kind of position. These differences then lose independent explanatory standing. If every circumstance is called class, pressures of labor and resources are seen, but household registration, locality, ethnicity, gender, medical history, kinship responsibilities, community memory, and institutional materials can readily lose their explanatory standing. Class is not an entity, and the low-dimensional position marked by a class image is not the entirety of a person's differentiation position.
IV. How Labor Relations Affect Chains of Everyday Life
A nonlocal worker's circumstances cannot be explained by the level of wages alone. What work they do at the workplace, whether their contract continues, whether social-insurance contributions are paid, whether they can take leave, and when they receive their wages all connect with housing, children, parents, and bodily condition. Labor relations are not the sole source of other relations, but may connect previously separate pressures to one person's everyday arrangements.
How work affects chains of everyday life depends on how these institutional relations intersect in concrete circumstances. If local admission rules list social insurance among enrollment materials, an interruption in social insurance may cause problems with a child's enrollment materials. Residence requires verification and registration, and whether the landlord cooperates in providing the relevant materials also affects residential eligibility. Once these chains have actually connected, instability in work makes several procedures that could previously be maintained become vulnerable together. Beyond labor income, whether institutional materials remain continuous and whether other people cooperate likewise determine whether a family can remain in the city.
Moving changes the area one lives in, the commute, and arrangements for taking children to and from school. When the new home is farther away, parents cannot arrive by the end of the school day, while higher commuting costs squeeze the part of wages available for living expenses. If they postpone moving for the sake of school, rent and housing conditions may become new burdens. These consequences arise from the interconnection of working hours, address, and care arrangements. They cannot be deduced directly from a labor position.
Debt deadlines, money borrowed for a father's hospitalization, and old bodily injuries also constrain resignation, recuperation, and the assertion of rights. Repayment dates do not wait for bodily recovery, and taking leave may make wages and jobs more insecure. Some people need to protect their immediate income first; others can no longer bear their former workload because of an old injury. These constraints intersect through family, medical care, wages, and work arrangements. They cannot be reduced to a single economic factor.
The designation “worker” can roughly identify relations of employment, wages, and being dominated. It cannot replace, in advance, actual tracing of contracts, social insurance, addresses, care, debt, health, and available exits. People who share the designation “worker” do not necessarily have the same capacity to wait or the same ways of bearing consequences. A designation is not proof of a natural community.
It is the points at which contracts, working hours, income, materials, and addresses connect or break off that change a person's room to leave a job, find another, or recuperate briefly. The effects of labor relations therefore cannot be summed up by a wage figure. Whether a contract is renewed, whether social insurance remains continuous, and whether leave is permitted will each change the conditions of materials, income, and bodily recuperation. Only when these connect with relations involving landlords, schools, and families do they form the paths a person can actually take. An interruption in social insurance need not mean only the loss of one protection: it may also break the previous continuity of enrollment materials, residential registration, and work choices. Once working hours are fully scheduled, moving, school pickup and drop-off, care, and treatment also become difficult to arrange otherwise.
V. How Property and Housing Become Education and Opportunity
Housing first enters education and institutional eligibility. The difference between owning and renting concerns not only the extent of one’s assets but also whether an address can remain stable, materials can be maintained, and a child can stay on the same educational path. When housing conditions change, educational opportunities may change with them. Housing is therefore more than a property situation.
Rental registration, landlord cooperation, address, and school materials connect within the same relation. A tenant living there may not be enough. Much also depends on whether the landlord is willing to supply materials, whether registration can be completed, and whether the address is recognized. These procedures turn the fact of residence into institutional eligibility, while also making it possible for people who all rent to obtain different results. Whether a lease is stable and an address can continue affects whether a family can make longer-term educational, work, and living arrangements. But a stable address does not necessarily guarantee smooth schooling; these conditions do not lead to one single outcome.
Relocation changes commuting time and time spent together. Living farther away requires parents to keep adjusting between work and taking children to and from school. A longer journey consumes not only money but also time for companionship, supplementary lessons, and school matters. A change of address increases transport expenses and constricts a family's room to arrange its time and income. Housing thus preserves an address, a commuting radius, and family arrangements together. Even if the landlord supplies materials, the pressures of commuting and care are not necessarily relieved.
Housing also enters courtship and marriage and evaluations of the future. Whether someone has a stable home, can afford rent, and can maintain an address is treated by relatives, relations of courtship and marriage, and local evaluations as evidence of whether they can arrange their life. These evaluations are not produced by housing alone. They form through connections between housing, family responsibilities, job stability, and expectations of the future.
Housing is a node where relational chains intersect, not merely an asset that can be calculated. It connects to addresses, materials, schools, commuting, family arrangements, and external evaluations. Precisely for this reason, differences in housing cannot all be compressed into differences between rich and poor, still less can “housing” as a whole be treated as a single differentiating unit. Whether each node can sustain the connection changes how much time and choice a family retains. When someone is forced to change homes, educational materials, time for school pickup and drop-off, and evaluations in courtship and marriage may not change simultaneously, yet they constrain a person's room to arrange the future at different nodes.
VI. How Debt Produces Lock-In
Borrowing after illness makes time harder. The body needs recuperation, treatment takes time, and income may stop, yet repayment dates arrive on schedule. When a sum falls due, the room to stop work, find a new job, or wait for treatment or appraisal is constricted. Debt's weight lies not only in its amount but in how it pulls bodily recovery, work arrangements, and repayment deadlines into the same span of time. This also changes the room to resign, recuperate, wait, and assert rights. Someone who must repay immediately can hardly bear an interruption in income; an injured person may also postpone handling matters because of the conflict between treatment and wages. Lock-in is not caused by the name “debt.” It results from the interconnection of deadlines, income, the body, and others' demands.
Borrowing can connect to different relations: a bank's deadlines and credit, a platform's collection demands and fees, personal regard and responsibilities among relatives, or dependence on work tied to an advance from a boss. These four paths do not bring the same pressure. Each places a person within different relations of recognition, urging, compensation, and return, and draws different boundaries around seeking help and exiting. The same sum of money thereby has different consequences for different people.
Debt deadlines, repayment pressure, credit, debt collection, and kinship responsibilities constitute a set of differences that can be traced separately; they cannot be merged into a single differentiating unit. Class theory can extract some of these weighty differences and project them as a rough position. The class image is the result: it cannot actively incorporate or compress differences in debt. Analysis must still ask when the deadlines fall, who is pressing for payment, and which work and family arrangements therefore cannot be interrupted.
Lock-in within debt relations is not forever immovable either. A loan repaid, a course of treatment supported, or a job becoming stable again may each loosen one pressure slightly. But other deadlines, credit, and responsibilities may remain. A partial loosening cannot be taken to mean that all consequences have disappeared.
VII. How Risk Is Distributed and Shifted onto Others
Illness does not reveal the same vulnerability in everyone. It brings savings, medical insurance, care, and leave conditions into view together, and these different conditions determine whether someone can wait and recover after bodily harm. Some have savings and can obtain treatment first; others must first think about the cost of medicine. Some can take leave and receive care from relatives; others lose their income as soon as they stop work.
Unemployment reveals time to wait and family fallback support. Some people can rely on their families to cover rent and daily expenses temporarily while waiting for another job. Others lack this buffer: as soon as income stops, they must repay debts, move, or accept worse work. The consequences of unemployment depend on whether the family can provide support and whether time can be extended, not merely on whether a job is lost.
Work-related injuries, in turn, must pass through contracts, surveillance footage, testimony, acknowledgment by the workplace, and appraisal. An injury does not automatically become compensation. Whether a contract exists, whether a record of the scene can be preserved, whether coworkers are willing to testify, whether acknowledgment is given by the workplace, and whether appraisal can be completed all determine who bears the bodily harm. A work injury reveals how responsibility is acknowledged or pushed away at concrete nodes.
A small-business owner may bear rent, loans, operating pressures, and market uncertainty. A landlord, in turn, may shift housing instability onto tenants by raising rent, withholding a deposit, refusing rental registration, or demanding a move at short notice. We must neither deny the risks small-business owners themselves bear nor use those risks to play down risk shifting.
The distribution of risk is a process within real relations, not class-image formation itself. Illness brings treatment and care to the fore; unemployment, time and family fallback support; work injuries, the determination of responsibility and compensation. Their relational chains differ. Class theory extracts a set of differences in risk, income, property, and domination, making the image appear stable. This is only a descriptive judgment about the differences extracted. The class image must not be written as a subject distributing the consequences of illness, unemployment, or work injuries. Risk is taken on or shifted onto others within different relations, so similar accidents have different consequences for different people. A group designation cannot predetermine these consequences either.
These differences must still be identified within the relations of concrete relational fields. Savings, care, contracts, materials, and recognition must each be traced to establish how they change the possibilities of waiting, compensation, and exit before and after an accident. Some people can obtain treatment but have no long-term income; some have work skills but no time to wait; some preserve materials yet still receive no recognition. We must distinguish which relations take on risk and which shift costs onto others.
VIII. Capacity for Domination: Who Can Arrange Other People's Time and Consequences?
Beyond resource differences, concrete differences within relations of domination must also be traced. Authority to schedule shifts, authority to deduct wages, demands for proof, control over leases, cooperation with rental registration, and job assignments gain weight together in concrete relational fields. They constitute different forms of authority that can alter a person's time, eligibility, income, and available exits, and cannot all be subsumed under the abstract phrase “capacity for domination.” Who can set shifts, demand materials, or decide whether eligibility can continue often comes closer to everyday consequences than a sweeping designation of strength or weakness.
A server cannot pick up their child: a supervisor's scheduling of late shifts and deductions for leave push working time into family care. After a worker is injured, workplace demands for proof, attendance records, and wage deductions turn bodily recovery into a problem within the organization of labor. For a tenant arranging enrollment materials for a child, the question of whether the landlord cooperates with rental registration again connects the fact of residence to institutional eligibility. The three scenes differ, but in each, domination enters into consequences through time arrangements, demands for proof, or cooperation with registration.
Domination is most direct where someone can turn their own arrangements into another person's timetable. The party requiring others to wait, supply further proof, change shifts, or endure a move does not necessarily bear the costs of waiting, obtaining evidence, care, and interrupted materials; the other party's action space nevertheless contracts. The gap between who makes decisions and who bears consequences is precisely the weight of relations of domination in everyday life. It often appears first in who can delay and who must respond immediately.
These real consequences are transmitted along relational chains through specific forms of authority. We must still distinguish which authority is involved, who exercises it, and where it alters another person's choices. Domination must also be examined through whether those whose lives are arranged retain room to wait, refuse, recuperate, or obtain missing materials. Only when this room narrows does a specific authority reveal its consequences in life. Some pressures come from scheduling, others from proof or registration. Each must be traced to the subject exercising authority and the people bearing consequences, rather than attributing all consequences to an abstract position.
Class theory extracts a set of differences in domination from this and projects them as positions of strength or weakness. But the class image is only the result of this explanatory operation. It must not be written as an acting subject that arranges time, transfers costs, or produces domination.
IX. How Families Take On Pressures of Labor, Debt, Risk, and Care
Once wages enter a family, they become rent, food, children's expenses, and parents' medicine costs. Unemployment enters relations between spouses, relatives' evaluations, and future arrangements. Borrowing after illness affects who provides care, who borrows money, and who does the housework. Labor income, bodily harm, and repayment pressures that originally fell on one person are redistributed within the family. These expenses and burdens often demand answers together in the same month: who pays, who takes leave, who provides care, and who explains matters to relatives.
Families can buffer some of this pressure. This is not abstract warmth: someone actually takes on the time, costs, and responsibilities. Parents looking after children prevent working hours from immediately overwhelming care. Relatives lending money and siblings sharing medicine costs can leave a family some time to wait and seek treatment. Spouses bearing unemployment together, and older people offering explanations for younger people in local society, may also temporarily prevent reputation and recognition from breaking down.
Families may also amplify pressure. When a lack of savings, ill parents, children at school, strained kinship relations, and debt incurred to maintain respectability coincide, a single change in income meets multiple responsibilities. It is no longer merely a lost wage payment: it becomes a problem of care arrangements, borrowing pressure, relatives' evaluations, and family shame. How much relatives can lend, whether parents still have the physical strength, and whether spouses can share care all change where the pressure ultimately falls and how long it lasts.
Housing, education, debt, care responsibilities, local evaluations, and evaluations in courtship and marriage may also enter the next generation's circumstances. What children take on is not limited to property: it may also include educational paths, household-registration materials, family debt, and care responsibilities. The family is a real relational node. It cannot be compressed into an appendage of the class image or a shell for class reproduction; it changes where pressure falls and how long it lasts.
Family buffering, amplification, and transmission are not steps in a fixed sequence. The same debt after illness may first be temporarily covered by borrowing from relatives, then increase family pressure through care and repayment. The key remains how concrete responsibilities are taken on or passed along. Whether a family can buffer pressure also depends on whether care, borrowing, and explanation can continue. Once these relations break off, income and bodily pressures that were temporarily buffered may concentrate again.
X. How Class Designations Disguise Projection as Underlying Reality
Designations such as worker, landlord, debtor, and middle class do not arise from nothing. “Worker” identifies relations of employment, wages, jobs, attendance, and being dominated; “landlord” identifies real property, leases, deposits, control over residence, and cooperation with rental registration; “debtor” identifies deadlines, credit, repayment, and responsibility; “middle class” identifies stable income, housing, educational arrangements, and buffers against risk. These designations of different kinds can rapidly identify some relations for particular purposes, but they cannot replace one another.
Rapid identification also cuts continuous, intersecting differentiation positions into coarser group boundaries. Once a designation is fixed, people readily leave aside different household registrations, medical histories, family responsibilities, local recognition, and widths of available exits. What remains is a position that appears already complete. Once a designation covers over materials, responsibilities, and recognition that originally required separate inquiry, group boundaries appear tidier than the actual relations.
Labels in particular cannot prove the existence of a natural group or a real community. A boss may face pressure from upstream actors to lower prices, debt, and local dependencies, and may also go on shifting risk onto employees. People who share the designation “worker” may differ greatly in household registration, medical history, care, and available exits. The same designation does not automatically generate shared memory, shared responsibility, or shared consequences. Nor does it guarantee that people have the same paths for bearing consequences when they suffer harm, wait, or need to exit. Income, occupation, or other limited classifications therefore cannot directly establish the class entity this book rejects.
Reopening a designation does not mean making it disappear or denying the pressures it captures. It means refusing to let the designation reach conclusions about reality in advance. Designations cannot replace judgment about concrete relations, nodes, and consequences. Once a designation is fixed, differences that could have corrected judgment are also readily pushed into the background. Reopening the designation means asking what class theory has extracted, amplified, downweighted, and excluded, and asking in which relational fields these differences cross boundaries and when they can no longer be explained by the same group position. Materials, relations, and consequences can thereby regain their respective explanatory standing.
XI. Lock-In, Room for Adjustment, and Positional Displacement within Relational Chains
In circumstances where the conditions above connect, lock-in comes from multiple relations acting together. Debt shortens waiting time; interrupted social insurance makes enrollment materials precarious; failure to recognize a work injury leaves bodily harm borne by the individual; missing rental registration makes urban eligibility unstable. With education and other institutional eligibility connected to these, change is no longer merely a personal choice. When these relations connect, people may still make choices, yet can hardly bear the consequences of each change.
Within these circumstances, some chains can loosen in part. Release from debt changes time pressure; making up gaps in social insurance may reopen the enrollment chain; recognition of a work injury changes responsibility and compensation; completed registration can make residential eligibility more stable; and changes in educational paths may affect the next generation's opportunities. These changes are not the same thing. Each loosens a different link, and no single change can be mistaken for a transformation of the entire situation.
Positional displacement remains constrained. Whether new nodes recognize someone, whether old reputations can be downweighted, and whether a new community accepts them all determine whether a partial loosening can continue. Different chains do not loosen simultaneously. One relation may ease while another still holds the person in place. Making up gaps in social insurance does not necessarily eliminate debt immediately; recognition of a work injury does not necessarily change family care at once; and completed registration may still encounter restrictions from a lease or reputation.
When relational chains change, people's positions change with them. The image formed by class theory may change accordingly, but the image is not the cause of lock-in, room for adjustment, or positional displacement. Displacement is not an inspirational story or an escape from some class fate. It depends on whether relations have actually changed consequences. If these conditions have not connected, a change in how the image is described does not widen a person's actual available exits. Nor can displacement be judged from the result alone. Seeing someone change jobs, supply materials, or temporarily pay off debt still requires us to ask which relations have not loosened and whether certain materials, qualifications, responsibilities, and support relations have actually changed the way they connect. Otherwise, a partial change can readily be mistaken for room for adjustment across the whole situation. Changing a designation cannot constitute genuine room for adjustment.
XII. Unpacking the Class Image Back into a Network of Differentiating Units
Strictly speaking, class does not exist at all. What does not exist is class as what society fundamentally is and as its original material. Concrete differences and their repeated connections within real relations are what really exist. Class theory extracts a set of high-weight differentiating units from them, compresses and projects them onto axes of economic relations, labor, property, and domination, and names them, thereby forming a class image. This process of formation cannot be understood in reverse, as if a class entity existed first and reality then supplied its content.
The image's explanatory appeal comes from real, weighty differences; it cannot prove that class exists as an underlying reality. The task is not to assign the class image a smaller place, but to remove its central place as what society fundamentally is. Otherwise, the result of projection will still pass itself off as society itself, and other differences will still be compressed into subordinate explanations. Acknowledging that the concrete differentiating units extracted and their processing can reveal these pressures establishes only that the relevant differences carry great weight. This appeal cannot be made into a reason for retaining class as an underlying reality.
Unpacking must return to concrete differentiating units, nodes, relational chains, weights, and consequences. Analysis must trace who recognizes differences, which subjects extract them and assign weight, which nodes preserve and pass them on, how differences travel along relational chains to change eligibility, risk, evaluation, and action, and where the consequences then reach. This requires preserving the course of when differences are extracted, when they are downweighted, and how they enter into consequences. Explanation must be placed back within concrete processes, rather than allowing a group designation to predetermine how someone ought to be understood.
Differentiating units are not new underlying particles. They acquire traceable weight only within concrete relations. Unpacking the image back into a network therefore does not mean listing labor, housing, debt, and so forth once again, still less replacing it with a longer list of nouns. Merely making the list of nouns longer may still freeze relations back into a plane.
The same wage, lease, or loss of a job does not automatically form the same circumstances. The same difference has different weights in different relational fields. Whether relatives can provide support, whether debt collection is approaching, whether the landlord cooperates with registration, and whether someone can wait for appraisal all make the consequences diverge. Similar economic pressures can coexist, but cannot cancel the roles of landlords, relatives, debt collectors, workplaces, and institutional materials at different nodes. Class theory's low-dimensional image therefore cannot replace differentiation positions within concrete relations.
Only when institutions, organizations, or actors classify, judge, and make arrangements according to a class image can that image enter write-back through concrete subjects and institutional nodes. Write-back requires materials, institutional nodes, and action. The image cannot create labor, debt, housing, or relations of domination on its own.
Removing the image's central place as an underlying reality does not mean playing down real pressures, nor does it require abandoning judgments about labor, property, housing, debt, and relations of domination. They gain weight together within concrete relational fields, but gaining weight together does not mean merging into a single underlying entity, nor can it cancel other differences' explanatory standing. Unpacking the image requires every judgment to be traceable to concrete relations, nodes, and consequences. Only then will the pressures captured by the image not become a reason to occlude other differences.