The Year-End Meeting

The mill’s training program was in its third year when an argument broke out at the year-end review. A shop-floor supervisor said: “We trained twelve people and three of them left. They learned electrical work, then turned around and went to another mill. We’re training people for somebody else.” Another said: “The nine who stayed haven’t got much better either. A few came twice and never came back.” Someone from personnel said: “They didn’t come back because the classes are on the day shift. People on the three-shift rotation can’t make it at all.” Someone proposed that anyone signing up should first sign a pledge: “Make the mill your home, and resolve to be a papermaker for life.” Someone else proposed shutting the program down: the mill makes paper; it doesn’t run a school.

That last remark is the question. The mill makes paper. Does it owe anything to the people who work in it, when it comes to their own growth? If so, what, and how much? The three who learned and left: did the program succeed with them, or fail?

How Is Institution Possible leaves an empty place here: it carries maintenance only, not development, and sets no terminal station of “full development.” So this ought cannot be derived from it. The series sets it up itself, and says it is a stance. The third ought: an institution provides conditions for the cultivation of those inside it, by relational thickness; it is concerned with conditions, not with outcomes.

Conditions Only

“Conditions only” is the whole measure of this ought. What the mill can do is see that certain things are there and within reach: time, courses, tools, a path to another post, a margin in which a mistake does not cost a person his living. What it cannot do is make anyone grow into a particular shape. The first essay said as much: “get the workers cultivated” cannot be registered as anyone’s accountability, and no specified self-avowal can be made a result to be compelled; task output and operating skill are checked separately. The ought sits on conditions precisely because outcomes are not in the institution’s hands.

“By relational thickness” is about weight. The mill arranges the shifts of the people on its floor, their livelihoods, most of their waking hours; there, this ought weighs a great deal. It arranges nothing of the household downstream’s life; there, it weighs little — how little is still read off that relation, not handed down by the bare fact that they count as inside.

“Cultivation” here keeps the sense the first essay fixed: acts within the limit that actually lift a person up, carried over to institutional conditions together with three things — refusal and change of direction preserved; named by the elevation actually achieved; not vouched for by good intentions, design aims or labels.

Three Rulers

The voices at the meeting were using three different rulers. “Three of them left” measures whether people stayed. “Haven’t got much better” measures outcomes. “Can’t make it” measures conditions. Whether this ought has been met is read directly only off the last: were the conditions provided, and were they within reach? The first two hand down no verdict. They are not useless, though: people leaving, people not improving, can be a clue that sends you back to check whether the conditions were really reachable.

First, naming. Where there is no elevation, it is not called cultivation. Coming twice does not get someone recorded as cultivated; coming twice and stopping does not get him recorded as not: he may have grown nothing, or he may already have what he needed to change direction. Whether there was elevation is checked separately. Three years of running the program do not make it cultivation either.

Then the other way. No elevation is no ground for calling the program a failure, or the person. People grow nothing for many reasons; some are not the mill’s doing, and some are no fault of theirs. Whether the mill did its part in conditions is checked separately: which conditions it provided, whether they were within reach of those people, how wide a range it had undertaken. Classes on the day shift, for people working three shifts, are a condition that exists on paper and is out of reach in fact. The problem lies there, not in their “lack of drive.” And this judgment is of the mill’s side only; it avows no one’s own law for him.

One more ruler has to be set aside. Someone will say: after the training, the workers keep to the rules better, make fewer errors, file fewer complaints — that is cultivation. Power Theory says cultivation does no such thing: “The ontological action of cultivating power in the releasing orientation is level-raising plus the dissolution of a local grid, not a reduction or zeroing of the remainder.” What it dissolves is the particular grid a power-holder laid on a person in that relation; as for the share of a person that no set of rules, no box, can ever take in, “cultivation does not heal, fill, or erase it.” Cultivation is judged by whether a person was lifted, not by whether that share got smaller, and not by whether he fits the boxes better. Being worn down is something else entirely.

Papermaking Is Not Their Terminus

Why can this ought not come out of How Is Institution Possible? That paper’s second premise says the maintenance of subjectivity takes continuing structured effort, and writes plainly: “This premise carries only the ‘continuously maintained’ half; it does not carry ‘development.’” Treating the framework’s commitment, it guards again: “this commitment must not be read as the framework converging on some state of ‘full development’ — this paper sets no such terminal station.” To force the derivation would be to read maintenance as development.

So the series takes a stance, openly, as its own undertaking. A construct, since it ought to take those inside it as ends, cannot promote its own purpose of handling into the terminus of their development. The mill’s purpose is making paper; the development of the people who work in it does not end at “becoming better papermakers.” For the conditions it is able to provide and undertakes to provide, within this entanglement and this thickness, the construct must explain which actual conditions help them discover, develop, or change the direction of their own value. It answers for the provision and usability of those conditions. It does not guarantee anyone a direction, and does not require anyone to keep developing. A man who has stood at one post for twenty years and does not want to learn anything else is nothing this ought sets out to correct.

How much the construct “undertakes” is not settled by its own report. “We are only willing to undertake this much” does not shrink the ought; it is checked against the stance and against the facts of the relation. What the stance calls for, what has validly been registered as accountability, and what has actually been done are three things, read separately. And “able” here marks the bounds of what the construct acts on — it gives conditions, and cannot constitute anyone’s own law for him — not a requirement that it be able to do so today.

Why conditions only? How Is the Inter-Ontological Possible draws the edge of what the institutional layer can do: its autonomy support can manage not to colonize, but it cannot reach the pure kind of cultivation; that kind is possible only at the relational layer — intimate relationships, genuine mentorships. (Only this edge of capacity is taken; what that passage says about an institution’s floor of survival is not taken as a ground of legitimacy.) The edge gives the ought its shape. The institution gives conditions; the pure kind is left to people among themselves, which is the next ought’s business.

Thick and Thin

Relational thickness, as this series uses it, is how far a construct actually organizes the lives of those inside it in a given relation: how much of their time, attention, livelihood and paths of development it arranges. Three-shift rotation arranges time; wages are livelihood; a post decides where most of a person’s craft will grow over ten years. The mill’s relation to the people on its floor is thick. It arranges almost nothing for the household downstream; that relation is thin.

Thickness counts only what the construct organizes by its arrangements, and three points must be put exactly. It does not count harm: the discharge that ruined the household’s living downstream is their being affected, not their being arranged; that account belongs to the first ought, and cannot be used to read the relation thick and then win the authority to arrange their lives. It does not count conditions that carry no direction and cost nothing to refuse: a reading room anyone may use or not, with no consequence either way, is not the mill “taking up” more of anyone’s life — otherwise every condition given would add to the debt. And it is read off structure, not off the construct’s description of itself: “we only pay wages, we don’t run their lives” counts for nothing if the mill runs a three-shift rotation. Thickness is also not either of the two thicknesses in How Is Institution Possible — how many and how fine the provisions are, how heavy the load on a post — which that paper itself says are not the same quantity. It is a third thing.

Two things read together. For what the construct has already organized, taken up or restricted, it must explain correspondingly how it leaves and provides room: three shifts take time, so it must say what is still left in those people’s time. And How Is Institution Possible’s principle of minimality: a new rule “must state which problem it solves and at what cost.” Together: do not take what ought not to be taken; for what is taken, explain how room is left and provided. This is not a one-for-one trade; there is no common unit that puts “how much was taken” and “how much was given back” on one scale. Nor does it license “take more, so long as conditions are added.”

That paper counts more than open quarrels as “problems,” but its list of continuing tasks does not include conditions for cultivation. So the series’ own stance comes first, setting such conditions up as a task to be secured; the principle of minimality then checks, inside that task, whether a given arrangement is needed and whether its cost can be borne. “Minimal” cannot be used to cancel every positive condition; that rests on the stance, not on that paper. Nor does “positive” license unlimited expansion: every new arrangement of conditions must say what problem it handles, why it belongs to this entanglement, and where its cost falls.

How Is the Inter-Ontological Possible names the plainest condition of all: not handing all of a person’s time and attention to a single institutional goal. Three shifts plus compulsory overtime handed every waking hour to the paper machine; that condition was gone. The mill rearranged the roster so that everyone had two fixed rest days a week. Some went to night school. One did nothing of the kind; he stayed home and fixed a window. Both are inside that condition. A condition gives room; it does not say what the room is for.

Toward Withdrawing

“We trained twelve people and three of them left.” Hidden in the sentence is a ruler: only staying counts as success. The series’ answer: asymmetric help has a direction, and the direction is withdrawal. Three things withdraw.

Dominating dependence. When the training ends, the mill issues a certificate valid only at this mill, which other mills do not recognize. That alone is no tether: whether others recognize it is not up to the mill; the skill is in the person, who can sit an exam elsewhere. But the mill has one more rule. Outside qualifying exams require the employer to issue a training record; the mill will not, and the records sit in the personnel office. The skill is his; the road for proving it and taking it elsewhere is held by the mill. Rights Theory’s distinction — “the supplier’s withdrawal and the severing of the circuit are not one thing” — helps pick out active cutting or gating here, and cannot be stretched to brand every limited supply as such; the in-house certificate shows no sealing by itself, while holding back the record is a gate added on top. Cultivation, Power Theory says, dissolves the particular grid of options that the power-holder has laid on a person within that relation. The withheld record is that grid. To withdraw is to hand the record back to the man himself. That much the mill can do; whether other mills recognize its certificate is beyond it.

The occupation of another’s office of constitution. The three who left sat their license exams themselves and found their own roads. Meaning Theory, on support: “The other’s own constitutive results do not, by virtue of the relation of support, become the supporter’s possession.” The mill provided conditions, but that step was theirs. It is not entered under the mill’s name, and the mill’s having helped gives it no place from which to decide where they go.

Local restrictions that have lost their grounds. The mill had an old rule: no outside courses during the apprenticeship. When it was made, there was a real reason: apprentices held fixed shifts, outside courses all ran in the daytime, and there was nobody to cover a missing hand. Now the roster has room to rotate, and there are evening courses outside. The problem the rule was there to solve is gone; the rule is still here. A rule has to say what problem it solves; when the problem is gone, the rule should withdraw — the same reasoning as re-examining a temporary guarding structure when its conditions change, here applied to a restriction. Nor does origin vouch for it: if the rule was made only for fear of other mills poaching, it had to answer for that reason from the start, not only now.

Withdrawing has a look when it succeeds. Power Theory: when a cultivating relation succeeds, the gap of position dissolves and the relation dissolves with it — “the student no longer needs the teacher, the recovered no longer need the physician, the editor withdraws behind the finished work” — and “this dissolution is the mark of cultivation’s success, not its failure.” If the three who left went toward roads of their own, they do not belong in the “failure” column.

But this cannot be read too far. What withdraws is those three things, not all supply. Meaning Theory fences its own test: “the test is not that he must in fact leave me”; being able to do without me “is limited to constitutive independence, not to real-world self-sufficiency”; and it does not “require the supporter to provide unlimited resources, to maintain every cooperation.” If the nine who stayed stayed because they wanted to, their cultivation is not “unfinished.” One worker has a bad leg, and the mill rebuilt his workstation; it will stay rebuilt. Continuing supply is not failure to withdraw. Carrying Power Theory’s and Meaning Theory’s sentences over to a construct’s conditions, and drawing the direction of withdrawal from them, is this series’ own undertaking.

The Pledge

Back to the proposal: anyone signing up for the program first signs a pledge, “Make the mill your home, and resolve to be a papermaker for life.” That crosses the edge of “conditions only.” Once a condition carries the demand “accept this direction of development,” it becomes an outsider ghostwriting a person’s direction. The first of the three things carried over was precisely that refusal and change of direction are preserved. A man who wants to learn electrical work, and where he goes once he has, are his own affair; to write “a papermaker for life” into the entrance is to resolve for him by way of a condition.

How Is the Inter-Ontological Possible gave the form a name: “instrumental autonomy support carries an implicit output expectation,” and an institution’s autonomy support always carries an instrumental undertone. This series does not ask the mill to wash the undertone out: of course it hopes to have more good electricians, and that crosses nothing. It asks only that conditions carry no demand about direction. Power Theory puts the measure finely: “the most that is held toward the one being raised is hope for their development, not a will that they become some determinate thing.” To hope he becomes a good electrician is fine. To make him sign “a papermaker for life” as the price of the condition is to will that he become a determinate thing. (Carrying that sentence from the one who holds power over to a construct’s conditions is this series’ own step.)

Three things must be kept apart. Expecting an output is one. Requiring a specific action by agreement — say, serving two years at the mill after the training, or else repaying the fees — is another: a fixed-term action with a source, which touches the cost of exit and is checked against the threshold of the second essay; it is not compelled avowal merely because its content is definite. Compelling a person to avow a direction for his life is the third, and only the third is ruled out here.

The mill makes paper; it does not run a school. That is true. But it arranges most of the waking hours of the people who work in it, and for what it takes it owes an account of the room it leaves. As for the three who learned and left: if they went toward roads of their own, the program did not fail with them.