Accepting and Exercising a Power

Accepting a power. Power Theory had written down the cost of refusing: refusal “costs you the position of dignity promised by the narrative” — something the narrative takes back, which is consequence. For the cost of accepting, the book found no ready sentence, and writes one. A person lets a power take a place in the ordering of his own actions, and from then on some things in that place are arranged by it. If his law contains “these few things I arrange myself,” that line was not taken in. It is overlooked because it so often arrives with a benefit; it looks like a purchase. But On Accountability refuses the trade: “A recognition-based right is not got in exchange for recognizing a power.” The two accounts cannot be set off against each other.

Exercising a power. Power Theory calls the power that sets out to lock the other in chiseling power. A chiseling power-holder cannot press the other’s remainder to zero, and so “is compelled to supply force permanently to suppress it. This is the mechanical cost of the severing structure, not A’s calculation.” The cost has two layers: his own remainder bound into the work of maintenance, which cannot be pressed to zero; and his adjustable freedom taken up inch by inch, which can be used up. It is overlooked because it is slow, and because it does not necessarily land on the top: “the apex of a severing structure can end well while the structure’s account is never cleared.”

Not every exercise of power carries this cost: power that performs no locking, Power Theory says, generates no back-binding — and it adds that cultivation, too, has a cost, “low cost is not zero cost.” And one stake must be driven in: how high or low a cost runs has nothing to do with whether a false claim holds. Power Theory itself says the trigger lies in the object of maintenance, not in the size of its cost. Cheap oppression is still oppression.

Pursuing, Giving Up, Stopping

Pursuing a value is a cut: this stretch of time and strength goes to this row and not the others. Value Theory says taking up a value is no obligation — a bearer may decline a legitimate bridge “and stands no worse in value for that.” So the cost of pursuit falls not on standing but on the other rows not walked right now. It is overlooked because pursuit seems to bring only gains.

Giving up a value: walking back from a higher source is “without loss in value”; yielding an item does not change its standing. Only actively voiding a source when its conditions have arrived is “not a neutral walking-back,” and even that alters “the accessibility of that row, not the presence of that row.” The cost of giving up falls on reach, windows and action, not on standing. It is misstated from both ends: either it costs nothing, or it is losing oneself.

Stopping, and not stopping. The First Critique sent two items here. The price of the one who stops: he “no longer realizes its being-an-end through this operation — that is all.” And “whether one ought to advance”: “advanceability is a capacity, not a duty.” The second critique answers that advancing and not advancing both have costs, both are stated, and whether one ought to is settled in each person’s own law. The stretch the non-advancer does not walk goes on his books, as the roads the advancer did not take go on his. The cost of stopping is often overstated; the cost of not stopping is often talked away.

The Ladder, Read for Its Cost

Someone who means to manage others as things must keep a whole apparatus running: fences mended, passes checked, fugitive-slave laws enforced, neighbors who must all join in refusing shelter. The controlling is never done.

Does the apparatus share his burden? Power Theory says back-binding “does not move and does not spread thin,” and that “apparatus-mediated division of labor cannot dilute T6; it can only replicate T6” — T6 being its theorem of back-binding. So everyone who checks a pass with his own hands, or turns the man away with his own hands, performs a lock of his own, and it goes on his own books; the slaveholder’s share is not a fraction smaller. A bystander who merely received a demand is not booked for a full share; which nodes bear it is identified item by item.

The labor of maintenance can be exhausted — that is the layer Power Theory calls the construct. What lands on this chapter’s books is the share of his remainder that cannot be pressed to zero. This chapter only reads the price; the testimony is taken in the next (Essays 07–08).

What I Can Do with Another’s Cost

The book discusses no lateral ought. What, then, can I do with someone else’s cost? Three things. First, read: what can be read from outside is acts and channels — whether he has shut his own review, whether others’ paths to correct and to leave are open; what is read is the direction of these traces, not a verdict and not his level. Second, act by my own law: not cooperate, exit, oppose. Action Theory: “exit is no longer keeping in touch, not a judgment that the other is unworthy.” One’s Own Law: “Opposition is your own remainder unfolding, your own ‘cannot not,’ not legislation upon them.”

Third, when he says no to me, I add no consequence for it. Action Theory writes of a man who holds the power of evaluation: “if the new hire says no, he truly accepts the no, and does not give him any less afterward because of it.” What is kept is a refusal to turn the other’s no into a pretext for retaliation; exit, and stopping extra cooperation, are not forbidden by it.

And three things I cannot do. I cannot read constitution: no one sees from outside how a person’s law is made in him. I cannot read level: the book records operations by moment and domain, and sorts no one by 15DD. I cannot turn my reading into his cost: a community “may confer recognition and may withdraw it,” Value Theory says, but what it removes “is social position and support, not this bearer’s own value content.” What is withdrawn belongs in the consequence column; his cost stays on his own books, his to state.

An Address in Four Columns, and Five Constraints

From this, an act has its address, in four columns: whose law; which position; which matter, which moment; which branch. With the address written out, overstepping gets a practical definition too. The First Critique called overstepping “carrying a criterion out of its field and issuing verdicts as usual”; on the practical side, it is carrying a law out of its address and making demands as usual.

Five constraints, kept through the whole book. Cost is not punishment — back-binding “is a mechanical cost, not retribution,” and Moral Law places outside 15DD the act of “making the bad person pay.” Cost confers no entitlement — however much you pay, that does not make a content yours. Cost is not consequence. Cost is written up neither as a medal nor as degradation. Cost is not compared across persons — no ruler stands outside both laws at once.

The last constraint has its proper limit. Within one person’s own judgment, comparing risk, timing and feasibility is untouched by it: drawing a line, Action Theory says, “does not presuppose a common master scale across persons and across sources; this does not rule out comparing risk, timing and feasibility within one matter.” What is ruled out is weighing two people’s costs on one scale, not thinking carefully about one’s own.