Asymmetries of capacity arise continually in social life, and most of them dissolve. A few do not. Accounts that measure power by the resources an actor commands cannot say which will do which, and are embarrassed by the cases in which a thin administration outlasts an overwhelming military advantage, or a body with no coercive capacity outlives every regime that tolerates it. This paper locates the difference in what the exercise of an asymmetry does to the conditions of its own exercise: some acts consume the preconditions that made them possible, and others manufacture them. Power, on the account offered here, is the asymmetry that survives both its own exercise and the continual production of difference against which it must hold. The paper first surveys the formal languages available for describing social dynamics and finds that each locates variability at one level while fixing the level above it, so that none makes the grammar of a system into a moving object; operator algebra, which comes nearest to the requirement, is assessed and set aside for reasons given in detail. A structure of typed operational repertoires is then constructed, carrying both the transitions an asymmetry induces through its own exercise and those the field supplies independently of it, and the mechanism is restated within it as two conditions: closure under self-induced transition, and maintenance under what the field does meanwhile. Two consequences follow. The Nietzschean thesis that power consists in its own maintenance is reconstructed without the will that carried it: self-maintenance is treated as constitutive of the relation rather than as something any arrangement pursues, and the rarity of maintenance, which Nietzsche read as weakness, is explained instead by the continual production of the difference against which any arrangement must hold. And generativity is shown not to reduce to the number of possibilities a configuration admits: constitutional prohibition contracts the field of available action and remains generative, while the collapse of norms expands it and does not. What distinguishes the two is whose possibilities are enlarged, and whether what is generated returns to the relation that generated it. The argument for this is given by counterexample rather than by a general impossibility result, and the paper is explicit about which of its claims are established and which are proposed.
Wanhong HUANG (Mon,) studied this question.