It’s been, what, a month now that I’ve been stuck on defining Repair?

It seemed like such a broad topic that I wasn’t sure how to consider it. An acknowledgement is repair, increasing material safety can enable repair, but the institution of Jineology is also repair — and those things are not particularly similar in nature. So how could I collapse them all into one variable?

I’m still struggling to define all that encompasses Repair, but since my last log I’ve split Agency (A) and Subjectivity (U) apart.

At the moment, treating subjectivity repair (reversal of objectification) and agency repair (restoration of capability and viable options) as separate processes feels like the correct direction.

Once subjectivity is treated as a variable, coercion has to be one as well because domination doesn’t merely restrict options, it produces objecthood. The experience of being acted upon, rather than acting, is not incidental damage; it is the mechanism.

So Repair can no longer be treated as a single action or outcome. In practice, systems often over-invest in one repair axis while neglecting others, producing stabilization without restoration. It appears to be a vector: different interventions act on different dimensions of harm, and repairing one dimension does not guarantee repair in the others.


To re-cap, we now have:

States

• A — agency
  
• U — subjectivity
  
• S — safety
  
• M — material safety
  
• V — vigilance (threat as expectation)
  
• G — gain
  
• P — perceived option-space, p_self (internal) and p_social (external)
  
• τ — lock-in / hysteresis, structural persistence of constraint that remains even if harm stops
  
• H — constraint / harm load, accumulated, internalized over time
  

Pressures

• D — domination pressure, active
  
• T — threat events
  

Flows / supports

• Rₛ, Rᵤ, Rₐ, Rₘ — repair (of safety, subjectivity, agency, material safety).
  unsuccessful repair is also possible.
  
• CRₛₜ, CRₗₜ — co-regulation (short term buffering and long term relearning)

Case A (A↑, U↓): “Liberalism’s Formal Choice but Objecthood”

A is high-ish, U is low.
The old model would say “agency exists so why broken?”
New model: U was attacked; you need Rᵤ (not just more options).

Case B (D>0, A> D): “Being The Chosen Sacrifice of Leftists”

Situation:

• Someone applies domination pressure D>0.
  
• I could say “fuck you!” and leave the group (A is sufficient).
  
• I choose not to, temporarily.
  
• I remain aware of authorship and revisability.
  

State values:

• D>0 (domination attempt exists)
  
• A high enough to exit
  
• U high (subjectivity intact)
  
• S may be medium (situation still risky)
  
• V impacted by domination attempt
  

Key point:

Domination exists, but it does not convert into objectification because agency exceeds domination pressure (as forecasted, since the dependency relationship is weak.)

So the model here represents failed domination, not “no domination.”

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I’m pleased that I’m beginning to see how these variables operate in real-life situations, since they felt much blurrier before.

I’m going to continue working on Repair, but I also need to think more carefully about which of these variables should be treated as exogenous and which are endogenous for the purposes of the model.

Treating a variable as exogenous implicitly treats it as background condition, constraint, or given environment; treating it as endogenous frames it as something that can be shaped, amplified, or degraded by the system itself. Different modeling choices will surface different failure modes and different responsibilities.

I don’t think there’s a single “correct” choice here. What matters is being explicit about which dynamics I’m trying to make visible.

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Since I’d like to avoid reinventing the wheel, I’m also tracking which dimensions of safety and domination have already been theorized, and which ones were left implicit.

Variable	Did Marx address it?	How
M (Material Safety)	✅ Strongly	Core critique of capitalism
S (Structural predictability)	⚠️ Partially	Macro-level, not procedural
A (Agency)	⚠️ Collectively	Individual agency under-theorized
U (Subjectivity)	⚠️ Diagnosed	Repair assumed, not designed
V (Vigilance)	❌ Largely absent	Not modeled

Variable	Did Graeber address it?	Notes
M (Material safety)	⚠️ Present but not central	Often backgrounded
S (Structural predictability)	⚠️ Critiqued	Especially bureaucratic arbitrariness
A (Agency)	✅ Central	Everyday freedom, refusal, creativity
U (Subjectivity)	✅ Central	Meaning, dignity, authorship
V (Vigilance)	⚠️ Strongly implied	Especially under bureaucracy

Variable	Did Ostrom address it?	Notes
M (Material safety)	⚠️ Contextual	Depends on resource system
S (Structural predictability)	✅ Central	Rules, transparency, stability
A (Agency)	✅ Procedural	Participation, voice
U (Subjectivity)	⚠️ Implicit	Via recognition, not theory
V (Vigilance)	⚠️ Distributed	Lowered by shared monitoring

I believe reading more about Malatesta and Ward would also illuminate aspects to consider, but I have a long list of things to think about already.

In contrast, here’s where Bakunin sits in the same chart:

Variable	Did Bakunin address it?	Why it doesn’t quite fit
M (Material safety)	⚠️ Secondary	Important, but not stabilizing
S (Structural predictability)	❌ Distrusted	Quickly becomes domination
A (Agency)	🔥 Extreme	Revolutionary, collective, explosive
U (Subjectivity)	🔥 Extreme	Self-assertion through negation
V (Vigilance)	🔥 Embraced	Permanent alertness as freedom

In this model, Bakunin represents a high-domination emergency mode: a response appropriate when domination pressure overwhelms agency, institutional safety is captured, and repair pathways no longer function. His theory restores subjectivity through rupture rather than stabilization.

Bakunin prioritizes U recovery under impossible conditions, even at the cost of long-term S, M, and V.