【(Preliminary)Perspective】Towards Generative Relational Governance - Discussion I
ENGLISH
Towards Generative Relational Governance
Discussion I
Wanhong Huang
Abstract
This discussion reconsiders governance from the standpoint of a generative relational ontology, and it proceeds as a delineation of a problem space rather than as the presentation of a theory. Its premise is that if being and knowing are generative, governance too may have to be understood as a generative process rather than as the administration of a stable structure. On this premise the received framings of governance, oriented toward the allocation of resources, the distribution of power, the design of institutions, and the sources of legitimacy, become insufficient, since they presuppose a structure that holds still while a generative field does not. The commons literature is taken as the point of departure, for it has shown that value arises from relation; the discussion extends it by observing that relation generates power in the same movement by which it generates value. From this observation two difficulties are assembled. Generation produces power that tends toward stabilization, structure, and finally an attractor, so that generation tends to terminate its own generativity. And the remedy of oversight upon oversight runs into an infinite regress that liberal constitutionalism, socialism, and the commons all encounter alike. Both difficulties may be artifacts of taking structure, rather than generation, as the object of inquiry. Since relational practice is inescapably multi-scale, carried on at the scales of intimacy, organization, community, and international order at once, the inquiry further requires a bridge across scales, for which renormalization is named as an open intuition rather than a result. The questions that follow are set out as a four-phase research program, running from the definition of generativity, through its dynamics and its transformation across scales, to the governance of generativity itself. No theory is established and no institutional design is proposed. The contribution is a proposal that the object of governance may have been misidentified, and that its primary object is generativity rather than structure.
Keywords: generative relational ontology; governance; commons; power and value; infinite regress; attractor; multi-scale relational practice; renormalization; research program; change of object.
A note on the standing of this discussion. It does not attempt to establish a theory of generative relational governance. It aims instead to identify a set of conceptual difficulties that appear once governance is reconsidered from the standpoint of a generative relational ontology. These are research notes rather than a finished argument. Their purpose is to show why the existing ways of posing the problem of governance have become insufficient, and to assemble, as clearly as possible, the questions that a generative account would have to answer. The questions are offered without their answers. A mature theory, if it comes, is left to later discussions and to the milestone papers that may follow.
§1 Governance as an Ontological Question
The starting point is not a political preference but an ontological one. If being is generative, as Generative Relational Being holds, and if knowing is likewise generative, as its epistemological extension holds, then a question follows that is rarely asked directly. Whether governance too should be understood as a generative process, rather than as the administration of a settled order.
Posed this way, governance becomes an ontological question before it is an administrative one. The conventional framing treats governance as the management of a given society: a structure exists, and the task is to run it well. But if relation is continually generative, if the field being governed does not sit still, then the object of governance is not a fixed structure to be administered. It is a process of generation that is itself in motion. This discussion takes that reframing as its point of departure and asks what difficulties emerge once it is taken seriously.
§2 The Insufficiency of the Received Framings
The received theories of governance are not to be dismissed. They have addressed, with great care, a definite set of problems: the allocation of scarce resources, the distribution of power, the design of institutions, and the sources of legitimacy. Each of these remains real. The observation here is narrower and concerns a shared presupposition rather than any particular failing.
The received framings largely presuppose a relatively stable social structure. They ask how to allocate, distribute, design, and legitimate within a field that holds still long enough to be administered. The presupposition is reasonable for many purposes and it is not being called false. It is being called insufficient for the case that concerns this inquiry. Where relation is continually generative, the field itself changes as it is governed, and the object of governance shifts from a structure to a process of generation. What the received theories govern is structure. What a generative account would have to govern is generation. The gap between these two is the space this discussion tries to open.
§3 The Commons and the Limit It Reveals
A body of recent work has already moved partway into this space, and it is worth marking both what it found and where it stops. The study of the commons, from Ostrom’s analysis of self-governing resource systems through the frameworks of generative justice, grassroots economics, and Eglash’s account of unalienated value circulation, converges on a single discovery. Value arises from relation, and sustainable systems return value to the relations that generate it rather than extracting it away.
This is a real advance, and this discussion inherits it. But inheriting it also brings a limit into view. These accounts show that relation generates value. They attend less to a second thing that relation generates at the same time. The generation of value is accompanied by the generation of power. A relational field that produces value also produces asymmetries, dependencies, and positions of advantage, and it does so through the very same activity by which it produces value. The commons literature has taught us to see value circulate through relation. It has not equally taught us to see power crystallize through relation. That second process is where the difficulties of this discussion begin.
§4 The First Difficulty: Generation Produces Power
The first difficulty can be stated as a proposition. The generation of value produces power as an accompaniment that cannot be wished away. Wherever relation generates value, it also generates differential positions within the relational field, and these positions tend to stabilize.
The sequence is worth making explicit, because each step is ordinary and the cumulative effect is not. Generation produces power. Power tends toward stabilization. Stabilization hardens into structure. Structure settles into an attractor. Each transition is the sort of thing that happens of itself, without anyone intending it, and the endpoint is a fixed configuration that the original generation now serves to maintain rather than to renew. The difficulty this poses for governance is not the familiar one of how to eliminate power, which is neither possible nor, stated so baldly, coherent. It is the subtler problem of how to prevent generation from terminating generation. A generative field, left to its own dynamics, tends to produce the very structures that arrest its generativity. How a system might keep generating without generating its own closure is the first question this discussion cannot answer and wishes to pose precisely.
§5 The Second Difficulty: Infinite Regress
The second difficulty appears as soon as one imagines a remedy for the first. Suppose that power, having accumulated, must be checked by some countervailing force or oversight. That oversight is itself a position within the relational field, and it too generates power and tends to stabilize. It therefore requires oversight in turn, and that further oversight requires its own, without any evident end. The regress is not a rhetorical trick. It is the genuine structural problem of who watches the watchers, followed to its conclusion.
What this discussion wishes to note is not a solution but a pattern. The regress is not peculiar to one tradition. Liberal constitutionalism meets it in the question of what constrains the constraining power and what grounds the ground. Socialism meets it in the question of what prevents the organ that supervises on behalf of the people from becoming an unsupervised power of its own. The commons meets it in the question of what governs the governance of a self-governing community. Three very different traditions arrive at the same wall. That they all arrive there suggests the regress is not a defect of any one design but a feature of the problem itself, and any generative account of governance will have to say something about it. This discussion only marks its universality and leaves the wall standing.
§6 A Change of Object: The Dynamics of Generativity
The third difficulty is the most productive, because it suggests that the two preceding difficulties may be artifacts of how the object has been posed. The received response to the regress is to build structure upon structure: a meta-structure to oversee the structure, a meta-meta-structure to oversee that, and so upward. This response takes structure as the object and multiplies it, and the regress is the natural consequence of that choice.
A different response would change the object rather than multiply it. Instead of studying structure and its endless meta-levels, one might study generation and its dynamics, and ask after the properties of a generative process rather than the architecture of a structural one. The relevant questions would then no longer be about how to stack oversight upon oversight, but about what properties keep a generative process open. Candidate properties suggest themselves, and they are offered here only as candidates: openness, the capacity to keep producing the new; reversibility, the capacity to undo a hardening before it sets; resilience, the capacity to absorb disturbance without collapse; and diversity, the maintenance of variety against convergence onto a single attractor. Whether these are the right properties, and how they might be characterized with any precision, is not settled here. What is proposed is only that shifting the object of inquiry, from the properties of structures to the properties of generation, may be the move that lets the earlier difficulties be restated in a tractable form. This shift is the central suggestion of the discussion, and it is a suggestion about how to pose the problem, not a claim to have solved it.
§7 The Many Scales of Relational Practice
Before any inspiration from other fields is invoked, the reason the inquiry reaches beyond a single scale should be made plain, because it follows from the subject itself and not from a borrowed method. We do not stand outside relation looking in. We are situated within a vast relational system, the system of relations among persons, and among persons and the world. A generative relational account is meant to hold of that system. But the system is never given to us whole and at once. Practice compels us to observe it, and to act within it, at different scales.
The same generative relational framework is brought to bear on the intimate relation between two persons, on the relations within an organization, on the relations within a community, on the relations among organizations, and on the relations among states. These are not five different systems requiring five different theories. They are the same relational system observed and practiced at different scales. What we call an intimate relation and what we call an international order are the near and the far view of one continuous relational fabric. This is why the earlier isomorphism, the recurrence of the same generative structure at every level, is not a curiosity but a condition of the subject. Any account adequate to relational being must be an account that holds across these scales at once.
From this a requirement follows that the received framings never had to face. If the same generative system must be practiced at the scale of the couple and at the scale of the state system, then we need a bridge between the scales, a disciplined way of passing from one scale of relational practice to another and of understanding how a generative account at one scale relates to the account at the next. Without such a bridge, the framework fragments into disconnected applications, each re-derived by hand, with no principled relation among them. The need for a bridge across scales is therefore not an ornament added to the inquiry. It is forced by the fact that relational practice is inescapably multi-scale.
§8 An Intuition Toward a Bridge
It is at this point, and only at this point, that a family of ideas from the study of complex systems becomes suggestive. They are introduced here as intuition and open direction, not as the theoretical basis of anything argued above, and the distinction matters enough to be stated flatly. Nothing in the difficulties assembled so far depends on these ideas. They are offered because the requirement just named, a bridge across scales, resembles a problem that other fields have had to solve.
Several notions seem to touch it. The attractor, toward which an undriven system settles, is the formal image of the structural fixation described earlier. Self-organization, the emergence of order without an external orderer, speaks to generation without a central generator. And scale itself, the recognition that the same system may look different, or the same, at different levels of resolution, is exactly the feature that the multi-scale character of relational practice forces upon us. Among these, one body of ideas is worth naming directly, because it is the one that in physics was developed precisely to bridge scales. Renormalization is the systematic study of how a system’s effective description transforms as one passes between finer and coarser scales, and of what is preserved and what washes out in that passage. If relational practice is inescapably multi-scale, and if what is needed is a principled bridge among scales, then renormalization is a natural candidate for the form such a bridge might take.
This is named as a conjecture and an invitation, not as a result, and its limits are acknowledged in the same breath. This discussion offers no coarse-graining operator on relational fields, no generating functional, and no flow equations, and it would be a misreading to take the word renormalization here as a claim that such objects are in hand. The claim is only that the multi-scale structure of relational practice makes a renormalization-like bridge worth seeking, and that the search is a defined direction rather than a vague hope. The construction itself belongs to work that follows this discussion, not to this discussion.
§9 A Research Program
The questions that emerge, once governance is reconsidered from a generative relational standpoint, arrange themselves into an ordered program rather than a loose list. Setting them out as phases is not a promise that they will be answered in sequence, but a way of showing that they are stages of a single inquiry, each presupposing the one before.
The first phase concerns definition. What is generativity, characterized precisely enough that one could say of a relational process how generative it is, and whether it is becoming more or less so. Without this, the later phases have no object.
The second phase concerns dynamics. How does generativity evolve. Given a characterization of generativity, one asks how it changes under a relational system’s own motion, whether it tends to grow, to decay toward an attractor, or to be sustained, and what conditions distinguish these fates. This is where the first difficulty, the tendency of generation to terminate its own generativity, would be studied rather than merely named.
The third phase concerns scale. How does generativity transform as one passes across relational scales, from the intimate to the organizational to the international. This is where the bridge is to be built, and where the renormalization intuition would either be made precise or be set aside. Here belong the subsidiary questions of what a relational scale is, of what coarse-graining a relational field into a collective subject retains and loses, and of whether there exist invariants preserved across scales that could serve as the stable objects a generative account holds onto in place of fixed structures.
The fourth phase concerns governance proper. How should governance regulate generativity rather than structures. Only once the first three phases have given generativity a definition, a dynamics, and a behavior across scales does it become possible to ask, without vacancy, what it would mean to govern for the sake of generativity, and how such governance would meet the difficulties of power and regress from which this discussion began. This is the phase toward which the whole program points, and it is the last, not the first.
§10 The Standing of This Discussion
It remains to say plainly what this discussion has and has not done. It has not established a theory of generative relational governance, and it has not proposed an institutional design. It has tried to show that the received ways of posing the problem of governance, framed around the administration of a stable structure, become insufficient once relation is taken to be continually generative, and it has assembled the difficulties that this reframing brings into view: that generation produces power and tends toward its own closure, that the remedy of oversight runs into an infinite regress shared across traditions, and that both difficulties may be artifacts of taking structure rather than generation as the object of inquiry. It has argued that relational practice is inescapably multi-scale and therefore in need of a bridge across scales, and it has named, as an open intuition, the direction in which such a bridge might be sought.
The contribution of this discussion is therefore not a theory of governance, but a proposal that the object of governance itself may have been misidentified. If governance is reconsidered from the standpoint of generative relational being, the primary object is no longer structure but generativity itself. Whether this change of object proves fruitful remains an open question, but it is this possibility that the discussions that follow seek to explore.
End of Discussion I. What is offered here is a problem space and a program, not a theory. The bridge across scales that the program requires, and the renormalization intuition named for it, are taken up in the discussion that follows.
中文
走向生成性关系治理
讨论一
黄万宏
摘要
本讨论从一种生成性关系本体论的立场重思治理，而它作为对一个问题空间的勾勒、而非作为一种理论的呈现而进行。它的前提是：若存在与认知是生成性的，那么治理或许也不得不被理解为一个生成性的过程、而非对一个稳定结构的行政管理。在这一前提之上，治理的诸既有框定，即那些面向资源的配置、权力的分配、制度的设计、以及正当性之诸来源者，成为不充分的，因为它们预设一个保持静止的结构、而一个生成性的场域并不保持静止。公共领域（commons）的文献被取为出发点，因为它已显示价值从关系升起；本讨论通过观察“关系在它生成价值的同一动作中生成权力”而扩展它。从这一观察，两个困难被集合起来。生成产生倾向于稳定化、结构化、并最终倾向于一个吸引子的权力，因而生成倾向于终结它自己的生成性。而“监督之上再加监督”这一救治撞上一个无限回退，自由宪政主义、社会主义、以及公共领域全都同样地遇见它。这两个困难都可能是把结构、而非生成，取为探究之对象的产物。既然关系性实践不可逃避地是多尺度的，同时在亲密、组织、社群与国际秩序诸尺度上被进行，这一探究还要求一座横跨诸尺度的桥梁，为此重整化（renormalization）被命名为一个敞开的直觉、而非一个结果。随后的诸问题被陈列为一个四阶段的研究纲领，从生成性的定义，经由它的动力学与它横跨诸尺度的转变，行至生成性本身的治理。没有理论被确立，也没有制度设计被提出。这一贡献是一个提议，即治理的对象可能一直被误认，而它的首要对象是生成性、而非结构。
关键词： 生成性关系本体论；治理；公共领域；权力与价值；无限回退；吸引子；多尺度关系性实践；重整化；研究纲领；对象的更换。
关于本讨论之地位的一则说明。它并不试图确立一种生成性关系治理的理论。它反而意在辨认一组一旦治理从一种生成性关系本体论的立场被重思便出现的概念困难。这些是研究笔记、而非一个完成了的论证。它们的目的是显示为何提出治理之问题的现有诸方式已成为不充分的，并尽可能清楚地集合起一个生成性的说明将不得不回答的诸问题。这些问题在没有它们答案的情况下被提供。一种成熟的理论，若它来到，被留给随后的诸讨论、以及可能随之而来的里程碑论文。
§1 作为一个本体论问题的治理
起点不是一个政治的偏好、而是一个本体论的偏好。若存在是生成性的，如生成性关系存在所主张，又若认知同样是生成性的，如它的认识论延伸所主张，那么一个鲜少被直接提出的问题随之而来。即治理是否也应被理解为一个生成性的过程、而非对一个已安顿之秩序的行政管理。
如此被提出，治理在它是一个行政问题之前成为一个本体论问题。传统的框定把治理当作对一个给定社会的管理：一个结构存在，而任务是把它运行好。但若关系是持续地生成性的，若那被治理的场域并不静坐，那么治理的对象不是一个有待被行政管理的固定结构。它是一个本身在运动中的生成过程。本讨论把那一重新框定取为它的出发点，并追问一旦它被认真对待，什么困难会出现。
§2 诸既有框定的不充分
治理的诸既有理论不应被摒弃。它们已以极大的审慎处置一组确定的问题：稀缺资源的配置、权力的分配、制度的设计、以及正当性的诸来源。这些之中每一个都仍是真实的。此处的观察更为狭窄，而它关切一个被共享的预设、而非任何特定的失败。
诸既有框定大体上预设一个相对稳定的社会结构。它们追问如何在一个静止得足够久以供被行政管理的场域之内配置、分配、设计与赋予正当性。这一预设对许多目的是合理的，而它并不被称为虚假。它被称为对于这一探究所关切的情形是不充分的。在关系持续地生成性之处，那场域本身随它被治理而改变，而治理的对象从一个结构移向一个生成的过程。诸既有理论所治理者是结构。一个生成性的说明所将不得不治理者是生成。这两者之间的裂隙是本讨论试图开启的空间。
§3 公共领域及它所揭示的界限
一批近期的工作已部分地进入这一空间，而值得标记它所发现者与它止步之处两者。对公共领域的研究，从奥斯特罗姆对自我治理之资源系统的分析、经由生成性正义、草根经济学、以及埃格拉什对未被异化之价值流通的说明，汇聚于一个单一的发现。价值从关系升起，而可持续的系统把价值返回给生成它的诸关系、而非把它榨取走。
这是一个真实的进展，而本讨论承继它。但承继它也把一个界限带入视野。这些说明显示关系生成价值。它们较少留意关系在同一时刻所生成的第二样东西。价值的生成伴随着权力的生成。一个生产价值的关系性场域也生产不对称、依赖与优势的诸位置，而它通过它生产价值所凭的同一活动如此为之。公共领域的文献已教会我们看见价值通过关系流通。它未曾同等地教会我们看见权力通过关系结晶。那第二个过程是本讨论诸困难开始之处。
§4 第一个困难：生成产生权力
第一个困难可被陈述为一个命题。价值的生成产生权力，作为一种无法被祈愿掉的伴随。凡关系生成价值之处，它也在关系性场域之内生成有差异的诸位置，而这些位置倾向于稳定下来。
这一序列值得被弄得显明，因为每一步都是寻常的、而累积的效果并不寻常。生成产生权力。权力倾向于稳定化。稳定化硬化为结构。结构安顿为一个吸引子。每一次过渡都是那种自行发生、无人意图之事，而终点是一个固定的配置，原初的生成如今服务于维持它、而非更新它。这为治理所构成的困难，不是那个熟悉的“如何消除权力”的困难，那既不可能、又，如此赤裸地陈述，不融贯。它是那个更微妙的“如何防止生成终结生成”的问题。一个生成性的场域，任由它自己的动力学，倾向于产生那些遏止它生成性的结构本身。一个系统如何可能持续生成而不生成它自己的闭合，是本讨论无法回答、而希望精确地提出的第一个问题。
§5 第二个困难：无限回退
第二个困难在人一想象对第一个困难的一种救治时便出现。假设权力，既已积累，必须被某种抗衡的力量或监督所制衡。那监督本身是关系性场域之内的一个位置，而它也生成权力并倾向于稳定下来。因此它转而要求监督，而那进一步的监督要求它自己的监督，没有任何显然的终点。这一回退不是一个修辞的把戏。它是那个真正的“谁监视监视者”的结构性问题，被追随至它的结论。
本讨论所希望标记者不是一个解决、而是一个模式。这一回退不是某一个传统所特有的。自由宪政主义在“什么约束那约束着的权力、什么为那根据奠基”这一问题中遇见它。社会主义在“什么防止那代表人民而监督的机关成为它自己一个不受监督的权力”这一问题中遇见它。公共领域在“什么治理一个自我治理之社群的治理”这一问题中遇见它。三个极为不同的传统抵达同一堵墙。它们全都抵达那里，这提示这一回退不是任何一种设计的缺陷、而是那问题本身的一个特征，而任何生成性的治理说明都将不得不就它说些什么。本讨论只标记它的普遍性、并让那堵墙立着。
§6 对象的更换：生成性的动力学
第三个困难是最有产出性的，因为它提示那两个在先的困难可能是对象如何被提出的产物。对回退的既有回应是把结构建于结构之上：一个元结构来监督那结构、一个元元结构来监督那个，如此向上。这一回应把结构取为对象并使它成倍，而回退是那一选择的自然后果。
一个不同的回应会更换对象、而非使它成倍。人可以不研究结构及它无尽的诸元层级，而研究生成及它的动力学，并追问一个生成性过程的诸性质、而非一个结构性过程的架构。那么相关的诸问题便不再是关于如何把监督堆于监督之上，而是关于什么性质使一个生成性过程保持敞开。若干候选的性质自行呈现，而它们在此仅作为候选被提供：敞开，即持续产生新者的能力；可逆，即在一次硬化定型之前撤销它的能力；韧性，即吸收扰动而不崩溃的能力；以及多样性，即针对向一个单一吸引子之收敛而对多样的维持。这些是否是正确的性质，以及它们如何可能被以任何精确加以刻画，在此不被了结。所提议者仅是：把探究的对象移动，从诸结构的诸性质移向生成的诸性质，可能是那让先前诸困难得以被以一个可处理之形式重述的一步。这一移动是本讨论的中心建议，而它是一个关于如何提出问题的建议、而非一个已解决它的主张。
§7 关系性实践的诸多尺度
在任何来自其他领域的灵感被援引之前，探究为何伸手越过一个单一尺度应被弄得清楚，因为它从主题本身、而非从一个被借来的方法得出。我们不站在关系之外向内看。我们被置于一个庞大的关系系统之内，即人与人之间、以及人与世界之间的诸关系之系统。一个生成性关系的说明意在对那系统成立。但那系统从不作为一个整体、一次性地被给予我们。实践迫使我们在不同的尺度上观察它、并在它之内行动。
同一个生成性关系的框架被施于两个人之间的亲密关系、施于一个组织之内的诸关系、施于一个社群之内的诸关系、施于诸组织之间的诸关系、以及施于诸国家之间的诸关系。这些不是要求五种不同理论的五个不同系统。它们是同一个关系系统，在不同尺度上被观察并被实践。我们所称的一段亲密关系与我们所称的一个国际秩序，是一整块连续之关系织物的近观与远观。这便是为何那更早的同构，即同一个生成性结构在每一层级的复现，不是一件奇事、而是主题的一个条件。任何一个对关系性存在适足的说明，都必须是一个同时横跨这些尺度成立的说明。
从这里一个诸既有框定从不必面对的要求随之而来。若同一个生成性系统必须在这对伴侣的尺度上、并在这国家系统的尺度上被实践，那么我们需要一座诸尺度之间的桥梁，一种从一个关系性实践尺度通向另一个、并理解一个尺度上的生成性说明如何关联于下一个尺度上之说明的有纪律之方式。没有这样一座桥梁，这一框架便碎裂为诸不相连的应用，每一个都被手工重新推导，它们之间没有任何有原则的关联。因此，一座横跨诸尺度之桥梁的需要不是被添加于探究的一件装饰。它被“关系性实践不可逃避地是多尺度的”这一事实所迫。
§8 一个通向桥梁的直觉
正是在这一点上、并且仅在这一点上，一族来自复杂系统研究的观念变得富有提示。它们在此作为直觉与敞开的方向被引入，而非作为上文所论任何东西的理论基础，而这一区分要紧到足以被直白地陈述。到此为止所集合的诸困难中没有任何一个依赖于这些观念。它们被提供，因为刚被命名的那一要求，即一座横跨诸尺度的桥梁，酷似一个其他领域曾不得不解决的问题。
若干概念似乎触及它。吸引子，即一个不被驱动的系统所安顿向者，是先前所描述之结构性固定的形式意象。自组织，即秩序在没有一个外部秩序者的情况下的涌现，言及没有一个中心生成者的生成。而尺度本身，即“同一个系统在不同的分辨层级上可能看起来不同、或相同”这一认识，恰恰是关系性实践的多尺度品格强加于我们的那个特征。在这些之中，一批观念值得被直接命名，因为它是那个在物理学中恰恰为横跨诸尺度而被发展者。重整化是对“一个系统的有效描述如何随人在更细与更粗的诸尺度之间通过而转变、以及在那一通过中什么被保存、什么被冲刷掉”的系统研究。若关系性实践不可逃避地是多尺度的，又若所需者是一座诸尺度之间的有原则之桥梁，那么重整化是这样一座桥梁可能采取之形式的一个自然候选。
这被命名为一个猜想与一个邀请、而非一个结果，而它的诸界限在同一口气中被承认。本讨论不提供关于关系性场域的粗粒化算子、不提供生成泛函、也不提供流方程，而把此处的“重整化”一词当作“这样的对象已在手”的一个主张，将会是一个误读。这一主张仅是：关系性实践的多尺度结构使一座类重整化的桥梁值得被寻求，而那一寻求是一个被界定的方向、而非一个模糊的希望。这一构造本身属于随本讨论而来的工作、而不属于本讨论。
§9 一个研究纲领
一旦治理从一个生成性关系的立场被重思，所涌现的诸问题把它们自己排列为一个有序的纲领、而非一份松散的清单。把它们陈列为诸阶段不是它们将被依次回答的一个承诺，而是一种显示它们是一个单一探究之诸阶段、每一个都预设它之前那一个的方式。
第一个阶段关切定义。生成性是什么，被刻画得足够精确，以致人可以就一个关系性过程说出它有多生成性、以及它是否正变得更或更不如此。没有这个，随后的诸阶段没有对象。
第二个阶段关切动力学。生成性如何演化。给定生成性的一个刻画，人追问它如何在一个关系系统自己的运动之下改变，它是否倾向于生长、倾向于向一个吸引子衰减、抑或倾向于被维持，以及什么条件把这些命运区分开来。这是那第一个困难，即生成倾向于终结它自己生成性的倾向，将被研究、而非仅仅被命名之处。
第三个阶段关切尺度。生成性如何随人横跨诸关系尺度、从亲密的到组织的到国际的通过而转变。这是那座桥梁将被建造之处，也是那重整化直觉将或被弄得精确、或被搁置之处。此处归属那些附属的问题，即一个关系尺度是什么、把一个关系性场域粗粒化为一个集体主体保留什么与丧失什么、以及是否存在横跨诸尺度被保存的不变量，它们能充当一个生成性说明用以替代固定结构而抓住的那些稳定对象。
第四个阶段关切治理本身。治理应如何调节生成性、而非诸结构。唯当前三个阶段已给予生成性一个定义、一种动力学、以及一种横跨诸尺度的行为，才可能不空洞地追问：为了生成性之故而治理会意味着什么，以及这样一种治理会如何应对本讨论由之开始的权力与回退之诸困难。这是整个纲领所指向的阶段，而它是最后一个、而非第一个。
§10 本讨论的地位
所余者是平实地说出本讨论已做与未做者。它未曾确立一种生成性关系治理的理论，而它未曾提出一个制度设计。它已试图显示：提出治理之问题的诸既有方式，围绕对一个稳定结构的行政管理而被框定者，一旦关系被取为持续地生成性的便成为不充分的，而它已集合起这一重新框定所带入视野的诸困难：即生成产生权力并倾向于它自己的闭合、即监督这一救治撞上一个横跨诸传统被共享的无限回退、以及这两个困难都可能是把结构、而非生成，取为探究之对象的产物。它已论证关系性实践不可逃避地是多尺度的、因而需要一座横跨诸尺度的桥梁，而它已命名，作为一个敞开的直觉，这样一座桥梁可能被寻求的方向。
因此，本讨论的贡献不是一种治理的理论、而是一个提议，即治理的对象本身可能一直被误认。若治理从生成性关系存在的立场被重思，首要的对象便不再是结构、而是生成性本身。这一对象的更换是否证明富有成果，仍是一个敞开的问题，但正是这一可能性，随后而来的诸讨论所寻求去探索者。
讨论一终。此处所提供者是一个问题空间与一个纲领、而非一种理论。那纲领所要求的横跨诸尺度之桥梁、以及为它所命名的重整化直觉，在随后而来的讨论中被接手。