Taking Up

At twenty-seven, Anaïs calls her mother after an argument. She has prepared several things to say. None feels right. Then she says:

“You asked me to tell you.”

Her mother goes quiet. Ten years earlier, on the way home from a family lunch, she had spoken about her own mother. “If I ever start doing the same thing to you, tell me. Even if I get defensive.” Anaïs had laughed, then said she would. They had never mentioned it again.

Her mother finally says, “I remember the car.” Then she adds that she had something else in mind that day, that she doesn’t want to be compared to her own mother. Anaïs answers. They argue a little longer.

Nothing is settled. Her mother remembers, she defends herself. Her daughter has handed back a sentence her mother had left in their history, and what they will do with it remains to be seen.

Without that earlier request, Anaïs could have made the same criticism. She could have said “you’re hurting me,” proposed a rule for their arguments, perhaps received a gentler answer. She could not have reminded her mother that she had asked to be stopped at just this point. Her mother might have listened just as well; the move would have been different.

This difference interests me. It depends on something that happened and, ten years later, still makes a particular move possible. I call a handle what a passage leaves behind that is definite and accessible enough for a later move to bear on it. Anaïs has just used the one her mother left.

A trace can remain for a long time without offering that access. The meeting was recorded, but none of those who attended can listen to the recording. The letter exists, in a drawer no one knows about. Even a sentence remembered word for word may no longer have any place in the relationship where it was spoken. Knowing it was said is not enough to be able to bring it back to someone.

We also need to know fairly precisely what we are talking about. “Something happened” gives us little to work with. “On Tuesday, you agreed that this decision could be reconsidered if the number was wrong” allows us to ask whether the number is wrong, recall the agreement, dispute its scope. Definiteness and accessibility go together. Whoever keeps the file may have a handle that the person it is hidden from has been denied.

An object can thus carry a handle, a memory preserve one, an institution provide for one. What matters is the practical relation to what happened that they make possible. This relation can persist without anyone using it. The words of Anaïs’s mother did not have to wait ten years to become something she could be reminded of; Anaïs had not yet had reason to remind her.

I call taking up the move made in the present that bears on something as having happened and gives it a continuation. Anaïs takes up her mother’s request in an argument neither could have foreseen when it was made. The old words enter another scene.

The act of taking up happens even before the reply. Her mother could have denied it, hung up, turned the request against her: “I asked you to warn me, not to accuse me.” That would have changed what Anaïs could get from it. It would not have taken away the move her daughter had just made.

In Le Courage du Réel, another scene lays this gap bare:

“I’d invited Agathe for the vacation. We could feel that it wasn’t working anymore, so we tried hanging on to the old stories, our memories of ninth grade, that boy we’d both been in love with who’d ended up snubbing us for another boy. We forced ourselves to laugh, hoping to find something again. We even got drunk on Pimm’s, but it all kept bouncing off.”

They have the memories and take them up together, cling to them, keep trying. Their old closeness does not return. The conversation during that vacation still becomes part of their history, with its efforts and its forced laughter. What they took up did not give them what they hoped for.

Taking up can also betray someone’s words, turn a rule to another use, make a humiliation suffered into a means of humiliating someone else. The concept assigns it no value in advance. It lets us follow a move and what comes after it, including when it closes what we hoped to open. The conversation in the car is over. Anaïs and her mother can discuss it for hours; they will not put themselves back in it. Every corrected memory, every denial, every added word happens tonight. This difference matters because we readily speak of repair as though what follows could eventually remove the event.

Repaying a sum can settle a debt in full. The money was still taken. An overturned decision ceases to produce certain effects; it was nevertheless made, sometimes applied, sometimes believed. This irrevocability does not condemn every repair to remain incomplete. The financial debt can be settled with nothing left over. The history in which it arose does not disappear with it.

We may discover that the facts were different, that an accusation was false, that a memory misled us. We then revise what we had taken to have happened. We do not make an event that actually occurred cease to have occurred. This distinction holds even when establishing the facts remains uncertain.

Within this irrevocable past, access changes. An archive opens, a witness disappears, a procedure becomes usable. The decision remains in the past while the possibilities for taking it up shift. Destroying its file is another event: it may remove the means of answering the decision without removing the decision itself. An injustice can remain a fact when there is no one left to call to account and nowhere left to do so.

What follows can also give the past a relation it did not yet have. A court delivers a judgment. Two years later, another case refers to it; the judgment becomes a precedent for this question. Not a word has been added to the original text. The relation to the new case formed after it.

The judgment may already have been available to invoke before it was invoked in this case. Taking it up establishes a new relation to the case at hand; it does not necessarily create the handle it uses. Availability, use, and what that use brings into being remain distinct.

For Anaïs, the request was there. Tonight it receives a continuation. If her mother manages to stop herself in the middle of a later argument, that new event can in turn be taken up: “Last time, you managed to stop yourself.” Or nothing of the kind will happen. The old request contained no program for it.

The past is therefore not equally available everywhere. A twenty-year-old promise can be recalled in a sentence. Yesterday’s decision may already be beyond reach: no witness, no trace, no one to address. Chronological distance tells us little about what we can still do.

I call addressable volume the whole of what has happened and can still be taken up by someone in a given situation. The word volume names this thickness of the present. It measures neither the number of memories nor the mass of the archives. It requires us to look at access, which differs according to who seeks it.

An address includes a possible recipient, somewhere the move can be received, and conditions of access, including its cost. A union obtains a review of a decision that an employee acting alone could not get heard. Everyone knew the document. Collective support changed what could be done with it without adding a single fact to the archives.

A language that has become unreadable removes other forms of access. An encounter may, on the contrary, suddenly make an old sentence usable. A document made public sometimes still has no address for those it concerns: everyone can read it, none of the decision-makers has to receive a challenge addressed to them. The information circulates; its recipient evades it.

For someone acting, the present includes these possibilities. Two employees may hold the same job in two similar companies and not have the same practical present. In the first, a decision the year before established an independent review of disciplinary action. In the second, nothing of the kind has been obtained. Both employees can write a letter. Only one can use the appeals process established last year and have the letter enter that procedure. The paper, the time, and the words are not enough to describe the difference.

Two accounts show the same balance once stolen money has been repaid. Two institutions have the same rule, one as the result of a challenge, the other because it copied it. The states may resemble each other. The situations differ if someone can still refer to that history in order to act. If access no longer distinguishes them in any way, their different origins alone do not establish a difference in the handles currently available.

A person’s continuity also appears in these addresses. “You promised” can reach me after my opinions, my desires, and my life have changed. Enough continuity must remain for the move to be put to me as my own. Simply saying that I am the same person does not yet describe what maintains or undoes that access.

A child’s promise does not have the same force as an adult’s. A disease that destroys memory may make it impossible to take the promise up together without erasing the fact that the person promised. An institution changes its leadership, its legal framework, its mandate; some decisions can still be invoked against its successor, others lose their addressee. Taking up offers a local test of continuity here, without claiming to settle the whole identity of a person or an institution.

Anaïs is not asking her mother to have remained who she was ten years ago. The old request concerned precisely the moment when she would begin to change in a way she dreaded. That is the continuity Anaïs tests by speaking to her.

An agency receives a report, numbers it, files it, and keeps it. Everything has been done. When the employee invokes an earlier decision, the answer is that every case is different. He points out a contradiction; his note is added to the file. It is now there alongside the decision it challenges. The rule remains beyond reach.

The agency has a memory. The employee has even been able to invoke it. But his objection cannot get back to what it targets. Keeping a trace, allowing it to be invoked, and letting that invocation reach its object are three different operations. We can carry out the first two very conscientiously and close off the third.

A challenge can lose after being examined. What is removed here is the very possibility that examining it might change the rule. Receiving the objection serves to complete the file or explain the procedure better. The act of taking up has happened; the institution limits its reach to what it had already decided to receive.

Caroline’s father does something similar. He was there at home, but he never took an interest in her. He never asked her a question, never looked at her. Their interactions were confined to the times when Caroline seemed to bother him. Then a sharp remark, and that was that.

Caroline writes him a letter. Everything is in it: the wounds, the suffering, and forgiveness. Her father reads it without letting it in. He intellectualizes it; the letter stays outside.

The letter has arrived. Caroline has taken up their history. Her father can understand what she writes and let none of that understanding reach the way he is with her. We would take Caroline’s own move away from her if we decided that no act of taking up had occurred because her father had not changed.

What he receives may even teach him something. An authoritarian manager sometimes becomes very attentive to objections: he notices the words that trigger resistance, the employees who talk to each other, the concessions that are enough to calm a team. Every protest improves his tactics. The rule that reserves the last word for him remains protected from what he learns.

This is the difference between adaptation and revisability. A system adapts by using what happens to it to continue more effectively. It is revisable, on a given point, when taking something up can reach the conditions under which it continues. Learning can include that revision; reserving the word learning for tactical adjustments alone would be too narrow. There remains, however, a question that the general capacity to learn does not settle: can this person bring this rule up for reconsideration on the basis of what happened to them? An organization can revise its rules often while closing off this access to those whose contributions it receives.

It can then draw a great deal from what it prevents from acting on it. A company asks its teams for ideas. The best become part of a strategy, and their authors can no longer discuss how their ideas are used. Complaints become data, objections serve to predict resistance. Those who voice them improve the machinery that will decide on its own what to do with their contribution.

I call capture the move that maintains a contribution, a presence, or an agreement by neutralizing responses that could change its attribution, use, or conditions. It can multiply what follows. What it retains is control over the conditions: the other person’s contribution is taken up, while their ability to take up what is done with it is neutralized.

We can thus be dispossessed of our history without forgetting any of it. The work still bears its author’s name, the facts are acknowledged, the contribution celebrated. Yet anything its author says about how it is used has become powerless to affect that use. Dispossession leaves memory intact. It strikes at the handle.

In this case, publishing the facts or naming the author leaves the closure intact. The possibility of taking up the use of their work has not been restored to them. Recognition can honor someone while continuing to use them.

This gives no one a veto. A decision can be settled and an objection rejected. The test concerns what was possible before that outcome: could the response change the use of the contribution, or were only responses that left it intact admissible? Disagreement with the result does not prove capture. Approval of the result does not prove that its conditions were open either.

Sometimes the lock comes from a move that had opened the relationship. A father admits to his son that he was wrong. The conversation is difficult; they manage to talk. Six months later, the son returns to another problem. The father sighs: “After everything I’ve already admitted, you could move on.”

The admission did happen. It left a handle. The father now takes it up as credit that would excuse him from listening to what comes next. His sincerity then does not decide this new use. He may really have explained himself and now use that explanation to close off another conversation. An institution does the same when it invokes an injustice it has corrected to make later ones inadmissible. What it repaired remains repaired; the present closure becomes part of its history.

Whether something can be taken up also depends on its cost. An employee discovers a scheduling error. The procedure exists. She has to gather the data in the evening, convince three managers, go back over four meetings, and risk being labeled difficult. After two months, she gets the error corrected.

The institution will be able to show that the report was received and the error corrected. All of that is true. If the next correction requires the same work and the same risk, whoever seeks it will face that obstacle again. The first employee paid for the correction; she did not necessarily make the next one more accessible.

Cost and impossibility remain distinct. People make moves that cost them almost everything. Their success establishes that the passage was possible under those conditions. It does not show that it was readily available, still less that it will be for someone else. A promise that can be recalled only at the cost of losing the relationship, an appeal that puts a job at risk: their practical existence differs from what their mere wording suggests.

Following these forms of access brings us back to the two forms of local death that The Maille called stone and water. The maille names the place where a move’s possibility of being received, leaving a trace, and changing what follows is at stake.

In stone, everything remains. Decisions are documented, objections recorded, roles fixed. Nothing that returns through these traces can shift the form that preserves them. The agency’s archive is of this kind, with respect to the rule the employee is trying to reach.

In water, everyone speaks, tries things, changes their mind, starts a project. The following week, no one can say “we decided this” or “this objection is still waiting for an answer” with much chance of it counting. What was received was not retained enough to become a handle. The movement can be incessant.

These states are local. The same institution can keep one procedure revisable and shield another from any examination. For an objection to a rule to have a continuation as such, its words have to remain usable as an objection to that rule. Filing it as information may preserve its content and strip it of its object. Circulation, preservation, and revision can thus come apart even in an impeccably kept file.

Why make a concept of all this instead of describing the ordinary effects of the past? A flood changes a riverbed. A scar remains on a body. Words heard in childhood can affect someone who no longer remembers them. None of these effects is enough to constitute taking up.

Anaïs relates to the old request as a request that was made. The employee invokes the regulation as a rule applicable to his case. The move has a past object under a description definite enough for us to discuss what it does with that object. Its causes and effects exist like those of any other event. The concept specifies how its relation to the past is organized.

The difference does not rest on a fully reflective awareness of that relation. Technical devices can carry its address. A form links a request to an earlier decision. A versioning system allows someone to go back to a specific change. A correction automatically triggered by a sensor does not have this structure for that reason alone. An operation must be able to bear on the earlier event as the definite object of its response. If address could not distinguish these cases, the term taking up would add nothing to causality.

This does not make the object indisputable. “That’s not what I meant,” the mother replies. Management maintains that the precedent does not apply. Someone refuses to call a promise what they considered an idle remark. Taking up involves a dispute over what happened, its description, and its scope. Witnesses, archives, and procedures for establishing evidence take part in it; they do not always end the disagreement.

We can then follow what each characterization makes possible: to whom it addresses a request, what it makes available to invoke, which decision it exposes to change, what it costs to sustain it. Adding a name without changing any of these relations is not enough to produce a new handle.

There is, however, a limit to what collective recognition can do. A forged document can produce recognized obligations and real effects; it does not make it true that the promise it attests to was ever made. The decision made on the strength of it did happen and can be taken up. The past fact, what is accepted about it, and the handles made available by that acceptance remain three distinct things. This distinction prevents us from manufacturing the past out of the success of its descriptions alone.

History enters into the existence of certain moves. Answering this letter requires it to have been written. Asking a second time for something that was refused presupposes the first refusal; the same words spoken for the first time do not do the same thing. Invoking a precedent requires an earlier decision and a practice that makes it available to invoke under that description.

We could anticipate the letter, describe the future procedure, imagine the repeated request. The possibility of speaking about them then preceded their availability in the situation. A logical possibility satisfies the conditions imposed on it; a physical possibility depends on what bodies and causes allow. Some practical possibilities also require this historical address. They need an event that has happened and access to that event. A plan can contain the bridge that will be built. It does not get anyone across.

A dynamic model can represent these differences, including the emergence of new handles. Representing a future appeal does not allow us to file it today with a body that does not exist. Anticipating Anaïs’s sentence does not replace the conversation in the car that allows her to say it.

A representation can, however, act in turn. A proposal for an appeals process circulates, employees refer to it, it becomes the object of a negotiation. It then leaves its own handles, distinct from those the appeals process will provide if it is adopted.

An act of taking up can itself leave something to be taken up. An employee whose challenge obtains a review sometimes makes that review available for a colleague to invoke. Nothing guarantees this: management can declare it exceptional, the traces can disappear, the cost can return. When access remains, the next move bears on a history that is now different. It can also shift older handles, make some unusable, or change what they serve.

It is in this precise sense that the proposition is ontological. It concerns the existence of practical relations constituted by a particular history. Another history could allow similar moves and sometimes the same results; it would not provide this handle. Anaïs could convince her mother without reminding her of any promise. Getting her mother to listen would not turn the conversation into a reminder of a request that had never been made.

Removing an appeals process while keeping the archives thus takes a present possibility away from those who could use it. Their memory can remain accurate. The earlier event, too, remains. Something has nevertheless disappeared from what they can do together. It is this disappearance, or the converse emergence, that addressability allows us to describe.

We still have to be able to show it. If the presence or absence of a handle changes no possible response, no obligation, no cost, and nothing that follows, no practical difference has been established. Telling the story of one’s childhood differently does not, by that fact alone, give each of its episodes the same status. We still have to show what the account makes addressable, for whom, and how that enters into what follows. Addressable volume names nothing beyond these situated relations; making it a second substance of time would empty the concept.

We forget almost everything. Moves have been made of which no trace remains. Someone dies, taking the only memory of a scene with them. A language ceases to be understood. Sometimes the file is still there, but no one knows any longer what the initials stand for or which decision the numbers refer to. The whole past is not waiting to be taken up.

Forgetting also allows us to go on. A relationship in which every old remark returned in every argument, an institution that could never close a case, would wear out those who live in them. Keeping every trace does not necessarily preserve everyone’s handles. Someone who records every word to turn it against the speaker may gain further power from doing so.

Another closure occurs when forgetting is engineered to deny someone a specific form of access: a name removed from the file, a decision made without a trace, a meeting without minutes where a challenge was foreseeable. Intention, when it can be established, specifies what is at stake; a handle can also disappear through negligence or loss. In every case, knowing how much information has been kept leaves open the question of what can still be done with it, and by whom.

With death, a possibility disappears more starkly. We can take up the dead person’s words, work, decisions, fulfill a promise made in their presence, write a letter they will not read. There may be many handles. They will no longer respond to what we do with what they left.

Others can challenge our reading, surprise us, shift our response. The dead person no longer can. The continuation of their traces is therefore not the continuation of the relationship in the sense that their response could still change ours. That reciprocity is broken.

Loving someone who will not return may mean keeping a way of speaking, a story, a move we learned, a question still addressed to them. These handles are real. They do not restore the dead person’s capacity to take things up in turn. Yet this love is measured neither by their number nor by their fruitfulness. Someone’s place does not depend only on what we can still do with what they left.

Taking up therefore does not say everything about what matters. A passage may have changed someone, shifted a decision, saved a life, and then left no accessible handle. Its practical disappearance takes nothing away from the fact that it happened. It takes a possibility away from those who come after. The gap between the two remains, even when no one is left to observe it.

Bearings

Handle (prise). What a passage leaves behind that is definite and accessible enough for a later move to bear on it. A trace can persist without providing a handle. A handle can be available without being used.

Taking up (reprise). A move in the present that bears on something as having happened and gives it a continuation. It differs from repetition and from a mere causal effect. Its existence does not depend on its success. It can open, close, divert, or capture. Earlier essays in this series rendered reprise as “uptake.”

Address. A possible recipient, a place of reception, and conditions of access through which a move can bear on what it targets. It is local and situated in time: the same trace can provide a handle for some and remain beyond others’ reach.

Addressable volume. The local whole of what has happened and can still be taken up. It varies with traces, institutions, relations, costs, and those who can make a move to take something up. It does not constitute an additional substance of time.

Revisability. The capacity of a maille to let an act of taking up reach the rule or relation it targets. Adaptation may leave these conditions intact. The diagnosis is local: this objection, brought by this person, against this rule, with these forms of access and these costs.

Capture. A move that maintains a contribution, a presence, or an agreement by neutralizing responses that could change its attribution, use, or conditions. The contribution is taken up; its author’s capacity to take up what is done with it is neutralized.

Lineages

Bergson challenged the image of the possible as simply preceding the real like a double without existence. Taking up shifts this question toward practical possibilities that require a history to have happened: recalling this promise, answering this letter, invoking this decision.

In Le Pardon, Jankélévitch distinguishes, in relation to wrongdoing, effects that can be repaired from the fact of having done something, which time does not erase. Taking up starts from this irreversibility. What cannot return may nevertheless leave a handle for what follows.

The looping effects studied by Hacking bring classifications back to the people classified, whose responses can in turn transform the classifications. Taking up encounters this problem of return, but it does not presuppose a classification: a promise or a decision can also become the object of a later move. Historical address, rather than feedback alone, delimits the concept here.

Argyris distinguishes learning that corrects action within a given framework from learning that allows the variables governing action to be reexamined. The distinction between adaptation and revision thus has a direct antecedent. Taking up poses a situated question: who can reach which rule on the basis of which history, and at what cost? An organization can revise its rules while preventing certain people from taking up the use of their contribution.

In his analysis of moral conflicts, Bernard Williams shows that a defensible decision does not necessarily make the demand it leaves unmet disappear. The distinction between what happened and how it is taken up shifts this question: a justification can direct what follows without rewriting the history it justifies.

In the ontology of passage series, The Maille described the conditions of passage and the two forms of local death; The Unknown separated the uncertain from what is not yet practicable; The Bad Guys defined capture; The Just traced the remainder of a legitimate decision. Taking Up examines the moves through which these forms of access to the past are used, transformed, or withdrawn.