Loyalty to form may be exercised as a requirement to confirm an established distinction through one’s actions again and again. Here the holding of form takes place in the relations between participants who reproduce the boundary presented to them.
A Distinction Enacted in Action
In the line from the film, “when a senior officer enters, you must salute,” a relation is established between rank and obligatory action. The distinction “senior / junior” is fixed in names and signs, and at each encounter the participants draw it again: one enters as the senior officer, and the other confirms the relationship through their action.
Saluting in this example simultaneously expresses recognition of rank and enacts an order in which the distinction between ranks determines actions. The already established boundary continues in a new encounter.
What is repeated is not the original event of establishing ranks. In new circumstances, the distinction organizing the relationship between participants is enacted again. The requirement to repeat applies to every relevant encounter; it does not imply continuous conscious holding of the boundary between encounters.
How Form Demands Its Confirmation
The phrase “form demands confirmation” describes a requirement fixed in a rule and imposed by subjects upon one another. Participants in the order expect and demand actions reproducing the established distinction. This description does not attribute an independent will to form.
Practical confirmation may occur without internal agreement with the order. A person can doubt the significance of rank while still performing the prescribed action. Their attitude toward the demand and their participation in reproducing the distinction may diverge.
In this sense, a policy of loyalty to form makes confirming the boundary obligatory for participants. It organizes subsequent encounters so that the established distinction gains force again through their actions.
The Primary Boundary and Its Renewal
A distinction that has been drawn is held through its renewal in subsequent relations and actions. This is the common structure of holding a boundary both at the level of an individual subject and at the level of relations between participants.
A subject may recognize what is happening anew through a previously drawn boundary. In the encounter under consideration, the participants enact the boundary “senior / junior” again through their behavior. In both cases, the distinction continues through subsequent distinguishing and action.
At the same time, initially drawing a boundary and confirming an already established boundary are different moments. For the person saluting, the distinction has already been presented as the foundation of an obligatory action. Reproducing it does not require reinvestigating the grounds upon which ranks were established.
The common operation of holding does not eliminate this difference in its enactment: discovering a boundary, recognizing it, and obligatorily confirming it stand in different relations to what has already been established.
Where Form Is Held
In this example, form is held in a reproducible relation between participants. Memory makes it possible to remember the order and recognize the situation, while action enacts the established relation in the next encounter.
Thus holding form is not exhausted by an individual subject returning to a distinction in their own memory. Several subjects can hold a distinction through mutually coordinated actions. This does not require treating the order itself as a separate subject.
This complements the understanding of form as the process of holding a distinction and makes it possible to distinguish the participation of memory from the enactment of the boundary in the relations between participants.
What Requires Examination
- How are the holding of a boundary by an individual subject and its reproduction by several subjects related: in what sense is this a single operation enacted in different ways?
- What happens to a held distinction when a participant refuses the prescribed confirmation: does the boundary lose force in that encounter, become an object of dispute, or get reproduced through the reaction of other participants?
- Under what conditions does obligatory confirmation preserve the foundation of a distinction, and under what conditions does its reproduction continue after that foundation has been lost?
