Readiness and Power: 2 Threshold-Setting as Power

If readiness is the medium of power, then thresholds are its primary instruments.

A threshold is the point at which readiness must tip into action: when waiting ends, when compliance is required, when potential can no longer remain potential. Thresholds do not persuade; they compel by structure. To cross a threshold is not to agree, but to respond to a condition that has been made decisive.

Power operates first and foremost by setting thresholds — determining when action is required, what counts as sufficient preparation, and who bears the cost of crossing.

What Thresholds Do

Thresholds transform indeterminacy into necessity. Before a threshold, multiple actions remain possible; after it, only a narrow set of responses remain viable. Importantly, thresholds do not specify meaning. They specify consequences.

A deadline does not argue for submission; it enforces a point beyond which non-submission becomes costly. A border does not persuade travellers of legitimacy; it enforces a condition of passage. An exam does not explain why competence matters; it defines the moment at which readiness is tested and ranked.

In each case, power does not need to justify the threshold. It only needs to make it operative.

Asymmetrical Thresholds

Thresholds are rarely universal. Power is expressed through asymmetry: some must cross thresholds repeatedly; others rarely or never do.

Consider who must constantly demonstrate readiness — students, job applicants, welfare recipients, migrants, casual workers — and who is exempt from such continual proving. The distribution of thresholds maps directly onto the distribution of vulnerability.

Those subject to frequent thresholds live in a state of chronic readiness. Their attention, time, and energy are continuously oriented toward meeting conditions imposed elsewhere. Those who set thresholds, by contrast, enjoy temporal slack. They wait; others prepare.

This asymmetry is not accidental. It is structural power.

Opaque Thresholds

One of the most effective techniques of threshold-setting is opacity.

When thresholds are unclear — when criteria are vague, shifting, or undisclosed — readiness cannot stabilise. Subjects must remain perpetually prepared, unable to release escalation because they do not know when or how crossing will occur.

Phrases like “you’ll know when you’re ready,” “we’ll be in touch,” or “subject to review” function not as guidance but as indefinite thresholds. They suspend readiness without allowing release.

Opacity extends power without visible enforcement.

Thresholds Without Decision

It is tempting to imagine thresholds as the outcome of deliberate choice by identifiable agents. But many of the most powerful thresholds are systemic. They emerge from layered procedures, inherited practices, and infrastructural constraints.

No one person decides when exhaustion becomes failure, when delay becomes disqualification, or when escalation becomes burnout. Yet thresholds still operate, still sort, still compel.

Power does not require intention. It requires structure.

Why Thresholds Matter More Than Rules

Rules tell us what is permitted. Thresholds determine when permission matters.

A system may contain generous rules and humane rhetoric, yet operate harshly through thresholds that are frequent, tight, or poorly timed. Conversely, strict rules may feel benign if thresholds are rare, clear, and evenly distributed.

To analyse power, then, we must ask not only what rules say, but:

• how often thresholds appear,

• how much readiness they demand,

• how much recovery they allow,

• and who controls their timing.

What Comes Next

Thresholds are static points, but power rarely operates through isolated moments. It unfolds through time: urgency, delay, waiting, and acceleration.

In the next post, we turn to temporal domination — how power governs readiness by controlling pace, rhythm, and duration, often more effectively than through force or threat.