Power over Ethical Legibility: Classification, Interpretive Manifolds, and the Political Economy of Heterogeneous Relations

Ethical and political judgment depends not only on which classifications are applied to entities and relations, but also on the conditions under which those entities and relations become classifiable, comparable, and normatively visible at all. Existing work across political economy, sociology of classification, science and technology studies, critical data studies, recognition theory, epistemic injustice, and relational ethics has long shown that categories, standards, infrastructures, and institutions can organize power. This paper develops a narrower Generative Relational inquiry into a prior layer of that problem: power over ethical legibility. The central question is how control over interpretive conditions can shape what can appear as a subject, harm, capability, dependency, exploitation, care, consent, relevant difference, or legitimate object of governance before a particular normative classification is selected. The paper distinguishes several analytically related forms of power. Classification power concerns the assignment and stabilization of categories. Quotient power concerns which differences are retained and which are treated as normatively irrelevant. Interpretive-manifold power concerns the historically generated dimensions, units, temporal scales, and conceptual distinctions within which classification becomes possible. Interface power concerns the infrastructures through which heterogeneous interpretive systems are translated or coordinated. Archival power concerns which traces, provenance, and competing interpretations remain available for future re-cognition. Boundary power concerns the constitution of the domain to which governance, responsibility, or institutional jurisdiction is said to apply. These forms of power interact with material control over resources, computation, communication, institutions, ecological conditions, and other infrastructures. The inquiry is motivated by heterogeneous relations in which epistemic access is uneven and no interpreter can be assumed to possess a neutral or ontologically privileged view. Artificial–artificial, artificial–animal, animal–alien, and alien–alien cases are treated as conceptual stress tests rather than as a taxonomy of moral status. Building on a prior account of relational reconstruction under epistemic difference, the paper asks how asymmetries in resources, interfaces, archives, standards, and classificatory authority can shape the very field of possible ethical interpretation. A familiar participant may become more ethically legible not only because observers care about it more, but because institutions possess richer measurement systems, vocabularies, legal categories, and evidential infrastructures for it. Conversely, a participant or relation may remain politically weak because the conditions required for its injury, dependency, agency, or claim to become legible have not been generated or are controlled by others. The paper does not equate visibility with justice, emergence with legitimacy, or counter-classification with emancipation. Nor does it claim that interpretive manifolds are infinitely plastic or reducible to political will. Its more modest aim is to identify how political-economic power can operate before, through, and after explicit classification by shaping the conditions of ethical legibility itself. This perspective also clarifies a temporal problem: present classifications and archives can produce quotient lock-in, preserving only the distinctions recognized by current institutions and thereby narrowing future possibilities of re-cognition. Ethical legibility is therefore treated not as a passive property of entities but as an historically generated and politically contestable relation among material infrastructures, interpretive systems, institutions, and heterogeneous forms of life.