Canaan House as a Strategic Action Field
I'm a PhD candidate in sociology and I need to get more familiar with the concepts and language of strategic action field so as an exercise I decided to apply this framework to an analysis of the House heirs during their time at Canaan House. There will absolutely be major spoilers for Gideon the Ninth and minor spoilers for Harrow the Ninth.
Questions gratefully encouraged.
The Emerging Field A field is a unit of social organization for coordinating collaborative action. Field theory is intended to look at "meso" level social units like organizations but realistically it could apply to a system as small as a marriage or as large as an intergalactic space empire. According to Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam (2012), an attempt at a field happens when two or more people or groups have goals that are similar enough that they have to routinely think about each other. A field can be said to properly exist when there are multiple people and/or groups who have some kind of shared consensus about what the field is doing, who's involved and how, and what the rules are, and when those people and/or groups have ways of making sense of one another's behavior. A field achieves initial settlement when consensus is reached, and the field then transitions from a disorganized or emerging status into a stable status.
In Gideon the Ninth, what I'm going to call the Canaan House field emerges when the heirs of the respective houses receive letters from the Emperor inviting them to study to become Lyctors. The two letters sent to the Ninth House articulate almost an initial field settlement or definition of the stakes, players, and rules. This isn't how fields usually come into existence but it's also not unique, especially for state fields, those fields that make up states (in this case, the Empire). Within field theory, states are systems of fields that are distinct in that they claim to represent a defined geographic territory, set rules regulating all social behavior within that territory, and maintain a monopoly on the means of violence. Because the Canaan House field was established by the Emperor to benefit the Empire, it is a state field.
The stakes are defined in the first letter. Fligstein and McAdam have noted that when fields are in a disorganized or emerging state, action more closely resembles social movement organizing, and even in the case of a field defined by imperial fiat we can see that happening here. The Emperor uses framing devices to communicate the stakes in a way that compels the designated members to act. This demonstrates that the Emperor has significant social skill, meaning he is able to empathize with others enough to secure their cooperation. This requires understanding their motivations and goals, taking stock of his available resources, and applying them effectively. Social skill and position in a field do not necessarily correspond, but he specifically is both extremely structurally powerful and especially skilled.
The Canaan House field exists to facilitate the ascension of eight House heirs to Lyctorhood. This answers the basic question of what the field is doing, what people are doing there. The Emperor uses diagnostic framing to communicate a problem, that many Lyctors have died, and he needs more Lyctors than he has (though it is not clear what he needs them for). He also uses prognostic framing to propose a solution: the heirs of the Houses and their cavaliers should come become new Lyctors. Most of the first letter is devoted to motivational framing that communicates the severity of the problem, the urgency of action, the likelihood of success, and the moral appropriateness of action.
Motivational framing combines appeals to duty with overtly religious moral and status justifications that simultaneously affirm and subvert the status hierarchy of the Empire. Initially the Emperor seems to subvert his extreme authority, framing himself as "begging" on behalf of and then with his surviving Lyctors. Lyctors are framed as being above all others, the most blessed and beloved, and the heirs are invited to "ascend" to that rank and to become figuratively part of the Emperor's body, to achieve a status and intimacy with him that no others could achieve. At the same time, this is equated to kneeling and to giving a "dutiful gift" to him, reaffiming his authority over them. Taken together, the letter offers a transcendent, personal relationship with the God-Emperor in which he retains authority over the Lyctor but the Lyctor is so uniquely beloved that the God-Emperor will publicly debase himself on their behalf. This is a subtle and powerful technique that indicates an exceptionally honed social skill.
The second letter defines an initial sketch of the makeup of the field and the rules for the heirs and their cavaliers. Harrow notes that the Emperor defines who can be in Canaan House (only heirs and their cavaliers), and Harrow and Gideon have an illustrative disagreement regarding how this constrains their actions. Gideon feels that if there are very few people around, she should not have to conform to Ninth House traditions, illustrating that she understands obeying Ninth House rules as a function of having Ninth House personnel other than Harrow around; Harrow understands obeying Ninth House rules as a function of advancing House interests.
This disagreement illustrates two important features of field theory. First, the strategic action frames that people use to make sense of others' actions are different depending on their position within the field. Within the Ninth House, Harrow is an incumbent, meaning that the prevailing concepts of the Ninth House will tend to legitimate her position and the rules tend to favor her goals. As an incumbent, Harrow thinks about the rules as being in concert with her goals, and she deeply cares about the success of the House. In contrast, Gideon is a challenger, meaning that she has much less influence over what happens, the prevailing concepts of the House legitimate her (in this case, extreme) disenfranchisement, and the rules disadvantage her. Gideon thinks about the rules as fundamentally illegitimate, things she does to avoid problems with more powerful others, but when she doesn't feel like she has a specific opportunity to gain advantage, she can generally be expected to follow them anyway. While not all challengers hate the rules as much as Gideon, even the saltiest challengers can be expected to follow rules most of the time.
This disagreement also illustrates that fields exist in (and as) networks of other fields and are informed by these other fields. The Canaan House Field is highly proximal to the fields of the Houses, because it is largely composed of House heirs. This means that what happens in the House fields shapes what the Canaan House field looks like, and what happens at Canaan House will have ripple effects in the other fields. Harrow and Gideon simultaneously exist within the Empire field, and within the Ninth House field, as they enter the Canaan House field. Their ties to and status in these other fields shapes how they understand and behave in the Canaan House field, and this is true of all the other members of the field with respect to their own social locations. The Canaan House field is designed to be composed of the priesthood plus eight smaller two-person fields of cav-necro pairs. The letters thus create both the Canaan House field and the Griddlehark field, which exists to make Harrow specifically a Lyctor and has rules distinct from both the Ninth House field and the Canaan House field.
The Stable Field A field is stable when there is a relatively strong consensus regarding the big four of field features (what's going on, who's involved, what's allowed, why are people like that) and when incumbents can reproduce their power. Stability is relative.
The ring ceremony marks the point at which the Canaan House field has reached stability. At that point everybody has a sense of who is in the field, their relative positions and roles, what they're doing there, and what everybody is allowed to do (in technical terms, what actions are legitimate, possible, and meaningful). Notably, that sense is not objectively correct, but it is shared by nearly everybody, so the field is stable. People generally feel that they can make sense of one another's behavior and rely on others to act in particular ways, so the field is stable.
The boundaries of the Canaan House are explicitly (but not altogether accurately) defined by Teacher on behalf of the Emperor. The field is part of the state structure of the Empire and is proximal to the eight other House fields. A distal field would be, for example, the cigarette trade on a planet outside the Empire. These two fields do not directly affect one another. The field is physically located at Canaan House. The rules apply to the physical space of Canaan House and the people who are temporarily or permanently living there, but not all field actors are physically present. The field includes everybody who has an immediate stake in the production of new Lyctors. The settled conception of the field includes the God-Emperor, the other Lyctors, Teacher, the other priests, the Heirs, and their cavaliers. But oops the field also has some Blood of Eden in it. We'll talk more about that later, but for now it is worth acknowledging that some fields can include a settled conception of the members that denies, ignores, or is not yet aware of some members. The skeleton servants are not members because I don't think they have basic agency.
The principal incumbents in the Canaan House field are the Emperor and the existing Lyctors. The rules legitimate their authority and facilitate their interests. The house scions and their cavaliers are initially challengers, who have less power over the structure of the field. The Canaan House priests and particularly Teacher act in service to the incumbents and facilitate information flow within the field.
Within field theory, power can be structured more like hierarchy or more like coalition, but it is assumed that a field will virtually always have elements of both. Canaan House is intended to function as a coalition, but extreme disparities of power at the Empire, House, and Canaan House levels prevent effective coalition.
The Emperor is at the top of the Canaan House hierarchy and the broader Empire hierarchy; the Lyctors occupy the next strata in both; Teacher occupies the highest Canaan-only position; then the other priests (if they have basic agency which isn't totally clear to me); then the necros; and finally, cavs. The cav-necro relationship is supposed to be hierarchical but some individual necro-cav fields are functionally coalitional. The Ninth and Eighth cav-necro fields exhibit extremely unequal power and conform closely to the hierarchical ideal. The Fifth, Sixth, and Second exhibit moderately unequal power and frequently resemble coalitions. The Fourth exhibits a basically flat power distribution and conforms closely to ideal coalition. The Seventh pretends to be highly unequal but is not a field (having only one actual agent in it), and the Third presents as near-flat because all members hold similar status at the House level and because their necro-cav distinction is secretly broken. It is also, technically speaking, a fucking shitshow. Worth noticing that coalition does not imply that everyone is generally cool to each other or even that coercion isn't routine.
Notably, even in the most flat necro-cav microfields there are times when the necro insists on getting their way, and even in the most hierarchical necro-cav microfields, there are times when the necro is obliged to solicit cooperation. However much necromancers respect and value their cavaliers, these dynamics still exist within and are shaped by the broader system and its rules, giving the necromancers a felt edge in negotiations. But however powerful a necromancer becomes, they still sometimes have to reckon with their cavalier's agency, because even extremely disenfranchised people can resist cooperating to some degree and at some times. One of the main contributions of field theory is that it addresses the theoretical tension between structural power and individual agency. Action is constrained and enabled by structural conditions, but not to the point of automation. Agency is always in play, albeit within the structural constraints of a given situation.
Among necromancers, among cavaliers, among necro-cav pairs, and within necro-cav pairs there is constant jockeying for status. Necromancers gain status by looking elegantly frail, including paleness, angularity, and thinness; by demonstrating intelligence (here mostly meaning planning, analysis, and strategy); by actively cultivating necromantic ability; by actually having necromantic ability, by which I mean being able to do things with necromancy that others cannot; and (tightly bound to necromantic ability) by service to the Empire. There is a basic conception of the Empire that necromantic ability is the legitimate source of power, and more necromantic ability equals more power. This is why powerful necromancers are in charge of state fields and have automatic status over cavaliers, and why it is good and normal for the necro-led Empire to colonize and exploit communities of non-necromancers.
Cavaliers gain status by being/looking healthy (which seems to include being less pale, not getting sick, and being visibly muscular, which itself means very low body fat); having and cultivating a capacity to enact violence; and completely subordinating the use of this violence to necromancers in service to the Empire. Cavaliers do not seem to gain status directly by having higher-status necromancers, but they can gain status by being associated with a House with good cavaliers or being associated with a good cavalier family.
Necro-cav pairs gain status by reference to House status, which they perform by demonstrating wealth and social correctness to outsiders. This includes the most status-insecure people presenting as wealthier and attending carefully to social protocol (Harrow, Isaac) and the most apparently status-secure people presenting as theatrically nonchalant (Coronabeth, Magnus) or markedly performing respect as a gesture of modesty without actually sacrificing control (Abigail, Palamedes). Obviously necro-cav pairs also believe that they can gain individual and collective status by causing the necro to ascend to Lyctorhood, thereby moving into a higher strata of power and increasing access to Imperial resources. Harrow and Ianthe demonstrate beliefs that Lyctors can exercise extreme agency over Empire-level resource distribution and/or power structure, which suggests that the original Lyctors are remembered as patrons of the houses they founded.
The initial settlement includes two kinds of rules. Rules that are part of the settlement are broadly-recognized restrictions on what kind of actions are legitimate, possible, and meaningful. Rules can be broken, either as exceptional or routine events, with or without consequences, so the fact of a rule existing does not inherently mean that behavior always or even typically conforms to the rule. There can also be rules about rulebreaking (e.g. moderate speeding on an empty freeway because your wife is in labor is practically an obligation, but extreme speeding outside an elementary school because you forgot your Labubu is monstrous).
Explicit rules defined by Teacher on behalf of the Emperor are that nobody may leave or contact anyone outside Canaan House, everybody is free to use any rooms not assigned to another necro-cav pair, and nobody may enter locked rooms without permission. It is structurally implied that the cavalier is supposed to sleep at the necromancer's feet, but this is not enforced at the level of either the Canaan House field or the Griddlehark field.
Cytherea's decision to live in a room not assigned to her illustrates the scope of the second rule. The fact of assigned quarters would seem to suggest that parties are obliged to live in their assigned quarters, but nobody objects to Cytherea living elsewhere, including Teacher. She also clearly does not gain exclusive use of the room she moves into. When actors seek to enter the assigned quarters of another House pair, we see them stop outside and request permission to enter. We do not see this when people enter Cytherea's sickroom. All actors appear to feel free to enter the space and stay for as long as they wish. Numerous people including Teacher and Palamedes announce intentions to occupy the space without soliciting Cytherea's opinion on the matter. Presumably Cytherea retains exclusive use of her assigned quarters even though she is choosing to live elsewhere.
Lyctorhood is supposed to be voluntary on the part of the cavalier. There is evidence in formal communications by the Emperor and Teacher that this is the intent, and additional evidence in the design of challenges and the comments by Cytherea that Gideon's consent is meaningful and that she should withhold it. The first time the Canaan House field came into existence for the purpose of producing Lyctors, it maintained stability for a very long time and the necro-cav strata and each individual necro-cav microfield operated on the basis of coalition. The challenges are designed in such a way that they cannot be completed without the active cooperation of both parties, but as mentioned, active cooperation can be structurally coerced.
Avulsion appears to be purpose-built to make sure that Lyctors are not the result of structural coercion by giving cavaliers extreme power over necromancers while overtly disincentivizing cooperation. A necromancer could not complete that challenge as designed without their cavalier recognizing that they are being asked to make a profound bodily sacrifice in immediate juxtaposition to temporary access to a blameless, undetectable means of killing their necromancer that they must actively resist. In all cases it would be easier for the cavalier to allow their necromancer to die. If the necromancer lives through the Avulsion chamber, their cavalier allowed them to live and knew it was against their best interest to do so. That's an enforcement mechanism for cav consent if I ever saw one.
Coalition typically forms when no one actor or group has enough resources to enforce a hierarchy. While a broader hierarchy existed, each necromancer and cavalier other than John and Alecto had roughly equal power. The incumbents assume that because the original Lyctorhood process emerged on the basis of coalition, this dynamic can be easily reproduced. In the second iteration of the Canaan House field, actors assume that one actor will become dominant on the basis of House resources and/or necromantic power, but that this has not happened yet and nobody is sure who it will be. I am inclined to characterize this less as a coalition and more as an unstable hierarchy. A hierarchy-in-waiting.
On arrival, most of the members of the field assume that the general rules governing elite inter-House social contact and their own Houses' conventions also apply. This is explicitly assumed to mean that nobody is allowed to murder each other, but also there are functionally shared rules about polite address, fashion, when it is permissible to physically fight each other and how that works, and the fact that it is absolutely terrible to have a crush on your friend's crush. There are also myriad (sorry) other little social conventions visible, such as when to use paper versus flimsy, how much to dress up or down at a given moment, what questions cannot be asked openly, etc. How people relate to the rules illustrates their perception of their status and the sophistication of their social skill. The Third routinely draw attention to their own rule-breaking as a performance of status, but each does this differently. The Fourth and the Ninth are fastidious about the rules because of their status vulnerability, but the Fourth let others see them doing this, and the Ninth do it in private.
Initially consensus regarding the settlement is quite strong. Because this is a small, explicitly defined field everyone appears confident in their shared view of the stakes, members, roles, and rules, and when we see people attempt to make sense of one another's behavior with respect to the Lyctor project, they have clear models for linking others' behavior with their conception of the field.
Despite being structurally isolated from external fields, the normal functioning of inter-House elite contact within the Empire field massively shapes the settlement. Numerous actors make reference to Imperial law, religious norms, and social norms as relevant to how they and others ought to behave at Canaan House.
The Canaan House priesthood (or just Teacher, if he's the only one with agency) functions as an internal governance unit, which are internal actors that maintain order, set rules, and help reproduce stability in the field. Teacher communicates and clarifies rules, affirms the hierarchy of the field, performs administrative tasks, and manages information flow.
The most common strategy evident is to gather information and complete challenges to win keys before anyone else can. Harrow, Palamedes, and Ianthe most strongly exhibit this strategy, so they take actions such as investigating and mapping Canaan House, solving puzzles, and attempting to gain access to information collected by others. People engaged with this strategy tend to reference collective action frames that understand the process as competitive and zero-sum.
An alternative strategy is to try to promote collaboration. Teacher, the Fifth, the Fourth, and Coronabeth most strongly exhibit this strategy, so they take actions such as arranging social events, being kind to others, and emphasizing positive social bonds. People engaged in a collaborative strategy tend to reference collective action frames that emphasize commonalities between actors and deemphasize necro-cav status distinctions.
Cytherea's strategy is radically different. She is trying to feed the Emperor to a resurrection beast and prevent others from becoming Lyctors. She takes actions such as sabotage and murder. At the same time, she endeavors to hide her identity, which involves actions such as claiming to be Dulcinea, puppeting one of the people she murdered, and performing extreme debility. She does not engage in a lot of overt framing behavior until the field is in crisis. Her actions are not actually oriented to the Canaan House field but to the Empire field, and she isn't very interested in influencing them rhetorically.
Crisis A field becomes unstable when the consensus breaks down and the shared understanding of the field's members, rules, and even the basic stakes of the field are up for grabs. According to field theorists, this most often happens because of exogenous shocks, meaning something external to the field happens that changes things. This could be big-picture things like an economic depression or a war, or things happening in another field, like how AI disrupted the porn industry.
The Canaan House field endures a number of significant shocks without the basic field settlement breaking down, but when several actors discovered that Imperial law did not apply, it threw the field into crisis. You would think that killing a significant proportion of the field would do it but as we can see, people just make meaning of the death and keep on keepin on. What throws Canaan House into total crisis is asking Teacher if collaboration is allowed and the resulting discovery that Imperial law does not actually apply.
This discovery undermines the Canaan House settlement in three ways. Most directly, it throws the rules into question. In doing so, it throws into question the rules of the larger Empire field. If the Canaan House field is part of the Empire but not beholden to Imperial law, what is Imperial law for? Why doesn't it apply to everyone? Why would God do this? This fundamentally challenges ideas about the Empire and how it works, and this profoundly alienates people like the Second who are unwilling to confront the implications.
Finally, it destabilizes necro-cav power relations. Within the Empire in general, necromancers gain power by virtue of necromantic ability, and that benefits John, who has the most necromantic ability, and the Lyctors, who have the next-most. Within the broader social rules of inter-House relations, status is heavily tied to the individual necromantic ability of administrators and to various forms of soft power, particularly wealth generated through colonial extraction, which itself is enacted via necromantic and conventional violence. Conventional violence within Houses is restrained to sport, albeit blood sport. Conventional violence is a source of status, but a source of status that is inherently subordinated to necromancers' interests. Structuring power in this way within Canaan House would disadvantage cavaliers, which in turn would undermine consent. This is likely why John attempted to divorce Canaan House from the legal structures that privilege necromancers, but it doesn't work because John hasn't studied his Bourdieu.
The strong cultural emphasis on soft power derived from necromancy in the Empire and its other subsidiary fields means that the actors at Canaan House assume that this is more or less the only legitimate path to advantage within the Canaan House field. Destabilizing the necro-cav power relations is supposed to produce the conditions for coalition, but it also means that hard power is equally legitimate. This means that everybody suddenly learns that they do not have an accurate view of how resources may be brought to bear, and that individuals who were relatively unlikely to gain advantage on the basis of soft power may be able to gain it on the basis of hard power. In short, everyone suddenly realizes that an unexpected hierarchy could form in the immediate aftermath of this revelation. While they had been oriented to a hierarchy emerging over weeks or even months, they are now oriented to a hierarchy emerging in hours.
Although it was not an exogenous shock that caused the crisis, external fields still massively shape the crisis and its resolution, most centrally the Blood of Eden field, which is not properly part of the field but is acting on it for reasons relevant to their field. The Empire field is also in crisis and key incumbents have begun to defect to the side of a powerful challenger, the Blood of Eden, who have offered an alternative conception of the Empire in which Necromancy Bad Actually. Cytherea acts as a Blood of Eden invader. Invaders are really powerful because they don't have to give a shit about the rules. They are often oriented primarily to other fields, and can access resources and legitimacy through those other fields, which removes incentives to play by the rules in the field they invade. As long as Cytherea behaves in a way that's makes sense to Blood of Eden and/or John and/or the other Lyctors, she doesn't necessarily have to care whether her behavior is legitimate and/or meaningful to the people at Canaan House.
After the consensus breaks, several people attempt to establish incumbency via hard power, exhibiting a strategy of taking keys from others using coercive force. Judith and Silas frame these actions in terms of reestablishing order, while Naberius engages in naked opportunism. Judith and Silas have strong incentives to reaffirm their respectives House settlements and the broader Empire settlement, so they attempt to legitimate their actions in reference to the primacy of law and religion, respectively.
The Third routinely engages in rulebreaking as a display of power, so Naberius doesn't need to square his actions with Third norms. Naked opportunism is already normative in his context, so he was restrained only by the shallow Third necro-cav power differential. Now that this is removed, he perceives himself to be empowered to take unilateral action that is overtly oriented to consolidating power for the Third. This implicitly posits a new settlement in the Third House necro-cav field, which Ianthe and Coronabeth accept immediately. They basically have to, as he is no longer structurally restrained from using hard power and is explicitly willing to act unilaterally to consolidate power. He has just become an extremely dangerous person to them and they have treated him really poorly with even a small power advantage over him.
Most of the cavaliers are not willing to exploit this moment to renegotiate their own necro-cav fields, and there's a sense that this is in poor taste. This is really sociologically interesting and if this were a case that actually happened I would want to investigate very carefully why Gideon and Colum in particular chose not to take advantage of this opportunity, especially in the face of an extremely public example of someone doing so with immediate, unqualified success on the level of the necro-cav field.
Field crisis feeds reactive struggle. In this case, aggression from these houses is met with aggression from the Ninth and Fourth, who form an ad hoc coalition with the Sixth to prevent the Second, Third, or Eighth from gaining the upper hand. Notably, Gideon actively affirms the existing Griddlehark settlement by waiting for Harrow to decide whether to commit her capacity for violence and praising Harrow for deciding to do so, and Harrow affirms the existing Griddlehark settlement by committing Gideon's capacity for violence without consulting her. Jeannemary, who was already in the habit of publicly exercising independent agency because of her unusually flat cav-necro microfield, commits her own capacity for violence without consulting Isaac.
Even though Harrow and Palamedes had been committed to competitive frameworks, they are willing to commit to coalition once they lose the protection of social conventions against hard power. Each believed that they stood a decent chance of winning under conventional Empire rules, but this makes them targets under the new rules. Establishing incumbency is no longer possible individually, but they think they can establish incumbency as a group.
This group is a coalition but it's unequal, ineffective, and massively unstable because there's a barely shared sense of why they should be a team and a not at all shared sense of who is on the team. Harrowhark and Palamedes are sort of the leaders of the pack, vying politely for dominance with respect to one another. They are interested in solving the Lyctor puzzle and accumulating status, which requires them to also care about the murder problem and prevent others from gaining power. They treat Camilla as a near-equal because they perceive her as having necromancer-like intelligence (yikes, btw) who can contribute to analysis and strategy. Her epistemic agency is taken seriously, but her agency with respect to her capacity for violence is fully subordinated to Palamedes, and Camilla's individual goals are not understood as meaningfully relevant by anyone.
Nobody else is centrally motivated by the Lyctor puzzle anymore. Isaac and Jeannemary's central goal is revenge for the Fifth's killings. They are part of the group in that they are apparently willing to provide resources to powerful members of the group. Nobody takes either of them seriously, except Gideon, and nobody really takes Gideon seriously, so the three of them exist basically as semi-cooperative resouces to Palamedes and Harrow. Palamedes sort of pretends to view Isaac and Gideon as having relevant instrumental agency in the way that Camilla does but does not actually take an interest in their perspectives except to evaluate whether they need to be convinced to do something. Only Isaac and Gideon respond to Jeannemary as having relevant agency. Palamedes convinces the Fourth to "temporarily" subordinate their goal in favor of his by framing the goals as related (but his as more urgent), and then the Fourth are immediately murdered as a result of their cooperation.
Palamedes and Gideon share a goal around protecting Dulcinea in particular, who they think should principally benefit from the group's resources. Collective pressure from them forces Harrow to accept this goal despite actively and expressly wanting the opposite.
The squad commits to keeping Cytherea from being murdered because Palamedes and Gideon want her to not be murdered. Harrow wants her to die just as soon as possible, out of suspicion and/or because Gideon is willing to withhold cooperation over her and she destabilizes the Griddlehark field. Cytherea's own agency is not relevant to or notived by anybody. She is not a member of the group but a sexualized object of sadness. She is not included in analysis or strategy. Necromancers have status based on ability, and she is too disabled to count as a person relative to Palamedes and Harrow. She complains about this feature of the Empire to Gideon and wishes that she could still be valued for her intelligence. Because intelligence and (in this case, necromantic) ability are understood as closely linked, she can't be. This is also, by the way, saying true and important things about inteligence, dis/ability, and Empire in the real world.
Although Teacher says that only his rules are real rules, this isn't how field crisis works. Once the rules are up for grabs, all the rules are potentially up for grabs. People start entering locked rooms without permission, and while this goes badly, it doesn't go badly for rules reasons. Teacher loses relevance as a source of field stability. People still go to him for information but he is no longer an incumbent.
This is an unusual case in which crisis is generated as a result of normal field activities rather than as a result of exogenous shocks. What destabilizes the settlement is the realization that incumbents and challengers had a fundamentally different concept of the rules and that under the rules as the incumbents understand them, cavaliers have much more power, which triggers an immediate collective reevaluation of the distribution of resources in the field and suddenly new strategies become possible.
The field is in crisis in that there is a pervasive sense of instability. Most people operating in the Canaan House field are aware that they are unable to accurately predict how others will behave, how power is structured in the field, and what actions will be possible, legitimate, and meaningful. Eventually the stakes are called into question as challengers and then incumbents begin to openly question whether Lyctorhood is a morally acceptable goal.
Field Collapse Canaan House enters terminal disintegration around Chapter 32. A field exists when there are multiple people or groups whose goals are sufficiently similar that they have to bear each other in mind in organizing their actions and when they have a shared consensus regarding the stakes of the field, who's involved and in what capacity, and what the rules are. The Canaan House field was intended to be temporary and to end by merging into the Lyctor field. It kiiiind of does this.
By Chapter 32, the First house representatives do not have any apparent goals because they are dead, except for Cytherea, whose goals are to feed the Emperor to a resurrection beast, express and be witnessed in her anger toward him, and ensure that nobody else ascends to Lyctorhood. The Second do not have any apparent goals because Marta is dead and Judith believes she is about to die, but the last goals they had were oriented to complete insurgency against the basic settlement, overtly challenging the hierarchy and its rules and physically destroying its internal governance unit. The Third don't have any apparent goals because Ianthe has achieved Lyctorhood via the bad ending and Coronabeth is too sad to have goals. The Fourth and Fifth don't have any apparent goals because they are dead. The Sixth have defected from the Lyctor project and their goals are oriented to establishing a less murder-heavy status quo. The Seventh don't have any apparent goals because they are dead. The Eighth have defected from the Lyctor project and want to prevent anybody ascending to Lyctorhood but not in a way that's responsive to Cytherea's project. The Eighth are oriented to an Eigth House framework rather than a Canaan House framework. The Ninth are also operating in reference to their house of origin rather than Canaan House. They are still in coalition with Cam. They want to ensure that Cam and one of them survive for Ninth reasons. Neither of them prefers to be the survivor.
The Canaan House field as a state-controlled entity that makes lyctors becomes increasingly disorganized as members die or defect from consensus. As the field collapses, novel forms of action are introduced. Cytherea abandons her strategy of hiding her identity and shifts from covert to overt sabotage and violence. She also engages in more framing, illustrating the proposition that a field more closely resembles social movement activity when in formation or crisis than it does when stable. This is in part because people are more receptive to new or radical conceptions of the field when the field is unstable or disorganized. The Fifth were killed during field stability, and Cytherea did not pair this killing with framing oriented toward the actors at Canaan House, but she did engage in framing oriented to John and the other Lyctors by writing "you lied to us" in a sabotaged lab. The Fourth were killed during field crisis, and Cytherea's framing activity was oriented to emphasizing their youth and the cruelty of her own action; this framing is likely also oriented toward John, as it doesn't make sense as oriented to the people who are physically at Canaan House. During field collapse, Cytherea begins engaging in framing that is oriented toward the other living people at Canaan House. She emphasizes to her intended murder victims their own high worth and the cruelty of her actions. It seems that she is engaging in the same kind of project as in the framing of the Fourth's deaths, suggesting that John is still the intended target of these communications. This suggests that Cytherea expects him to become aware of what she said at Canaan House, which he can, because victims can testify about their murders in this universe.
When the Second initiated insurgency, they adopted a strategy geared toward bringing in illicit military resources, characterized by the use of forbidden communications technology and using nonsport violence targeting the internal governance unit. Ianthe introduced novel action such as murder and ritual cannibalism, although these actions are somewhat field-normative. It was supposed to be voluntary but Ianthe avoided enforcement mechanisms. The Eighth microfield destabilized in the face of the broader field collapse, but held together just enough for Silas to get them both killed.
At this point the Canaan House field is definitely nonexistent, and if a field exists, it is the Cytherea Kills Everyone field, in which Cytherea is the incumbent against challengers Ianthe and Team 69. Modal strategies center overt violence. Modal forms of action are necromantic proxy combat using bone constructs and conventional violence using handheld or thrown bladed weapons. Collective action frames diverge dramatically, which you'd expect in a fight to the death. Cytherea continues to engage in a weird mix of praise and performative cruelty that is presumably oriented to John. Ianthe's perspective is not well documented. Team 69's collective action frames are oriented to maintaining group consensus regarding immediate-term field conditions and coordinating actions that will take place within seconds or minutes.
This field is even more independent from the rules of the Empire than the dying Canaan House field. Cavaliers exhibit independent autonomy and stop referencing House conventions regarding weaponry or the use of violence. New forms of necromantic and conventional violence are on the table for everyone capable of them. Novel forms of action include turbocancer, magic suicide bombing, stabbing, ritual cannibalism, and becoming a Lyctor anyway.
The Cytherea-Kills-Everyone strategic action field dissolves when Cytherea dies and survivors disperse into other fields.
