Representative Redundancy and Transport Obstruction under Persistence

Redundancy and obstruction arise as forced structures once comparison is required to persist under admissible variation. When accumulated loss is path-dependent, locally valid descriptions cannot, in general, be identified globally without additional bookkeeping. Multiple representatives remain locally equivalent but diverge under transport along different admissible paths, producing representative redundancy. Transport functions as the minimal rule relating local comparison frames across variation. Obstruction appears when transport around closed loops fails to return the identity, marking the impossibility of global representative equivalence. In this framework, obstruction provides the operational content of curvature prior to any geometric or field-theoretic interpretation. The analysis is structural rather than dynamical. No spacetime, symmetry principle, gauge postulate, or field equation is assumed. Redundancy, transport, and obstruction are derived as necessary devices for maintaining coherence, not as modeling choices. Quantities invariant under admissible refinement and reparameterization are isolated as the only candidates for observable content, while representative-dependent residues signal inadmissible comparison schemes. The result clarifies the boundary between structural necessity and representational choice and provides diagnostic criteria reused in later applications involving gauge structure, curvature, and global constraints.