Registration and Ontological Fixation: The Temporal Architecture of Inequality

How does power become durable across time? Classical social theory explains domination through production, bureaucracy, or discipline, yet leaves under-theorized the infrastructural mechanism through which social categories acquire temporal persistence. This article argues that registration constitutes a foundational infrastructure of power by converting fluid social states into durable, authoritative records. I introduce the concept of ontological fixation to describe the process through which inscription, institutional recognition, and persistence converge to stabilize identities and classifications. Ontological fixation generates a temporal architecture of constraint, wherein past inscriptions structure future trajectories. Through a hybrid analysis of caste as a historically codified hierarchy (Dirks, 2001; Bayly, 1999), the article demonstrates how recorded status becomes intergenerationally durable. It further examines how contemporary digital infrastructures intensify fixation through data permanence and predictive classification (Rouvroy and Berns, 2013; Amoore, 2013). By reframing registration as ontological infrastructure rather than administrative technique, the article contributes to debates in social theory concerning the durability of inequality and the temporal foundations of governance.