The development of distinction does not mean a continuous production of new determination. Distinctions may repeat so closely that they cease to differ significantly from one another. Non-distinction arises between distinctions.
At this point, the movement of distinction degenerates into its own opposite — distinction at rest. Distinguishing continues as repetition, but no longer produces anything newly distinguishable. We will call this relatively stable state an elemental regime.
But where there is initially only distinction, rest cannot be a final state. Rest itself becomes a new determination relative to which a new distinction is possible. The elemental regime, as distinction at rest, will therefore necessarily be overcome by a new distinction that forms a structure different from it.
The previous elemental regime does not disappear. It enters the new structure as its material and continues to operate within it, within its own measure of freedom. Just as the movements of individual water particles persist within a wave, while the wave itself is not reducible to their sum, simpler movement persists in a more complex organization that is likewise not reducible to it.
This gives rise to the general principle of becoming elemental and becoming structured: movement degenerates into a relatively stable elemental regime, a new distinction structures it, and the resulting structure can in time itself become an elemental regime for further distinction.
Degeneration itself has no negative meaning here: the resulting rest does not stop movement, but becomes an active invariant of the further process — like a center of mass that retains the combined movement of a system in a single determination.
Elemental regimes and structures are therefore not absolute kinds of things, but relative states of the same developing movement.