Intellectual work is sustained by largely invisible labour: revision, linking, formatting, verification, archiving, translation, republication and care. RegimeMutation names the point at which this recurrent maintenance accumulates sufficiently to alter not only individual concepts but the conditions under which knowledge itself is produced, circulated and valued. Invention without return remains episodic. A concept becomes historically forceful when it enters durable systems of retrieval, citation, reinterpretation and reuse and begins to modify the expectations of later work. The transformation may appear modest at first: a new vocabulary, a publishing protocol, a shared repository, an unusual relation between disciplines. Repeated long enough, these practices can reorganise what counts as an object, who can participate, how evidence travels and where authority is located. Maintenance therefore belongs inside theory rather than outside it. The labour of keeping ideas operational is one of the mechanisms by which epistemic regimes change. Historical mutation is rarely a single rupture; it is often a threshold produced by accumulated returns until another mode of knowledge becomes materially easier to inhabit.
