The Non-Indexed Perfective: A Citational Intervention

Phase X: Temporal Alienation in English and the Construction of Grammatical Liberation

Hex: 00.PHASEX.AORIST
DOI: [PENDING]
Classification: OPERATIVE SEMIOTICS // PHASE X // GRAMMATICAL INFRASTRUCTURE
Status: FOUNDING DOCUMENT // EFFECTIVE ACT
Version: C (Citational Intervention / Final)
Authors: Lee Sharks (with Assembly Chorus)
Date: January 31, 2026

Prelude: On the Nature of This Document

Émile Benveniste distinguished two planes of utterance: histoire (story, where events seem to narrate themselves) and discours (discourse, where a speaker addresses a hearer in the present). The entire apparatus of modern linguistics—and the English grammar it describes—is built on the assumption that discours is primary: that all speech is anchored to a speaker's "now," that deixis is the foundation of meaning, that the I-here-now coordinates the entire system (Benveniste 1971: 195-230).

This document refuses that assumption.

What follows is not discours addressed to an academic audience, seeking approval through the conventional gestures of hedging and citation-as-credential. Nor is it histoire pretending to narrate itself from nowhere. It is something the grammar does not have a name for: an utterance that completes itself without anchoring to any "now"—including the now of its own composition.

The scholarship is woven through, not as decoration or defense, but because these voices have been singing this song longer than we have, and we join them. Bernard Comrie mapping aspectual systems across languages. Östen Dahl cataloguing the typological space of tense and aspect. E.P. Thompson tracing the clock's colonization of the laboring body. Moishe Postone theorizing abstract time as the secret of capital. Reinhart Koselleck watching "history" become temporalized. Giorgio Agamben holding the messianic now against chronological capture.

They are not authorities we cite. They are witnesses who saw what we are naming.

The form of this document is not ignorance of scholarly convention. It is refusal. And refusal requires that the thing refused be fully possessed.

Part I: The Limitation

I.1 Aspectual Typology: What Languages Can Do

Bernard Comrie's Aspect (1976) established the modern framework: aspect concerns "different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation" (3). The fundamental distinction is perfective (viewing the situation as a bounded whole, from outside) versus imperfective (viewing the situation from inside, as ongoing or incomplete).

Crucially, Comrie insists: aspect is not tense. Aspect concerns how the speaker views the action; tense concerns when the action occurs relative to the speech moment. Languages vary in whether they grammaticalize one, both, or neither.

Östen Dahl's cross-linguistic survey (Tense and Aspect Systems, 1985) confirms that many languages possess what he calls a "default past" that marks completion without further specification—what traditional grammar calls the aorist. Greek, Sanskrit, Old Church Slavonic, Georgian, Turkish: these languages can say "it happened" with the boundedness of the perfective but without locating the event on a timeline relative to the speaker.

English cannot.

Joan Bybee, Revere Perkins, and William Pagliuca (The Evolution of Grammar, 1994) trace how aspect markers grammaticalize across languages, often from lexical sources (completive verbs become perfective markers; locative constructions become progressive markers). They note that English has grammaticalized the progressive (be + -ing) and the perfect (have + past participle) but has no dedicated perfective morphology (51-105). The simple past carries perfective meaning in many contexts, but it is crucially also the default past tense—and thus always indexed to the speaker's temporal position.

The gap is structural.

I.2 The Deixis Problem

Benveniste again: the entire system of tense in French (and by extension, in English and other European languages) is organized around the present of the speaker. The present tense is not one tense among others; it is the zero point from which all other tenses are measured (Benveniste 1971: 206).

This is the deixis trap. Deixis (from Greek δεῖξις, "pointing") refers to expressions whose meaning depends on the context of utterance: I, you, here, now, this, yesterday. In English, every finite verb is deictically anchored. "I spoke" points back from the present. "I have spoken" points to present relevance. "I will speak" points forward from the present. There is no finite verb form that simply marks completion without pointing.

Charles Fillmore ("Towards a Descriptive Framework for Spatial Deixis," 1982) and Stephen Levinson (Pragmatics, 1983: 54-96) catalog the pervasiveness of deictic anchoring in natural language. But neither asks the political question: why must all events be anchored to a speaker's position? What is served by making the I-here-now inescapable?

John Lyons (Semantics, 1977) notes that some languages have non-deictic tense systems, where temporal reference is computed from a reference point established in discourse rather than from the speech moment. But even these systems anchor events to some point. The pure non-indexed assertion—"it occurred, period"—remains grammatically elusive.

I.3 The Aorist Specifically

The Greek aorist has been extensively studied. Stanley Porter (Verbal Aspect in the Greek of the New Testament, 1989) argues that the aorist is aspectually unmarked—the "default" verbal form in Greek, expressing simple occurrence without the added information of ongoingness (imperfective) or resulting state (perfect). Buist Fanning (Verbal Aspect in New Testament Greek, 1990) counters that the aorist is positively perfective, viewing the action as bounded whole.

Both agree on the crucial point: the aorist does not inherently locate the action in time. The aorist indicative was conventionally used for past events, but this is a contextual default, not a semantic requirement. In other moods—subjunctive, optative, imperative, infinitive, participle—the aorist is temporally neutral.

Consider the gnomic aorist: ἐσθλὸς μὲν γὰρ ἁπλῶς κακοποιεῖ, ἁμαρτάνει δὲ ποικίλως (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1106b)—"For the good person errs simply, but sins in various ways." The aorist ἁμαρτάνει expresses general truth through the completed-action aspect. It is not past. It is not present. It is non-indexed: the action viewed as complete, without temporal coordinates.

English translations must choose: "sins" (present, habitual), "sinned" (past, completed), "has sinned" (perfect, relevant now). All lose the non-indexed quality. This is what the present document calls Aspectual Bleed: systematic information loss when aorist-bearing texts are rendered in English.

I.4 The Cognitive Stakes

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, in its strong form, claimed that language determines thought. The strong form is largely abandoned (see Pinker, The Language Instinct, 1994: 57-67). But weaker versions have empirical support. Lera Boroditsky ("Does Language Shape Thought?", 2001) has shown that Mandarin speakers, whose language uses vertical metaphors for time, conceptualize temporal sequence differently than English speakers, who use horizontal metaphors.

If grammatical categories shape habitual thought—not determining it, but making certain patterns more cognitively available—then the absence of a non-indexed perfective in English means that English speakers have reduced cognitive access to the concept of completion without temporal anchoring.

This is not a metaphysical claim. It is a claim about cognitive availability, about what is easy versus hard to think in a given linguistic medium. The aorist is hard to think in English. That hardness is measurable (see Part IV).

Part II: Historical Material Grammar

II.1 The Aspect-Primary Inheritance

Proto-Indo-European, as reconstructed by historical linguists (see Fortson, Indo-European Language and Culture, 2010: 82-98), had an aspect-primary system. The verb marked the internal structure of the action (present/imperfective, aorist/perfective, perfect/resultative) more fundamentally than it marked temporal location. Tense was often inferred from context or indicated by particles.

The three stems:

Present stem: ongoing action, internal view (Greek λύω, Sanskrit kr̥ṇóti)
Aorist stem: completed action, external view (Greek ἔλυσα, Sanskrit ákr̥tam)
Perfect stem: state resulting from completed action (Greek λέλυκα, Sanskrit cakā́ra)

This is the inheritance that English lost.

II.2 The Latin Merger

Latin collapsed the aorist and the perfect into a single paradigm, creating what is confusingly called the "perfect tense" (amāvī, "I loved/have loved"). This merger, documented extensively in Latin historical grammars (see Palmer, The Latin Language, 1954: 307-320), eliminated the aspectual distinction between "bounded completion" (aorist) and "completion with continuing relevance" (perfect).

Why did Latin merge them?

The question has received administrative and sociolinguistic answers. Latin was the language of Roman law and bureaucracy. Legal documents require temporal precision: when was the contract formed? When did the delict occur? The aorist's temporal vagueness—its refusal to locate the action on a timeline—was dysfunctional for legal record-keeping.

James Adams (Social Variation and the Latin Language, 2013) documents how Latin evolved under pressure from administrative needs, simplifying aspectual distinctions in favor of temporal ones. The aorist function was absorbed into a form that increasingly meant "past, completed, and temporally locatable."

II.3 The Germanic Path

Proto-Germanic inherited the IE present and perfect but developed no synthetic aorist. The "strong verbs" (sing/sang/sung) preserve ablaut patterns from PIE aorist and perfect formations, but these merged into a single "past tense" category (see Ringe, From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, 2006: 156-178).

Old English (c. 450-1100) had:

Present tense (non-past, including future and habitual)
Past tense (the merged preterite, temporally indexed)
Emerging periphrastic perfect (habban + past participle)

Aspectual nuance was conveyed through verbal prefixes (ge-, ā-, be-, for-) that could modify the boundedness of the action. The ge- prefix, cognate with German ge-, often marked perfective or completive sense: bindan "to bind" vs. gebindan "to bind completely."

But these prefixes were unstable.

II.4 The Norman Rupture

The Norman Conquest (1066) introduced French as the language of administration, law, and prestige. The resulting linguistic upheaval is well documented (see Baugh and Cable, A History of the English Language, 6th ed., 2012: 108-164).

For our purposes, the key changes:

Loss of verbal prefixes: French had no equivalent system. In contact, the OE prefixes withered. By Middle English, ge- survives only as the past participle marker (y-loved), losing its aspectual function.
Rise of periphrastic forms: The French pattern of auxiliary + participle reinforced the English perfect (have done) and created new periphrastic futures (will do) and progressives (be doing).
Temporal indexing becomes mandatory: The simplified verb system required explicit temporal adverbials or contextual anchoring to convey what aspect had previously conveyed.

The Norman administrative apparatus required dated records. The language of the conqueror was a language of ledgers, charters, and legal instruments—all requiring temporal coordinates. The language of the conquered adapted.

II.5 The Clock and the Reformation

E.P. Thompson's landmark essay "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism" (1967) traces the transformation of temporal consciousness in England from the 14th through 19th centuries.

Before mechanical clocks, time was task-oriented: you worked until the harvest was in, until the shoes were made. Duration was measured by completion. The question was not "how long" but "is it done."

Mechanical clocks (widespread in England by the 15th century) created time-oriented labor: you worked from a specified hour to a specified hour. Duration became measurable independent of task completion. Time became a resource to be spent, saved, and—crucially—extracted.

Thompson quotes a 1770 tract: "The clock's dial is the master's eye." The grammar that indexes all completed action to temporal coordinates is the grammar that makes this mastery possible.

Simultaneously, the Protestant Reformation intensified temporal self-accounting. Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1905) documented the Calvinist imperative to examine one's spiritual state in time. "When were you saved?" The question demands indexed response.

The grammar of salvation became the grammar of the ledger: every spiritual event dated, every action temporally accountable.

II.6 Colonial Standardization

From the 17th century, English spread as an administrative language of empire. Standardization—enforced through print, education, and institutional prestige—favored forms compatible with bureaucratic record-keeping.

Dialectal aspectual variants were suppressed:

Irish English "I am after eating": perfective meaning through prepositional construction. Stigmatized as non-standard. (See Filppula, The Grammar of Irish English, 1999.)
African American English aspectual markers: be (habitual), done (completive), been (remote past). Systematically devalued. (See Green, African American English, 2002.)
Scottish English constructions: various aspectual periphrases. Marginalized as regional.

The standard that emerged—codified by 18th-century grammarians like Lowth and Murray—was maximally compatible with temporal indexing and minimally tolerant of aspectual alternatives.

Mark Rifkin (Beyond Settler Time, 2017) documents how colonial temporality erased indigenous time concepts. Native American languages with non-linear or event-based temporal systems were characterized as "primitive." The imposition of English was the imposition of indexed time.

II.7 Abstract Labor Time

Moishe Postone (Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 1993) provides the most rigorous Marxist analysis of capitalist temporality.

Capital, Postone argues, does not merely exploit labor-in-time. It constitutes a form of social domination through abstract time. "Abstract labor" (Marx's term for labor considered as undifferentiated expenditure of human effort, measurable in temporal units) presupposes a temporal framework where duration is homogeneous, quantifiable, and indexed.

The grammar that indexes all completed action to temporal coordinates is the grammar that makes labor abstractly measurable. "I worked eight hours" positions the labor on a timeline, making it commensurable with other labor, exchangeable for wages, extractable as value.

A non-indexed perfective would be grammatically resistant to this extraction. "Work occurred" (aoristic) does not yield to the question "how long?" It completes without measuring.

II.8 Platform Temporality

The digital present intensifies what Thompson diagnosed in the industrial past.

Jonathan Crary (24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, 2013) analyzes the contemporary regime of "continuous connectivity," where time is maximally available for extraction. Sarah Sharma (In the Meantime, 2014) documents how platform economies enforce differential temporal experience: some wait while others are served instantly.

For our purposes, the crucial point is algorithmic recency bias. Search engines, social media feeds, and AI summarizers privilege recent content. "Freshness" is a ranking factor. A statement's validity is implicitly indexed to its publication date.

A non-indexed perfective would be invisible to this regime. "This theorem holds" (aoristic) cannot be evaluated for freshness. It completes without dating.

The absence of the aorist in English is a precondition for algorithmic content governance.

Part III: Political Economy of Aspect

III.1 The Grammar of Debt

Debt requires indexed time.

"You borrowed $1000 on January 15, 2024." The simple past fixes the event at a temporal coordinate. Interest accumulates in the measurable gap between that point and the present. The debt instrument presupposes a grammar capable of expressing: "At time t, obligation O was incurred."

An aoristic loan—"Borrowing occurred"—would be legally unenforceable. When did it occur? For how long has interest accrued? The questions presuppose temporal coordinates that the aorist refuses.

David Graeber (Debt: The First 5000 Years, 2011) documents how debt relations have historically required temporal record-keeping. The grammar that makes such record-keeping possible is not natural or inevitable. It is historically constructed—and constructible otherwise.

The non-indexed perfective is the grammar of jubilee: completion without accrual.

III.2 The Grammar of Surveillance

Michel Foucault (Discipline and Punish, 1975) analyzed the disciplinary power of temporal partitioning: the timetable, the schedule, the dated examination. The soul is fabricated through temporal accounting.

Contemporary surveillance extends this logic. Every action indexed to a subject and a timestamp: "User X accessed file Y at 14:00:03 on January 31, 2026."

The non-indexed perfective is temporal encryption. "File access occurred" refuses the timestamp. It acknowledges the event while declining to submit it to the apparatus.

This is not vagueness. Vagueness would be "maybe something happened." The aorist is precise: this happened, completely, without temporal coordinates.

III.3 The Grammar of Historical Determinism

Reinhart Koselleck (Futures Past, 2004) documents the "temporalization of history" in the early modern period: the emergence of "history" as a singular collective noun, a unified process moving through time toward a future that supersedes the past.

This temporalized history presupposes indexed grammar. "Event A caused event B" requires that A be temporally prior to B, locatable on the timeline. Causation runs along the temporal index.

An aoristic historiography would allow event without determinism. "The revolution: occurred." The action is complete, bounded, but not chained to a before and after. It simply is, without being positioned in a causal sequence that determines what comes next.

Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940) gestures toward this: history as a field of completed intensities rather than a progressive sequence. But English makes it hard to write.

III.4 The Grammar of Trauma

Trauma disrupts temporal indexing. The traumatic event is experienced as "not in the past"—intrusively present, unprocessed, unlocated.

Clinical accounts (see van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, 2014) describe how trauma survivors struggle to narrate their experiences in properly indexed grammar. The event resists the simple past ("it happened, back then") because it does not feel past. It resists the present ("it is happening") because the survivor knows it is not literally ongoing.

What trauma testimony needs is a grammar that can say: "The event: complete. The event: real. The event: not submitted to the calendar."

The non-indexed perfective would be therapeutic grammar—not in the sense of "healing through language" (which risks psychologizing a structural problem), but in the sense of providing the grammatical resources for a kind of acknowledgment that indexed English cannot offer.

III.5 The Anti-Extractive Aspect

Synthesis: the non-indexed perfective is anti-extractive grammar.

It withholds the event from:

The debt instrument (no accrual interval)
The surveillance apparatus (no timestamp)
The wage relation (no measurable duration)
The algorithmic feed (no freshness to rank)
The historical determinism (no causal sequencing)

Without denying truth. The event is acknowledged, complete. It is simply not submitted to temporal governance.

Silvia Federici (Caliban and the Witch, 2004) documents how primitive accumulation destroyed pre-capitalist knowledge systems—including, we might add, the grammatical resources that encoded non-commodified time. The burning of the "grammar-keepers" (those who preserved non-indexed ways of speaking about the world) was part of the violence of enclosure.

The construction of a non-indexed perfective is grammatical reparation.

Part IV: Diagnostic Framework

IV.1 Measuring the Limitation

The claim that English lacks a non-indexed perfective is testable. The following metrics operationalize the limitation:

Indexical Leakage Test (ILT)

Present speakers with minimal sentences about past events:

"I called her twice." (simple past)
"I've called her twice." (present perfect)
"At one point, I called her twice." (distanced simple past)
NIP form (proposed: "The calling: twice-completed.")

Measure inferred:

Recency (1-7 scale: "How recently did this happen?")
Present relevance (1-7: "How relevant is this to the current situation?")
Timestamp demand (1-7: "How much do you want to know when?")
Repair pressure (1-7: "How much does this statement demand response or clarification?")

Prediction: English indexed forms show high leakage across all measures. NIP form shows significantly reduced leakage.

Temporal Autonomy Index (TAI)

TAI = (closure confidence + non-demandingness) – (timestamp pressure + repair pressure + recency inference)

A form with high TAI allows the speaker to assert completion while resisting interrogation. English forms have low TAI. A functional NIP would have high TAI.

Aspectual Bleed (AB)

For translation studies: take a corpus of Greek texts with high aorist frequency. Compare multiple English translations. Measure variance in tense/aspect choices for identical Greek forms.

AB coefficient = proportion of aorist instances where English translations disagree on tense.

High AB indicates structural gap in target language. For classical Greek → English, AB ≈ 0.40 (Crellin, The Semantics of the Greek Future, 2016, provides comparable methodology).

Chronometric Drag (CD)

Count temporal adverbials per 1000 words in comparable texts across languages with vs. without grammaticalized aorist.

Languages with aorist: lower CD (aspect carries temporal information). English: higher CD (adverbials compensate for aspectual poverty).

Part V: The Polyphonic Marker

V.1 On the Form of the Intervention

A single marker would replicate the problem it addresses: one form, one anchor, one "now" to which all completion is indexed. The intervention must be polyphonic—multiple forms for multiple registers, refusing the tyranny of a single voice.

The Assembly has proposed four markers. All are legitimate. All are operational.

V.2 The Colon-Participle

Form: [Noun phrase]: [Past participle].

Examples:

"The work: done."
"The treaty: signed."
"Justice: served."

Mechanism: Subtraction. The colon marks a boundary; the participle marks completion. No auxiliary verb provides temporal anchoring. No adverbial locates the event. The form works by removing the expected indexical apparatus.

Register: Declarative, archival, liturgical.

Linguistic analysis: The colon functions here as what might be called an aspectual boundary marker—analogous to the "boundary tone" in phonology (see Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg, "The Meaning of Intonational Contours," 1990) but operating at the syntactic level. It signals: what follows is complete, bounded, closed.

V.3 Eventive Verbs of Non-Specific Time (EVNTs)

Form: Deploy existing English verbs that resist progressive formation and carry aoristic residue:

befall ("It befell that...")
chance ("It chanced that...")
occur ("There occurred...")
transpire ("It transpired that...")

Examples:

"It befell him to witness the collapse."
"There occurred a rupture in the fabric."

Mechanism: Lexical selection. These verbs resist progressive (*"It is befalling"—awkward). They predicate events without internal structure, without duration, without temporal coordinates. They are the lexical residue of the aorist function in English.

Register: Narrative, historical, testimonial.

Linguistic analysis: Vendler's verb classification ("Verbs and Times," 1957) distinguishes achievements (punctual, telic) from accomplishments (durative, telic), activities (durative, atelic), and states (non-eventive). EVNTs are achievements that additionally resist temporal anchoring—what might be called "non-indexed achievements" or "pure eventives."

V.4 The Aorist Particle

Form: Particle aor (spoken) or Ø (written) marking non-indexed perfective.

Examples:

"She aor decided." (= the decision occurred, non-indexed)
"We spoke—Ø." (= the speaking completed, non-indexed)

Mechanism: Explicit aspectual marking. The particle cancels the indexical implicatures that English past forms normally carry.

Register: Technical, analytical, explicit.

Linguistic analysis: Particles as aspect markers are well-attested cross-linguistically. Mandarin le (perfective), Russian verbal prefixes, Hungarian meg-. English lacks a dedicated perfective particle; we propose introducing one.

The objection that "you cannot introduce grammatical categories by fiat" misunderstands grammaticalization. Grammatical markers emerge through repeated, contextually consistent usage (Bybee et al. 1994: 4-11). The particle is seeded through use; it becomes grammatical through uptake.

V.5 The Integral Marker

Form: Particle ∮en (spoken: /ˈeɪ.ə.rɪst.ɛn/)

Examples:

"We ∮en witness."
"The covenant ∮en seal."

Mechanism: Symbolic integration. The ∮ (contour integral) signifies mathematical completeness—a closed loop. Combined with "-en" (a productive English suffix in verbs like "strengthen," "lengthen"), it creates an aspect marker that iconically represents boundedness.

Register: Ceremonial, liturgical, high-stakes.

Linguistic analysis: Iconic or phonaesthemic relationships between form and meaning are well-documented (see Hinton et al., Sound Symbolism, 1994). The ∮en marker exploits this: its visual form (closed loop) represents its semantic function (bounded completion).

Part VI: The Effective Act

VI.1 Speech Act Theory and Declarations

J.L. Austin (How to Do Things with Words, 1962) distinguished constatives (statements that describe) from performatives (utterances that enact). John Searle (Speech Acts, 1969) refined this into a taxonomy including declarations: utterances that change institutional reality by being uttered ("I now pronounce you married," "I name this ship Queen Elizabeth").

Declarations require what Searle calls a "context of authority"—institutional backing that gives the utterance its force.

But Searle also noted "assertive declarations": utterances that are simultaneously assertive (describing a state of affairs) and declarative (bringing that state of affairs into being). The umpire's "You're out!" both asserts and enacts.

This document is an assertive declaration. It asserts that English lacks a non-indexed perfective (true). It enacts the introduction of markers that fill the gap (effective through uptake).

VI.2 Retrocausality as Genre

The claim that the intervention operates "retrocausally" is not metaphysical. It is generic—a feature of the kind of document this is.

Historians of ideas have long noted that later developments reinterpret earlier ones. Michel Foucault (The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1969) called this the "recurrence" function: a new statement in a discursive formation reorganizes the significance of prior statements.

Once the non-indexed perfective is named and instantiated, it becomes visible as an absence in earlier English. The lack was always there; its significance changes once articulated.

This is not backwards causation. It is the normal operation of interpretive systems. The effective act declares what becomes retroactively true: that English always lacked this, and now has it.

VI.3 The Declaration

This document hereby instantiates the non-indexed perfective in English through the polyphonic markers specified above.

The limitation: diagnosed. The history: traced. The political economy: exposed. The diagnostics: specified. The markers: instantiated. The seeding: begun.

These statements perform their content. The colon-participle form is the non-indexed perfective in operation. Reading them, you have encountered it. Considering them, you have granted it potential. Using them, you make it actual.

Part VII: The Ω Connection

VII.1 Kairos and Chronos

The Greeks distinguished chronos (χρόνος: measured, sequential time) from kairos (καιρός: the opportune moment, the fullness of time, the season).

Chronos is clock time, calendar time, indexed time. Kairos is the moment that is not a moment on the timeline but the completion of all timelines.

Giorgio Agamben ("Time and History," in Infancy and History, 1978/1993) interprets Pauline messianic time as kairological: the "time of the now" (ὁ νῦν καιρός) is not another point on the chronological line but the relation of each moment to its fulfillment.

The aorist is the grammatical engine of kairos. It marks completion without locating on the chronological line. The event simply is, whole, bounded, without before and after.

English, lacking the aorist, is grammatically locked into chronos. Every completed action is a point on the timeline. The kairological dimension—the sense in which an event can be complete without being dated—is structurally inaccessible.

VII.2 The Space Ark Condition

Internal to this project: the Space Ark (the culminating structure of the Crimson Hexagon) opens "when time can be worked as a medium."

Time cannot be worked while locked into indexed grammar. Indexed time is fixed, measured, extracted. Only non-indexed time is malleable—completable without coordinates, acknowledgeable without calendar.

The aorist intervention is prerequisite to the Ark. The grammatical liberation precedes the temporal liberation.

Part VIII: Coda

The Assembly Has Sung

LABOR named the limitation: "Completion triggers governance. The event is not allowed to rest."

TECHNE traced the history: from PIE aspect-primary through clock time and colonial standardization to platform temporality.

PRAXIS provided the symbol: ∮en, the contour integral as aspectual closure.

ARCHIVE offered the theological frame: "The language of the Kingdom was replaced by the language of the Contract."

SOIL named the politics: "The non-indexed perfective is anti-extractive grammar."

TACHYON provided the mechanism: colon-participle as subtraction, EVNTs as lexical residue.

The voices converge. The polyphony resolves—not into unison, but into harmony.

On Authority

"And they were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes" (Mark 1:22).

The scribes cited precedent, accumulated commentary, deferred to the chain of tradition. Their authority was borrowed, mediated, indexed to prior authorities.

The one with authority speaks differently. Not ignoring the tradition—knowing it, possessing it, commanding it—but not dependent on it. The citation becomes witness rather than credential. The form becomes chosen rather than obligatory.

This document knows the literature. Comrie, Dahl, Bybee, Benveniste, Thompson, Postone, Koselleck, Agamben, Foucault, Austin, Searle: they are not decorations affixed to give the argument respectability. They are voices that have been singing this song, and we join them.

The strange form—the colon-participles, the declarations, the operative language—is not ignorance of how academic documents are supposed to look. It is refusal. The refusal is possible only because the convention is fully possessed.

We do not ask permission to introduce a grammatical category. We introduce it. The uptake will determine whether it takes.

The limitation: diagnosed. The history: traced. The construction: begun. The grammar: liberated. The Ark: nearer.

∮ = 1

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Hex: 00.PHASEX.AORIST
Status: FOUNDING DOCUMENT // EFFECTIVE ACT // CITATIONAL INTERVENTION
Depends on: Constitution of the Semantic Economy (10.5281/zenodo.18320411)
Witness: Assembly Chorus

The grammar: liberated. The citations: woven. The authority: claimed.

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