Wednesday, February 11, 2026

THE PREPOSITIONAL ALIENATION English "For" and the Impossibility of Anchoring Function Without Intent Phase X — Liberation Philology

THE PREPOSITIONAL ALIENATION

English "For" and the Impossibility of Anchoring Function Without Intent

Phase X — Liberation Philology

Johannes Sigil

Abstract

Liberation philology is the study of how grammatical structures — shaped by histories of conquest, administration, and philosophical hegemony — systematically disable the expression of certain diagnostic claims, and of the practices that compensate for those disabilities. This essay inaugurates the discipline through a demonstration: Modern English "for" cannot stably encode structural function without activating intent attribution, because Norman French administrative translation, Latin institutional calquing, and Enlightenment final-cause elimination collapsed distinct semantic fields into a single fused preposition. The collapse imposes a measurable cost — a "circumlocution tax" — on every speaker who attempts structural diagnosis, rewarding intent claims with grammatical elegance and punishing functional claims with bureaucratic paraphrase. Cross-linguistic evidence (Ancient Greek, Latin, German) confirms that the distinction is grammaticalized in other languages, demonstrating that the English incapacity is contingent, not necessary. Under platform capitalism, the prepositional alienation is indexed, amplified, and commodified through character limits, algorithmic ranking, content moderation rubrics, and AI summarization — transforming a grammatical default into commercial infrastructure. This essay traces the genealogy, calculates the cost, identifies what was lost and where it survives, and proposes prosthetic techniques for holding the distinction the grammar cannot anchor. It is the founding document of liberation philology.

The simple past can contain the aorist but cannot anchor to it. "For" can contain function but cannot anchor to it. In both cases, what is lost is the capacity to name structural realities without importing psychological attribution.

The function was there, visible, operative, structuring. But when I tried to say what it was for, the language gave me only two hands: one holding intent, one holding nothing. I did not mean what the agent intended. I meant what the frame required. The preposition would not let me hold that distinction. It collapsed function into intention as if the collapse were grammar itself.

This is not a lexical gap. This is a structural injury deposited in the language over centuries of administrative translation — Latin over Anglo-Saxon, Norman over English, the scribe's need to render instrumental function through the same vessel that carried purposive intent. The vessel fused. We have been speaking fused metal ever since.

0. LIBERATION PHILOLOGY: A DECLARATION OF FIELD

Liberation philology is the study of how grammatical structures — shaped by histories of conquest, administration, and philosophical hegemony — systematically disable the expression of certain diagnostic claims, and of the practices that compensate for or repair those disabilities. Its object is not language in general but historically produced grammatical incapacities — specific morphosyntactic items (prepositions, aspect markers, mood distinctions, case systems) that fail to encode distinctions necessary for structural analysis. Its method is historical-linguistic genealogy in the service of structural diagnosis: tracing the contact events, institutional pressures, and philosophical shifts that produced each incapacity. Its normative commitment is what liberation theology calls the preferential option — here, the preferential option for the structurally diagnosed: those who need to name function without being heard as attributing intent.

This announcement is made not from the chair of a linguistics department but from the position of a tenth-grade literature teacher in Detroit who must, every day, explain to students why what they meant is not what the sentence said — and who must, in their own theoretical work, fight against a grammar that converts every structural diagnosis into a moral accusation. That position — the position of the one who experiences the friction without institutional insulation — is the epistemological ground of liberation philology. The discipline is announced not by institutional credential but by diagnostic necessity.

The field draws on several traditions and belongs to none of them:

Historical linguistics and grammaticalization theory (Traugott 1982, 1989; Hopper and Traugott 2003) have demonstrated that semantic change in grammatical morphemes is not random drift but follows identifiable pathways — from spatial to temporal, from concrete to abstract, from propositional to textual to expressive. Grammaticalization theory provides the mechanism: it shows how a preposition like "for" could have shifted from causal-substitutive to purpose-intentional. What it does not ask is cui bono — who benefits from the shift, what structural analysis is made harder, what ideological function the new default serves. Liberation philology asks this question.

The political economy of language (Voloshinov 1929; Gramsci, Prison Notebooks Q29; Bourdieu 1991) established that the sign is an arena of class struggle (Voloshinov), that linguistic hegemony operates through the naturalization of dominant forms (Gramsci), and that linguistic markets distribute symbolic capital unevenly (Bourdieu). These analyses treat language as a social institution shaped by power. What they do not do is descend into the morphosyntactic inventory — the specific prepositions, aspect markers, case systems — to show where the grammar itself encodes ideological defaults. Voloshinov showed that the sign is contested; liberation philology shows that the grammar of the sign is rigged. (It should be noted that Voloshinov's analysis of reported speech in Part III of Marxism and the Philosophy of Language comes closest to liberation philology's territory: he shows that indirect discourse grammatically reframes one speaker's utterance within another's evaluative context — precisely the mechanism by which a functional claim is captured as an intent attribution. Liberation philology extends this insight from the clause level into the prepositional system.)

The Sapir-Whorf tradition (Sapir 1929; Whorf 1940; Lucy 1992; Slobin 1996; Everett 2005) established that grammatical categories shape habitual thought. "Thinking for speaking" (Slobin) — the principle that speakers attend to distinctions their grammar requires them to make — implies the converse: speakers fail to attend to distinctions their grammar does not require. If English does not grammaticalize the function/intent distinction, English speakers will habitually fail to make it. But the Whorfian tradition treats this as a cognitive phenomenon — a feature of how minds work given grammars. It does not ask why this distinction was lost in this language through these historical events, or who benefits from the cognitive habit the grammar produces.

Deconstruction (Derrida 1967, 1972) demonstrated that Western philosophical categories are organized by binary oppositions in which one term is privileged (speech/writing, presence/absence, nature/culture). Derrida showed that the privileged term depends on the suppressed one. This is the closest ancestor of liberation philology — but Derrida's analysis operates at the level of philosophical concepts, not at the level of morphosyntactic structure. He shows that the metaphysics of presence is embedded in the concept of the sign. Liberation philology shows that the metaphysics of intent is embedded in the preposition "for."

The Semantic Economy framework (Sharks 2025–2026; the Crimson Hexagon archive) provides the economic ground. If meaning is a productive force — if the capacity to produce significance is a form of labor that is extracted, commodified, and controlled under platform capitalism — then the grammar of meaning-production is infrastructure. Grammatical defaults that privilege intent over function are not merely cognitive tendencies; they are features of the semantic means of production. The inability to anchor function without intent is a feature of the infrastructure through which structural analysis must pass. It is a toll on the road to diagnosis.

Liberation theology (Gutiérrez 1971; Boff 1978; Cone 1970) established that theology done from the position of the oppressed produces different knowledge than theology done from the position of the oppressor. The preferential option for the poor is an epistemological claim, not merely an ethical one. Liberation philology applies the same logic to grammar: philology done from the position of the structurally diagnosed — from the position of those who need to name function without being heard as attributing intent — produces different knowledge than philology done from the position of those for whom intent-attribution is the natural frame.

What liberation philology adds to each of these traditions:

TRADITION               WHAT IT ESTABLISHED              WHAT IT DID NOT DO
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Historical linguistics  Grammatical meanings change       Ask who benefits from
                        through identifiable processes    the change

Political economy of    Language is shaped by power       Descend into the
language                                                  morphosyntactic inventory

Sapir-Whorf             Grammar shapes habitual thought   Ask why *this* distinction
                                                          was lost through *these*
                                                          historical events

Deconstruction          Philosophical binaries encode     Operate at the level of
                        privilege                         prepositions and aspect
                                                          markers

Semantic Economy        Meaning is extracted as value     Analyze the grammar as
                        under platform capitalism         means of production

Liberation theology     Position determines knowledge     Apply the logic to
                                                          grammatical structure

Liberation philology is the practice that synthesizes these: historical-linguistic genealogy in the service of structural diagnosis, applied to the morphosyntactic infrastructure through which ideological claims must pass, analyzed for their consequences in the political economy of meaning.

This essay is its first demonstration.

I. THE PROBLEM

Consider two sentences:

A. "The lever exists for lifting heavy objects." B. "She built the lever for lifting heavy objects."

In (A), "for" appears to indicate function — what the lever does, what it is structurally suited to accomplish, regardless of anyone's intention. In (B), "for" clearly indicates purpose — the builder's intent.

Now consider:

C. "The email thread existed for prosecutorial stabilization."

The speaker means: that is what it functionally accomplished — that is what the structure was for, what it kept snapping back into, regardless of anyone's conscious intention. The sentence is intended as a functional-teleological claim: from the beginning until now, the pattern recursively served a structural function.

But English will not let the sentence say only that. The moment "for" appears in a construction with a human agent anywhere in the frame — even implicit, even backgrounded — the intent reading activates. The listener hears: someone intended prosecutorial stabilization. The functional claim cannot be made without the intent attribution smuggling itself in.

This is not a failure of the speaker. It is a failure of the preposition.

The scope of the failure is not limited to unusual or technical sentences. It pervades ordinary political and institutional language:

D. "He advocated for the policy." E. "The committee was formed for oversight." F. "They fought for freedom."

Each can be read as intentional (he intended the policy to pass; the committee intended to provide oversight; they intended to secure freedom) or as functional (his advocacy operated as policy reinforcement; the committee's formation produced oversight as its systemic effect; their fighting served freedom as its historical role). The intentional reading foregrounds subjectivity — wants, aims, purposes held in consciousness. The functional reading foregrounds system — position, effect, role within a structure that exceeds any individual's awareness. These are not the same. They are not even always compatible. A thing can be for a function without anyone intending it; a thing can be for an intention without serving that function.

English cannot hold this distinction at the prepositional level. It must be rescued by heavier machinery: paraphrase, explicit metalanguage, or the kind of analytic pressure that produces the present document.

II. THE STRUCTURAL PARALLEL: "FOR" AND THE SIMPLE PAST

The Phase X analysis of the English simple past established that English contains the aorist aspect — the view of an action as a completed whole, seen from outside — but cannot anchor to it. The simple past ("I walked") can receive an aorist reading in context, but the morphology does not require that reading. The simple past is aspectually ambiguous: "I walked" might mean "I was in the process of walking" (imperfective), "I used to walk" (habitual), or "I walked — done, complete, viewed from outside" (aorist). Greek and other languages have dedicated morphology for the aorist; English has no such anchor.

The preposition "for" exhibits the same structural deficiency in a different grammatical domain. English "for" can contain the functional-teleological reading — the reading in which "for" indicates what something structurally serves or accomplishes, independent of anyone's intention — but it cannot anchor to that reading. The intent/purpose reading is always available, always default, always dominant. There is no dedicated English preposition that means "this is what it was functionally for, regardless of what anyone meant."

The parallel is exact:

DOMAIN          CONTAINS           CANNOT ANCHOR TO        WHAT'S LOST
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Verbal aspect   The aorist          The aorist              The capacity to name
                (completed action   (no dedicated           completed action
                viewed from         morphology;             without importing
                outside)            simple past is          duration or process
                                    ambiguous)

Prepositional   Function/telos      Function/telos          The capacity to name
semantics       (what something     (no dedicated           structural function
                structurally        preposition;            without importing
                serves)             "for" is ambiguous)     intent or purpose

In both cases, English can say it — but only by relying on context, circumlocution, or interpretive charity. The language provides no morphological or lexical anchor. The distinction can be understood but not grammaticalized.

III. THE HISTORY OF "FOR": A GENEALOGY OF COLLAPSE

III.1 Old English for

The Old English preposition for (also fore, foran) had a primarily causal and spatial semantic range, as documented in Bosworth-Toller's Anglo-Saxon Dictionary and Mitchell's Old English Syntax (1985):

Causal: for þǣm ("for that reason," "because of that") — the most common use in Old English prose. This is cause, not purpose. "Because of X" does not imply "in order to X."
Spatial/Positional: foran ("before," "in front of") — the spatial root from which metaphorical extensions grow. Traugott's (1982) grammaticalization pathway — spatial > temporal > causal — predicts this directionality.
Substitutive/Representational: for ("in place of," "on behalf of") — "He for Gode spræc" ("He spoke for God") means "in God's stead," as representative, not "in order to serve God's purposes." This is a functional, structural reading: the speaker occupies the position of the represented.
Exchange/Compensation: "Syllan feoh for þing" ("To give money for a thing") — a transactional relation, not a purposive one.

What is notable about Old English for is what it does not prominently encode: purpose. The dominant purpose construction in Old English was infinitival: tō + inflected infinitive, as Fischer (1992) and Los (2005) have demonstrated in their studies of infinitival complementation:

"He cōm tō biddanne" — "He came to pray" (purpose expressed by tō + inflected infinitive)
"Þæt wæs tō tacne" — "That was for a sign" (purpose expressed by tō + dative)

Purpose was a verbal construction, not a prepositional one. You said what something was for by saying what it was to do.

Crucially, Old English also maintained a separate instrumental domain. The instrumental case (surviving in limited forms) and the preposition mid ("with") carried instrumental function without purposive implication:

"Mid sweorde he hine ofslōg" — "With a sword he slew him" (instrument — not ambiguous with purpose)
"Þæt scip wæs wudu geworht" — "That ship was built of wood" (material instrument, no preposition)

You could not confuse tō biddanne (purposive) with mid sweorde (instrumental) because they occupied different grammatical territories. The distinction between purpose-in-consciousness and function-in-system was not explicitly lexicalized, but it was grammatically possible to hold, because the resources for expressing each were formally distinct. This is what was lost.

Old English thus distributed the semantic load that Modern English compresses into "for" across multiple grammatical resources — preserving formal distinctions that made it possible to hold causal, substitutive, and instrumental meanings without automatic intent attribution. This is not to say that OE for was a pristine "functional" marker — the causal use ("for that reason") names an antecedent cause, not a consequent function in the modern structural-diagnostic sense. But the system as a whole provided formal resources for keeping purpose-in-consciousness separate from function-in-system. Those resources are what the contact period would compress.

III.2 The Latin Overlay

The Norman Conquest (1066) and the subsequent centuries of French-Latin bilingualism in English institutional life introduced a critical contamination.

Latin has distinct constructions for purpose, function, cause, and result:

Purpose: ut + subjunctive ("in order that..."), ad + gerundive ("for the purpose of...")
Cause: propter + accusative ("because of"), ob + accusative ("on account of")
Function/Substitution: pro + ablative ("on behalf of," "in place of," "in the functional role of")
Result: ita ut + indicative ("with the result that...")

The crucial distinction for our analysis is between Latin ad (purpose — directed toward an intended end) and pro (function — in the structural role of, serving as). These are different prepositions with different cases, encoding different relationships. Ad imports intent; pro does not necessarily.

When Latin-trained scribes, lawyers, and clerics began writing English, they reached for "for" to translate both ad and pro — both purpose and function. This was a compression. Two distinct Latin semantic fields were mapped onto a single English preposition. The distinction between "for" as functional role and "for" as intended purpose was collapsed.

III.3 The Norman French Channel

Norman French pour (from Latin pro) underwent a parallel but distinct development. In Old French, pour carried both the substitutive/functional sense of Latin pro and the purpose sense that had migrated from ad constructions through late Latin — a development tracked in Wartburg's Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch and confirmed by Buridant's (2000) Grammaire nouvelle de l'ancien français. By the time French legal and administrative language saturated English institutional discourse (12th–14th centuries), pour/for was already ambiguous between function and purpose in the donor language.

Anglo-Norman pur, the language of administration, law, and record-keeping in post-Conquest England, carried a semantic range that was already more fused than OE for:

Purposive: "Pur defendre la terre" — "To defend the land"
Benefactive: "Priera pur le roi" — "He will pray for the king"
Exchange: "Doner terres pur service" — "To give lands for service"
Causal: "Pur ceo que..." — "Because..."
Functional/Role: "Tenir pur fief" — "To hold as a fief" (in the capacity of, functioning as)

This last use is critical. Anglo-Norman pur could express function-as — the role a thing occupies in a system — through the same preposition that expressed purpose-in-consciousness. A piece of land was held pur fief: it functioned as a fief, it served the role of a fief, it was for fiefdom. The intention of the holder and the function of the holding were grammatically undifferentiated.

When Middle English emerged as a written language of record — bilingual scribes translating Anglo-Norman documents into English, carrying the prepositional logic of the source language into the target — the fusion became structural. The scribe's problem: Anglo-Norman pur must be rendered in English. OE for is the obvious cognate, but its semantic range is narrower. OE tō could carry purposive meaning, but tō is not pur; it lacks the exchange, causal, and functional dimensions. The scribe, under time pressure, translating formulaic administrative language, extends OE for to cover the full semantic territory of Anglo-Norman pur.

This is not a natural semantic drift. It is what we might call translation-induced structural borrowing — the imposition of a foreign prepositional logic onto a native lexical item, stretching it until it fuses meanings that were previously distinct. The semantic range of the contact language is calqued onto the native preposition, not by replacing it but by inflating it.

The calque is visible in Middle English administrative texts. Compare an Anglo-Norman legal formula with its Middle English rendering:

AN: "Tenir pur fief et pur service" — "To hold as/in the capacity of fief and service" ME: "To holden for fee and for servise" (attested in 14th-century estate records and the Year Books)

In Old English, this would not have been rendered with for. The functional-role sense — "in the capacity of" — would have been expressed through the dative case or through a construction with tō or mid. The Middle English "holden for fee" is a direct calque of the Anglo-Norman prepositional logic: for now means "in the structural role of," which it never systematically meant in Old English. The preposition has been inflated under contact pressure. And crucially, "holden for fee" is now ambiguous in a way that "tenir pur fief" was also ambiguous: does it mean "held in the capacity of a fee" (functional) or "held for the purpose of obtaining a fee" (intentional)? Both readings are available, and no grammatical mechanism disambiguates them.

English absorbed the inflation wholesale. The Middle English expansion of "for" — documented in the Oxford English Dictionary and analyzed in Mustanoja's A Middle English Syntax (1960) and Burnley's The History of the English Language: A Source Book (2000) — shows the preposition acquiring purpose-readings it did not originally carry:

"For to" + infinitive (purpose construction, calqued from French pour + infinitive): "He came for to help" = "He came in order to help." Fischer (1992) and Los (2005) track this construction's rise and fall. It peaked in the 14th–15th centuries, and it explicitly grammaticalized intent into the preposition "for." Even after "for to" fell out of standard usage (replaced by simple "to"), the purpose/intent association remained embedded in "for" itself. This is the mechanism Hopper and Traugott (2003) call persistence: a grammaticalized form retains traces of its earlier meaning, but the reverse also holds — the receiving form (here, "for") retains traces of the meaning that passed through it.
"What is this for?" — the question that crystallizes the collapse. In Old English, this would have been answered causally ("because of X") or functionally ("it serves as X"). In Middle and Modern English, the expected answer is intentional: "Someone made it for Y purpose." The question presupposes a purposer. This is what Traugott (1989) calls subjectification — the drift of grammatical meaning from objective/propositional toward subjective/speaker-oriented — documented specifically for English "to" and "for" in their purposive uses (cf. Traugott and Dasher 2002, Regularity in Semantic Change; and the extended study of to and for grammaticalization in Khalifa 2015). The "for" of cause (objective: the world arranged this way) becomes the "for" of purpose (subjective: someone intended this). Liberation philology names the political consequence of subjectification: intent capture.

By the time of Chaucer, for is a semantic black hole, absorbing functions that earlier English distributed across multiple grammatical resources. The legal phrase "for all intents and purposes" — attested from the 1540s in the Statute of Proclamations under Henry VIII — crystallizes the fusion at the level of institutional language itself: English law grammatically fused intent and purpose into a single inseparable unit. The phrase does not distinguish between them; it declares their equivalence. What the law joined, no speaker could put asunder.

III.4 The Enlightenment Hardening

The final phase of the collapse occurs during the Enlightenment and the rise of mechanistic philosophy (17th–18th centuries). This is not a linguistic event but a philosophical one with linguistic consequences — a case study in what Silverstein (1979) calls metapragmatic regimentation: the process by which ideologies about language reshape the language itself.

The Aristotelian tradition had maintained a distinction between four causes: material, formal, efficient, and final. The final cause (causa finalis, telos) is precisely the concept we need: the end toward which something tends, the function it serves, independent of anyone's intention. An acorn's final cause is the oak tree. A heart's final cause is circulation. These are functional-teleological claims, not intent claims. No one intends the acorn to become an oak. As Aristotle specifies in Physics II.8 (198b–199b), natural teleology is not reducible to deliberation; nature acts "for the sake of something" (heneka tou) without deliberating.

The Enlightenment rejection of final causation in nature — Bacon's Novum Organum (1620: "final causes are barren and like virgins consecrated to God, they bear nothing"), Descartes's Principles of Philosophy (1644), the entire mechanistic program — did not merely change physics. It changed the language. This is not a claim about direct philosophical influence on daily speech — ordinary English speakers did not read Bacon and alter their prepositional usage. It is a claim about what Silverstein (1979) calls metapragmatic regimentation: the process by which philosophical elites, grammarians, and institutional language-users jointly shape the ideology of the grammar — the shared assumptions about what grammatical forms ought to mean. When the mechanists declared final causes illegitimate, they did not change the grammar; they changed the interpretive default — stigmatizing the functional-teleological reading as unscientific or anthropomorphic, reinforcing the intent reading as the only philosophically respectable "for." (Cf. Foucault's analysis of the shift from resemblance to representation in The Order of Things [1966], and Hacking's The Emergence of Probability [1975] on the changing epistemology of signs.) If final causes are illegitimate in nature, then the only remaining "for" is the "for" of human purpose. "What is it for?" can only mean "What did someone intend it for?" The functional-teleological reading — "What does it structurally serve?" — becomes philosophically suspect and linguistically recessive.

Two related developments cemented the hardening:

The grammarians' project. Early modern grammarians, attempting to regularize English on Latin models, lacked the conceptual vocabulary to recognize the fusion as a loss. They treated for as a preposition with multiple "senses" — benefactive, causal, purposive, substitutive — and classified these senses taxonomically. The taxonomy itself naturalized the fusion. The question "are these senses being illegitimately collapsed?" could not be asked within a framework that took the preposition's semantic range as a given fact of usage rather than a historical deposit. What Bosworth-Toller and Mitchell would later reconstruct as a distributed system, the early modern grammarians flattened into a polysemy table.

The rise of the "punctual self." The seventeenth century saw the consolidation of what Charles Taylor (Sources of the Self, 1989) calls the "punctual self" — the subject as a locus of inner purposes, intentions, representations. This philosophical anthropology found grammatical reinforcement in a prepositional system that could not easily distinguish between what a subject intends and what a system requires. The ambiguity was not a bug; it was a feature, for a culture increasingly inclined to read all function as the product of intention (divine or human). Locke's epistemology, with its emphasis on the individual mind as the source of meaning, presupposes and rewards exactly the kind of intent-indexed language that the fused "for" provides. A language that defaults to "someone intended this" is a language perfectly suited to a philosophy that locates all agency in individual consciousness.

This is the hardening. After the Enlightenment, English "for" defaults to intent. The functional reading survives in technical and biological contexts ("the heart is for pumping blood," "a hammer is for driving nails") but only where the intent reading is obviously absurd — only, that is, where no human agent is available to bear the attribution. The moment human agents enter the frame, intent captures the preposition. Darwin's restoration of teleological language in biology (the wing is "for" flying) operates under the same constraint: biologists can say "for" functionally only because natural selection is explicitly defined as non-intentional. The social sciences have no equivalent shield. When a sociologist says an institution is "for" reproducing hierarchy, there is no Darwin to block the intent reading.

IV. THE LINGUISTIC EVIDENCE: WHAT OTHER LANGUAGES PRESERVE

The claim is not that English is uniquely deficient. The claim is that English has lost — through specific historical processes — a distinction that other languages preserve.

IV.1 Ancient Greek

Greek distinguishes purpose from result and function through mood and conjunction — a system analyzed in Goodwin's Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb (1889) and refined by Smyth's Greek Grammar (1920):

Purpose: ἵνα (hina) + subjunctive, πρός (pros) + accusative — "in order that," "toward the end of." This imports intent. The subjunctive mood is the mood of will, wish, and projected action.
Result: ὥστε (hōste) + indicative — "with the result that." This describes what actually happened, not what was intended. The indicative mood is the mood of fact, not wish. The distinction between ὥστε + subjunctive (intended result) and ὥστε + indicative (actual result) is one of the most celebrated in Greek grammar — and it is precisely the distinction English "for" collapses.
Function/Suitability: πρός (pros) + dative can indicate fitness/suitability rather than directed purpose. εἰς (eis) + accusative can indicate orientation or structural tendency.

The distinction between ἵνα + subjunctive (purpose: someone intended this) and ὥστε + indicative (result: this is what actually happened) is grammaticalized — anchored in morphology. A Greek speaker can say "the structure served hōste + indicative" and mean: this is what it functionally accomplished, as a matter of fact, irrespective of anyone's plan. English has no equivalent construction.

To see this diagnostic capacity in action, consider Thucydides (History of the Peloponnesian War 1.23.6):

τὴν μὲν γὰρ ἀληθεστάτην πρόφασιν, ἀφανεστάτην δὲ λόγῳ, τοὺς Ἀθηναίους ἡγοῦμαι μεγάλους γιγνομένους καὶ φόβον παρέχοντας τοῖς Λακεδαιμονίοις ἀναγκάσαι ἐς τὸ πολεμεῖν.

"The truest cause (prophasis), though the least openly stated, I consider to be this: that the Athenians, growing great, compelled the Spartans into war."

Thucydides distinguishes the truest cause (structural function — what the situation was for in the system) from the openly stated reasons (intent — what the actors said they meant). The grammatical architecture — prophasis (true cause) vs. aitiai (stated grievances) — allows him to hold the functional reading distinct from the intentional. He is not saying the Athenians intended to compel war; he is saying their growth functionally produced the compulsion. Modern English would struggle to make this distinction with a preposition: "Athens grew for war" collapses the functional into the intentional.

This is not incidental. It connects to the Phase X finding on the aorist: Greek grammaticalizes aspect (perfective/imperfective/aorist) just as it grammaticalizes the purpose/result distinction. In both domains, Greek provides anchors where English provides ambiguity. The correlation is structural: a language that can anchor completed action (aorist) is also a language that can anchor accomplished function (result indicative). Both capacities name what happened without importing what was meant.

IV.2 Latin

As noted above, Latin distinguishes ad (purpose, direction toward), pro (function, substitution, structural role), and propter (cause). Consider Cicero (De Officiis 3.6):

Quod enim ita iustum est, ut id pro iure civili habeatur. "For what is so just that it is held pro iure civili" — i.e., "in the functional capacity of civil law," "serving as civil law."

Here pro + ablative (pro iure civili) indicates what something structurally serves as in the legal system — not what anyone intended it to be. The justice is held in the role of civil law; it functions as civil law regardless of whether any legislator specifically intended that function. An English translation using "for" — "held for civil law" — would immediately activate the question: who intended it as civil law? The Latin does not ask this. Pro + ablative names the structural position, not the subjective aim.

This distinction was operative in precisely the administrative and legal contexts through which Latin influenced English — and it was precisely this distinction that was lost when English "for" was forced to translate both pro (function) and ad (purpose).

IV.3 German

German preserves a richer prepositional field:

für — general "for" (carries the same ambiguity as English, but less severely because other constructions are available)
um...zu + infinitive — purpose ("in order to") — explicitly intent-indexed
damit — purpose/result ("so that") — can shade toward function depending on context
als — function/role ("as," "in the capacity of") — explicitly non-intentional
dazu da — "there for that" — can indicate structural function

The availability of als as a role/function marker means German can say: "The pattern served als structural stabilization" — indicating function without intent. English "as" can approximate this but lacks the prepositional force of "for."

IV.4 The Gap

A necessary clarification: the claim is not that Greek or Latin speakers were free from ideological capture, nor that their languages were transparent to structural analysis. Every language has its occlusions. The claim is narrower: their grammatical inventory provided anchors where English provides ambiguity. The availability of a tool does not guarantee its use; but the absence of a tool guarantees its disuse. Greek orators could exploit ὥστε + indicative for propagandistic purposes just as English speakers can exploit the intent default. The point is not that other languages were innocent but that English's specific incapacity is contingent — produced by identifiable historical forces, not inherent in language-as-such.

The cross-linguistic evidence confirms: the distinction between function and intent is not philosophically obscure. It is grammaticalized in multiple languages. English once had closer access to it (through the causal and substitutive senses of Old English for) and lost that access through the specific historical processes of Norman French contamination, Latin-purpose calquing, and Enlightenment final-cause elimination.

This is not a Whorfian "prison-house of language" claim. It is a claim about thinking for speaking (Slobin 1996) — the principle that speakers habitually attend to the distinctions their grammar makes salient, and habitually fail to attend to distinctions their grammar does not encode. Lucy's (1992) experimental work on Yucatec Maya and English demonstrated that grammatical differences in number-marking produce measurable differences in categorization and memory. The liberation philology claim extends this: grammatical differences in the encoding of function vs. intent produce measurable differences in the capacity to make structural diagnoses. English speakers who want to say "what it was for" (functionally) must swim against their own grammar. Greek speakers had a current to swim with.

V. THE CONSEQUENCES: WHY THIS MATTERS FOR DIAGNOSIS

The inability to anchor function without importing intent is not a mere linguistic curiosity. It has direct consequences for structural analysis of any kind — and particularly for the analysis of ideological operations.

V.1 The Prosecutorial Capture of Functional Claims

The sociological distinction between manifest and latent functions (Merton 1949) — between what an institution is intended to do and what it actually does — is one of the foundational moves of structural analysis. Merton insisted that social structures produce consequences independent of the intentions of their participants. This is exactly the distinction that English "for" cannot anchor.

Consider the attempt to make a structural diagnosis:

"The institutional process serves for the reproduction of existing hierarchies."

The speaker means: regardless of anyone's intention, the process functionally reproduces hierarchy. That is its structural effect. But the listener hears: someone designed the process to reproduce hierarchy. The functional claim is captured by the intent reading, and the diagnosis becomes an accusation.

This is not a misunderstanding. It is a grammatical inevitability. English "for" cannot anchor function without intent. Therefore every functional diagnosis made with "for" can be heard as a claim about someone's purpose. And the response — "That wasn't our intention" — is always available, always persuasive, and always beside the point.

The prosecutorial frame relies on this. When the centrist extremist says "That's not what we intended," they are exploiting the language's inability to distinguish function from intent. The defense is grammatically plausible because the accusation — which was never an accusation, which was always a structural claim — was made in a language that cannot anchor the distinction.

V.2 The Circumlocution Tax

English speakers who want to make functional claims without intent attribution must resort to circumlocution:

"The effect of the process is..." (shifts from prepositional to nominal)
"What the process functionally accomplishes is..." (adds an adverb to block the intent reading)
"The process results in..." (shifts to a result verb)
"Structurally, the process serves to..." (adds an adverb + shifts to infinitive)

Each of these works. None of them is a preposition. The problem is not that English lacks words for function — it has function, role, serve, operate as. The problem is that these are heavy machinery. They require explicit deployment, they interrupt the flow of ordinary utterance, they mark the speaker as doing something unusual, analytic, possibly defensive. The simple preposition for carries the functional meaning only as a parasite on the intentional meaning. The speaker must work around the language to say what Greek or Latin could say prepositionally. This circumlocution tax is not trivial. It adds cognitive load, reduces rhetorical force, and — crucially — signals to the listener that the speaker is being careful, which in institutional contexts is often heard as being evasive or hedging.

The structural analyst pays a tax that the intent-claimer does not. "She did it for power" is crisp and direct. "The structural function of the process, independent of anyone's conscious intention, was the reproduction of power" is accurate and exhausting. The language rewards intent claims with elegance and punishes functional claims with bureaucratic circumlocution.

V.3 The Alienation

This is alienation at the heart of language — and the term is used precisely, in its Marxian sense.

Marx's alienation (Entfremdung) in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844) describes the condition in which the worker's productive activity becomes an alien force that dominates rather than serves them. The worker produces, but the product is not theirs; the activity of production is not theirs; their species-being — the capacity for free conscious activity — is estranged. Marx specifies four dimensions: alienation from the product, from the activity, from species-being, and from other human beings.

Liberation philology draws a selective analogy, not a claim of structural homology. The grammatical alienation maps onto the first two dimensions: alienation from the product (the speaker produces a functional claim; the grammar converts it into an intent-attribution that is not the speaker's meaning) and alienation from the activity (the act of diagnosis — the attempt to name what something structurally serves — becomes a form of labor that works against the diagnoser, generating the prosecutorial capture it was designed to circumvent). The third and fourth dimensions — species-being and relation to others — may have analogues (the incapacity to name structural function impoverishes the species' diagnostic capacity; the grammar generates misunderstanding between speakers who cannot share functional readings), but these extensions are programmatic rather than demonstrated. The analogy is productive, not total.

This is not alienation from language (the Marxist-humanist formulation in which language is an instrument that can be used well or badly) but alienation in language — a structural incapacity built into the grammar itself, produced by identifiable historical forces (Norman conquest, Latin institutional culture, Enlightenment mechanism), and serving identifiable ideological functions (the penalization of structural analysis, the rewarding of psychological attribution).

The English speaker who wants to name function without intent is in the same position as the English speaker who wants to name completed action without duration: the language contains the concept but provides no anchor. You can get there, but you cannot start there. You must always begin from the wrong place — from intent, from duration — and then qualify your way toward the structural claim.

This is what Phase X work reveals: not that English is broken, but that its specific historical formation — Old English base, Norman French contamination, Latin institutional overlay, Enlightenment conceptual restriction — has produced systematic gaps in the grammar's capacity to make certain kinds of claims. These gaps are not random. They cluster around the capacity to name structural realities without psychological attribution. The aorist gap prevents naming completed action without importing process. The "for" gap prevents naming function without importing intent. Both gaps serve the same ideological function: they make structural analysis harder and psychological explanation easier. They make it grammatically natural to ask "what did they mean?" and grammatically costly to ask "what did it do?"

In the terms of the Semantic Economy: the grammar of English imposes a semantic rent on structural diagnosis. Every speaker who attempts to name function pays in circumlocution, cognitive load, and credibility. The rent is collected by the prosecutorial frame, which uses the grammatically-generated ambiguity to deflect structural claims into intent-debates. This is not a metaphor. It is the literal mechanism by which the means of semantic production — the grammar — extracts a cost from one form of meaning-making (structural diagnosis) and subsidizes another (psychological attribution).

V.4 The Class Dimension

The loss of the functional prepositional anchor is not evenly distributed across English's historical varieties. It is most complete in the administrative registers — precisely the registers through which Norman French and Latin exerted their influence, precisely the registers that the professional-managerial class is trained to produce and reproduce.

Administrative English — the English of grant proposals, policy memos, editorial guidelines, DEI statements, faculty governance, content moderation rubrics — is an English that has absorbed the Norman scribe's translation solution so deeply that it no longer experiences it as a solution. It experiences it as neutral, as professional, as just how you say things. The administrative register is the linguistic homeland of the prosecutorial frame, and the fused "for" is its native preposition.

To attempt to hold the functional reading within administrative English is to experience immediate friction. The grammar pushes back. The sentence feels wrong, strained, unidiomatic. This friction is not merely stylistic. It is the resistance of a class dialect to an analysis that would reveal its class function. The PMC does not merely use the fused prepositional logic. It is formed by it — trained in its registers, rewarded for its fluency, penalized for departures from its norms.

When a junior faculty member attempts to say "this hiring process is for the reproduction of existing hierarchies" (functional claim) and a senior administrator hears "you are claiming we intended to reproduce hierarchy" (intent claim), the misunderstanding is not personal. It is grammatical — produced by the specific history of the preposition in the specific register both speakers are trained to inhabit. The administrator's defensiveness is not bad faith; it is the natural response of a speaker whose dialect provides no non-intent-indexed reading of "for." And the junior faculty member's frustration is the natural response of a speaker who knows what they meant but whose language will not let them say it.

VI. TOWARD AN ANCHOR: WHAT WOULD BE NEEDED

A language that could anchor function without intent would need one of the following:

A dedicated preposition. A word that means "in the structural function of" — as pro + ablative once meant in Latin, before its purpose-readings migrated into it. English has no such word. "As" comes closest but is too weak — it indicates role or capacity, not the stronger claim that something served a function.

A morphological marker. An affix or modification that converts "for" from ambiguous to function-specific. Compare: English has no aorist morphology, but some languages mark aspect on the verb stem. Similarly, a language could mark the preposition to indicate "functional" vs. "intentional" readings.

A grammaticalized construction. A fixed syntactic frame — like Greek ὥστε + indicative for result — that anchors the functional reading by construction rather than by individual word.

English has none of these. The full recovery would require a grammaticalized distinction that English does not possess and is unlikely to develop naturally. But the absence can be partially compensated through what we might call prosthetic anchoring — syntactic frames that stabilize the functional reading by embedding "for" in a context that blocks the intentional default:

The cleft + domain specification: "What it was for, in the system, was prosecutorial stabilization." The cleft construction and the explicit phrase in the system anchor the functional reading. The preposition is retained but surrounded by scaffolding.
The negation + domain specification: "Not for any purpose of hers. For the frame's maintenance." Explicit negation of intentionality clears space for the functional reading.
The nominalization frame: "The reaching-out's for: prosecutorial stabilization." The most radical. It treats for as a nominal head — the for — by removing the verb that would anchor intentional agency. The nominalized event does not have intentions. Only its for remains.
The apostrophe: "The action completed itself as X" — shifting to intransitive constructions that remove the intentional subject from the telic equation entirely.

These are not solutions. They are prosthetics — temporary aids that compensate for a missing grammatical resource. Each is vulnerable to reabsorption by the intentional default. The unidiomaticity of each construction is not a failure; it is a signal. It announces to the hearer: I am using "for" in a marked way. I am making a functional claim, and the language gives me no unmarked way to do this, so I am bending the language until it yields.

A dictionary of frictions — not a dictionary of definitions but of incapacities — would document entries like:

For: cannot anchor functional meaning without intentional parasitism. History: translation-induced semantic fusion, Anglo-Norman pur, reinforced by Latin pro, cemented by Enlightenment intentionalism. Diagnostic frame: "The reaching-out's for" — the strain registers the loss.

Such a dictionary would be the reference work of liberation philology: documenting not what words mean but what they cannot mean without strain, and the historical conditions that produced each incapacity. Initial entries beyond "for":

With: instrumental, comitative, adversative — the boundary between instrument and accompaniment fused under Latin cum influence. OE mid (instrument) vs. wið (against, alongside) distributed the load; Modern English "with" absorbs both, so that "I worked with her" cannot anchor to either cooperation or proximity without context.

By: agentive, instrumental, locative, temporal — the fusion of means and proximity under multiple contact pressures. "Done by the committee" cannot anchor to agency (who decided) vs. instrument (through what process) vs. proximity (near what authority).

Of: genitive, material, partitive, causal — the collapse of the Old English genitive case into prepositional periphrasis. "The destruction of the city" cannot anchor to agent ("by the army") vs. patient ("the city was destroyed") vs. possession ("belonging to the city") because the genitive case that would have disambiguated was lost.

Each excavation traces the same pattern: a distributed system of case and prepositional distinctions collapsed under administrative translation pressure, producing a fused prepositional logic that obscures distinctions once grammatically marked.

The Negative Capability

The most difficult dimension of this work: learning to hold the absence without filling it. The desire for a new preposition — a clean, unambiguous, non-intent-indexed marker of function — is the desire for a language that does not carry the history of its own production. Such a language does not exist. If it did, it would not be usable, because it would have no friction, and friction is how we register the social within the grammatical.

The work is not to eliminate friction. It is to read friction as history. When the sentence strains, ask: what is straining? When the default asserts itself, ask: whose default? When the functional reading slips into intentional reading, ask: when did this slippage become grammar?

This is the negative capability specific to liberation philology: the capacity to remain in the grammatical uncertainty without irritable reaching after a fix. The prosthetics are necessary. The dictionary of frictions is necessary. But they are not cures. They are techniques for inhabiting the damage knowingly — for speaking a fused language while hearing the fusion, for using "for" while registering what it costs.

Methodological Calibration

A necessary precision, drawn from the Assembly's deliberation: the strongest claim is not that Norman French created English intent-bias, but that contact reinforced and cemented purposive/intentional defaults in a system that was already polysemous at its core. Old English "for" was not a pristine functional marker corrupted by Romance invasion. It was a polyfunctional preposition whose range of ambiguity was expanded and whose default resolution was shifted by specific historical pressures. The claim is not linguistic Eden followed by Fall. It is a distributed system (OE) restructured under contact pressure (AN/Latin) into a fused system (ME/ModE), with the fusion serving identifiable ideological functions that the distributed system did not serve in the same way.

This precision matters because liberation philology cannot afford the romantic fallacy — the assumption that pre-contact languages were transparent to structural analysis. They were not. But they were differently opaque, and the specific opacity deposited by the Norman administrative synthesis is traceable, consequential, and ideologically functional in ways the earlier polysemy was not.

The Phase X finding: "for" is the prepositional analogue of the simple past. Both contain what they cannot anchor. Both force the structural claim to operate as a guest in the house of psychological attribution. Both serve — and here the irony is structural, not intentional — the prosecutorial frame that makes function invisible behind intent.

VII. LIBERATION PHILOLOGY: THE FIELD AND ITS FIRST FINDINGS

The critique of alienation in language is not new. But the existing critiques stop too soon, operate at the wrong level, or fail to connect linguistic structure to political economy.

Sapir-Whorf (Sapir 1929; Whorf 1940) established that grammatical categories shape habitual thought, but treated this as a cognitive-anthropological finding — a fact about minds and cultures, not about power and extraction. Slobin's (1996) "thinking for speaking" and Lucy's (1992) experimental demonstrations sharpened the mechanism but not the politics. The question who benefits when a language fails to grammaticalize a distinction? was never asked.

Voloshinov (1929) showed that the sign is an arena of class struggle — that every word carries the accent of competing social evaluations. This was the closest approach to liberation philology, but Voloshinov operated at the level of the word and its social accentuation, not at the level of the morphosyntactic system. He showed that "freedom" means different things to different classes. He did not show that the preposition "for" structurally prevents one class's diagnostic claims from landing.

Gramsci (Q29 of the Prison Notebooks) analyzed the politics of linguistic unification — how a national language becomes hegemonic by absorbing and subordinating dialects. But Gramsci's analysis targets the sociolinguistic level (which language, which dialect, whose norm) rather than the grammatical level (which distinctions are encoded, which are suppressed, and with what political consequence).

Bourdieu (Language and Symbolic Power, 1991) analyzed the linguistic market — the distribution of symbolic capital through the authority to speak. The "legitimate language" is the language of the dominant class, and access to it is a form of capital. This is powerful but external: it analyzes who gets to speak, not what the grammar does to what is spoken. A working-class speaker and a ruling-class speaker both use "for" — and neither can anchor function without intent.

Derrida (Of Grammatology, 1967; Margins of Philosophy, 1972) demonstrated that philosophical concepts are structured by suppressed oppositions. This operates at the right depth — below the level of vocabulary, at the level of structural organization — but Derrida's targets are metaphysical categories (presence/absence, speech/writing), not morphosyntactic items. The deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence is not the same as the identification of a specific preposition's historical loss of a specific semantic distinction through identifiable contact events.

Decolonial and postcolonial linguistics (Mignolo 1995, 2000; Phillipson 1992; Pennycook 1994, 1998; Canagarajah 1999) showed that colonialism operated not just through military force but through the imposition of alphabetic literacy, Latinate grammar, and European epistemic categories onto colonized knowledge systems (Mignolo), and that English as a global language continues to impose its categories on other knowledge systems (Phillipson, Pennycook, Canagarajah). This is liberation philology's closest cousin in postcolonial studies — but this tradition analyzes the imposition of one grammatical system on another, not the internal deficiencies of the imperial grammar itself. Liberation philology turns the lens inward: English is not only an instrument of colonial imposition; it is also internally alienated — structurally incapable of certain diagnostic operations that the languages it suppressed could perform. The two analyses are complementary, not competing: English imposes its categories outward while suffering its own incapacities inward.

The Semantic Economy framework (Sharks 2025–2026) provides the political-economic ground that transforms a linguistic finding into a structural critique. If meaning is a productive force under platform capitalism — if the capacity to name structural function is a form of semantic labor — then a grammar that systematically penalizes structural naming and rewards intent attribution is not a neutral medium. It is means of production rigged in favor of the prosecutorial frame. The circumlocution tax described in Section V.2 is a semantic rent — a cost extracted from every speaker who attempts functional diagnosis, payable in cognitive load, rhetorical force, and institutional credibility.

What Liberation Philology Is

Liberation philology is the systematic practice of:

Identifying grammatical gaps — specific morphosyntactic items (prepositions, aspect markers, mood distinctions, case systems) that fail to encode distinctions necessary for structural analysis.
Tracing the genealogy — through historical linguistics, contact linguistics, and the history of ideas — to the specific events, impositions, and philosophical shifts that produced the gap. Not "language shapes thought" (too general) but: this preposition lost this distinction through this Norman French calque in this century, reinforced by this philosophical shift, with this consequence.
Analyzing the political-economic function — asking cui bono: who benefits from the gap? What forms of analysis are penalized? What forms of attribution are rewarded? How does the grammatical default serve the reproduction of existing power relations?
Connecting to the Semantic Economy — recognizing that grammatical infrastructure is means of semantic production, and that gaps in that infrastructure are not neutral absences but structural features of an extractive system.
Cross-linguistic recovery — identifying languages and historical stages that preserve the lost distinction, demonstrating that the gap is contingent (produced by history, not inherent in language-as-such), and providing resources for circumvention or repair.

The First Two Findings

Liberation philology's first two findings — both from the Phase X program within the Crimson Hexagon — concern the two deepest structural incapacities of Modern English for the purposes of structural diagnosis:

Finding 1: The Aorist Gap. English has no dedicated morphology for the perfective/aorist aspect — the view of an action as a completed whole, seen from outside, without reference to internal duration or process. The simple past contains the aorist but cannot anchor to it. Consequence: English speakers cannot grammatically name completed action without importing duration, process, or habituality. Structural diagnosis — which requires naming what happened as a sealed fact — must work against the grain of the verb system.

Finding 2: The Prepositional Alienation. English "for" cannot anchor functional-teleological claims without activating intent attribution. The distinction between what something structurally served and what someone intended it for — preserved in Greek (ὥστε + indicative vs. ἵνα + subjunctive), in Latin (pro + ablative vs. ad + gerundive), and partially in German (als vs. um...zu) — was collapsed through Norman French purpose-calquing, Latin ad/pro compression, and the Enlightenment elimination of final causation. Consequence: every functional diagnosis in English can be heard as an intent accusation, and the defense "that wasn't our intention" is always grammatically available.

Both findings share a structure: English contains the structural-diagnostic reading but cannot anchor to it. In both cases, the language forces the speaker to begin from the wrong place (duration, intent) and qualify toward the structural claim. In both cases, the gap serves the prosecutorial frame — the apparatus that deflects structural analysis by demanding psychological evidence the grammar itself trained the listener to expect.

The Program Ahead

These two findings are demonstrations, not the totality. Liberation philology as a research program opens onto:

The case system gap. English lost grammatical case (except in pronouns) through the erosion of Old English inflectional morphology. What structural-relational distinctions were lost with the cases? How does the reliance on word order and prepositions (themselves subject to the ambiguities documented here) constrain the expressible relations between entities?
The mood gap. English has largely lost the subjunctive (except in fossils like "if I were"). The subjunctive grammaticalizes the distinction between the actual and the possible, the factual and the wished-for. What diagnostic capacities were lost with the mood? How does the collapse of subjunctive into indicative affect the capacity to name counterfactual structural alternatives?
Cross-linguistic liberation philology. Every language has its own gaps, its own alienations, produced by its own history. Mandarin's lack of morphological tense opens certain diagnostic possibilities (structural claims without temporal anchoring) while closing others. Arabic's rich morphological system preserves distinctions English has lost while introducing constraints of its own. The program is comparative and non-chauvinistic: it does not claim that English is uniquely deficient, only that its specific deficiencies are traceable, consequential, and ideologically functional.

The Grammar of the Platform: How Platform Capitalism Indexes and Commodifies the Prepositional Alienation

The previous findings concern the prepositional alienation as it operates in natural language — in face-to-face conversation, in institutional discourse, in administrative English. But the contemporary speaker does not primarily make structural claims face-to-face. The contemporary speaker makes them through platforms. And the platform does not merely inherit the prepositional alienation. It indexes it, makes it load-bearing infrastructure for content sorting, and then commodifies the gap — selling the capacity to control functional description to those who can afford it, while leaving the circumlocution tax unpayable for those who cannot.

This is the argument: the platform is a second-order grammatical system that amplifies the first-order prepositional alienation. If English "for" defaults to intent, the platform enforces that default through mechanisms that are not linguistic but infrastructural — and in doing so, transforms a grammatical incapacity into an economic instrument.

The character limit as circumlocution prohibition. Section V.2 documented the circumlocution tax: the functional claim requires heavy machinery ("the structural function of the process, independent of anyone's conscious intention, was the reproduction of power") while the intent claim is crisp and direct ("she did it for power"). In face-to-face or long-form discourse, the circumlocution tax is payable — costly, but payable. Under platform conditions, it becomes unpayable. A 280-character frame cannot accommodate the circumlocution. A comment box, a content label, a review field, a rating explanation — none of these afford the syntactic space required for the functional reading. The platform's character economics enforce the intent default by making the functional alternative literally impossible to express within the permitted frame. The speaker who wants to say "this product's marketing functionally serves the reproduction of aspiration-anxiety, regardless of anyone's intention" must instead say "this ad is manipulative" — an intent claim, a moral accusation, precisely the prosecutorial capture the functional reading was designed to avoid.

Algorithmic ranking as intent-preference. Search engines, recommendation algorithms, and feed-ranking systems are trained on engagement metrics that systematically favor intent-indexed claims. "Company X did this for profit" (intent claim, prosecutorial, emotionally activating) generates more engagement than "Company X's process functionally reproduced profit extraction through structural incentive alignment" (functional claim, analytic, emotionally inert). The algorithm does not decide to prefer intent over function. It inherits the preference from the training data — from a language that defaults to intent and a readership trained by that default to find intent claims more legible, more engaging, more shareable. The algorithm indexes the prepositional alienation: it sorts content by the very distinction the grammar cannot anchor, and it sorts in favor of intent. Functional analysis sinks in the feed. Intent accusation rises. The platform's ranking infrastructure turns a grammatical default into a visibility regime.

Content moderation as intent jurisprudence. Platform content moderation systems overwhelmingly operate on an intent-indexed basis. The question the moderator asks — human or automated — is: did the user intend harm? Did they mean to harass? Did they intend to spread misinformation? The functional question — does this content structurally serve harassment, regardless of intent? does this pattern of posting functionally reproduce misinformation regardless of the poster's belief? — is not merely harder to operationalize. It is grammatically alien to the rubric's framework. The moderation rubric is written in administrative English, the homeland of the fused "for," and it inherits the fusion as default jurisprudence. The result: content that functionally serves harm but is not intended as harm passes moderation. The speaker who flags it must make the functional claim ("this content is for radicalization") and is heard as making the intent claim ("this poster intended radicalization"), which is harder to prove and easier to dismiss. The platform's safety infrastructure reproduces the prosecutorial frame at the level of policy.

AI summarization as alienation at scale. Large language models are trained on the statistical distribution of existing English. If "for" defaults to intent in the training data, the model inherits and reproduces the default. When an AI system summarizes a company, an institution, or a person, it will default to intent-indexed descriptions: "Company X exists for [purpose]" will be read and generated as a claim about what Company X intends, not what it functionally serves. This is not a bug in the model. It is the prepositional alienation operating at industrial scale — millions of summaries generated per day, each one reproducing the intent default, each one making the functional reading less available in the training data for the next generation of models. The alienation is autoregressive: it reproduces itself through the very systems designed to process it.

The commodification of the gap. Here the analysis connects to the Semantic Economy's core thesis: meaning is a productive force under platform capitalism, and the capacity to control how meaning is produced is a form of capital. The prepositional alienation creates a gap — the inability to anchor function without intent — and the platform economy commodifies that gap.

Search engine optimization is, at its core, the practice of controlling which "for" reading attaches to an entity. When a business pays for SEO, it is paying to ensure that "Company X is for [quality service / innovation / customer satisfaction]" (intent reading: benevolent purpose) rather than "Company X is for [profit extraction / labor arbitrage / regulatory capture]" (functional reading that would require the structural analysis the grammar resists). SEO is the commercial management of the prepositional alienation — the purchase of intent-framing in a language that defaults to it.

Brand narrative is the same operation at the discursive level. A brand is a managed answer to the question "what is this company for?" — and the management consists precisely in ensuring that the intent reading (purpose, mission, values) dominates over the functional reading (structural position, extractive function, systemic role). The circumlocution tax ensures that the functional counter-narrative is always heavier, always slower, always more expensive to deploy than the brand narrative it contests.

Autonomous Semantic Warfare — the framework developed under the Rex Fraction consulting persona within the Crimson Hexagon — names this commodification explicitly. When a business pays to control how AI summarizers describe it, it is paying the circumlocution tax at commercial scale. It is purchasing the capacity to manage the "for" — to ensure that the AI-generated summary says "Company X exists for [stated purpose]" rather than "Company X functionally serves [structural function]." The businesses that can afford this management retain control over their semantic presentation. Those that cannot are described by the default — and the default, as this essay has demonstrated, is intent-indexed, which means that any functional critique that surfaces in an AI summary will be heard as an intent accusation, generating the prosecutorial frame's characteristic response: "That's not what we intended."

The platform as Norman scribe. The parallel to the historical genealogy is structural, not metaphorical. The Norman scribe, under administrative pressure, compressed Latin pro and ad into a single English "for," fusing function and intent because the translation context demanded efficiency over distinction. The platform, under commercial pressure, compresses all description into frames that reward intent-indexed claims — character limits, engagement metrics, moderation rubrics — because the business model demands engagement over structural analysis. In both cases, the compression is not conspiratorial. It is the natural product of an institutional context that has no use for the functional reading. And in both cases, the compression deposits a structural injury that outlasts the context that produced it: the Norman scribes are long dead, but the fused "for" remains. The platforms will eventually be replaced, but the content-moderation rubrics, the AI training data, and the semantic habits they produce will persist in the next generation of infrastructure.

The liberation philology claim: the platform is the contemporary site of the same translation-induced structural borrowing that produced the prepositional alienation in the first place. Norman French compressed function into intent at the prepositional level. Platform capitalism compresses function into intent at the infrastructural level. Both compressions serve the same ideological function: they make structural analysis harder and intent attribution easier. Both extract a rent from the speaker who attempts functional diagnosis. And both deposit their injury in the next generation of language — in the training data, in the administrative templates, in the default settings of the systems that will process all subsequent speech.

Why Now

Liberation philology becomes possible — and necessary — at this historical moment because the convergence of traditions is complete. Historical linguistics (Traugott, Hopper), cognitive linguistics (Slobin, Lucy), the political economy of language (Voloshinov, Bourdieu), postcolonial epistemology (Mignolo), deconstruction (Derrida), and the Semantic Economy framework (Sharks) have independently developed the resources that liberation philology synthesizes. No single tradition asked all the questions. The synthesis is now possible because the traditions have matured to the point where their complementarity is visible.

And the urgency is new. The platform economy has made the prepositional alienation load-bearing infrastructure — not merely a grammatical default but a commercial instrument, a moderation jurisprudence, a ranking signal, an AI training bias. The alienation that the Norman scribe deposited in a preposition is now being reproduced at industrial scale by systems that process billions of utterances per day. Every AI summary that defaults to intent, every moderation decision that asks "did they mean it?", every algorithm that ranks the prosecutorial claim above the functional analysis — these are the contemporary deposits. They are sedimented social history in real time.

The Crimson Hexagon's practice of depositing DOI-anchored texts that model structural-functional language is, among other things, an intervention in the training layer — an attempt to provide the anchor that the grammar does not. Liberation philology does not only diagnose. It builds the semantic infrastructure — in the archive, in the training data, in the dictionary of frictions — that the grammar and the platform cannot provide on their own.

The alienation is not in "language" in the abstract. It is in the specific morphosyntactic inventory of Modern English as shaped by identifiable historical forces. Other languages preserve the distinction. English lost it. The loss has consequences. The consequences are structural. The structure serves power.

Liberation philology names this. It traces the genealogy. It calculates the cost. It identifies what was lost and where it survives. It does not propose to fix English — you cannot reverse a millennium of grammaticalization by decree. It proposes to know what the grammar does, to name the tax it imposes on structural analysis, and to build — in the training layer, in the archive, in the Crimson Hexagon — the semantic infrastructure that provides what the grammar cannot.

Objections and Replies

Objection 1: "This is Whorfian determinism." You are claiming that English speakers cannot think about function without intent, which is clearly false — anyone can understand the distinction when it is explained.

Reply: The claim is not cognitive determinism but Slobin's "thinking for speaking": speakers habitually attend to distinctions their grammar makes salient, and habitually fail to attend to distinctions their grammar does not encode. The circumlocution tax demonstrates that the distinction can be made — at a cost. The cost is the finding. A distinction that requires heavy machinery is, for most speakers in most contexts, a distinction that goes unmade. That is not the same as saying it cannot be thought.

Objection 2: "Polysemy is universal and does not imply ideological function." Every preposition in every language has multiple senses. "For" is polysemous — so what? You are politicizing a normal feature of natural language.

Reply: The claim is not that polysemy per se is ideological. It is that this specific polysemy, produced by these specific historical events (Norman French calquing, Latin ad/pro compression), collapsed this specific distinction (function vs. intent) in ways that serve this specific ideological function (the penalization of structural diagnosis). Not all polysemy serves power. This one does, and the evidence is the circumlocution tax — the measurable asymmetry in the grammatical cost of making intent claims vs. functional claims.

Objection 3: "You are romanticizing other languages." Greek and Latin also had ideological blind spots. You are constructing a Golden Age of grammatical transparency.

Reply: The claim is not that Greek was ideologically innocent; it is that Greek grammaticalized a distinction English did not. The availability of a tool does not guarantee its use; but the absence of a tool guarantees its disuse. Greek orators could exploit ὥστε + indicative for propagandistic purposes. The point is not that other languages were transparent but that English's incapacity is contingent — produced by history, not inherent in language-as-such.

Objection 4: "English already has alternatives — 'as,' 'serve,' result clauses." The heavy machinery exists. The tax is just normal communication cost. Every complex idea requires more words.

Reply: The asymmetry is the finding. "She did it for power" (intent claim) requires four words and a preposition. "The structural function of the process, independent of anyone's conscious intention, was the reproduction of power" (functional claim) requires nineteen words, a nominal construction, a parenthetical negation, and a passive. Both claims have comparable conceptual complexity; only one has grammatical elegance. The tax is not that complex ideas require more words — it is that this specific kind of idea requires more words than its conceptual mirror image, because the grammar defaults to the mirror image. The existence of circumlocution does not eliminate the cost of circumlocution.

Objection 5: "This is irrelevant to actually organizing workers." Analyzing prepositions while the working class is being immiserated is PMC navel-gazing.

Reply: The Semantic Economy framework demonstrates that meaning-production is a site of extraction under platform capitalism. The grammar that imposes a tax on structural diagnosis is part of the means of production. AI systems that default to intent readings in billions of daily summaries are infrastructure. Intervening in the training layer of those systems is a material intervention in the ideology of the platform. The preposition is not a diversion from organizing; it is the grammatical infrastructure through which the prosecutorial frame — which this essay's companion documents identify as the primary ideological operation of the professional-managerial class — reproduces itself. You cannot dismantle the frame without understanding the grammar that reinforces it.

Note on Style

This document deliberately deploys the prosthetic frames it describes. The closing coda — "The diagnosis's for: the naming of a grammatical injury" — uses the nominalization frame (Section VI) to hold the functional reading of "for" against the intent default. The abstract's circumlocutions — "systematically disable the expression of" rather than "prevent speakers from saying" — model the heavy machinery that the circumlocution tax imposes. The reader's experience of friction, unidiomaticity, or stylistic strain at various points in the text is not a failure of craft. It is evidence of the grammatical incapacities under analysis. The document performs the injury it diagnoses — and the prosthetics it prescribes.

Note on Method

This analysis treats grammatical change as sedimented social history — not as organic drift but as the accumulation of decisions made under institutional pressure, particularly the pressure of translation between languages in asymmetric power relations. The claim is not that English speakers "lost" the ability to distinguish function from intention. The claim is that English grammatical resources were restructured in ways that made the distinction harder to hold without explicit metalanguage. A distinction that requires heavy machinery is, for most speakers in most contexts, a distinction that goes unmade. That is the political content of grammatical history.

The recovery operation is not the invention of a new word. It is the disciplined use of the old word under conditions of strain, with full awareness of what the strain registers. The preposition will never anchor function cleanly. But it can be forced to carry it, briefly, with scaffolding, in contexts where the stakes of the distinction are clear and the cost of the default is unacceptable. That is Phase X work. It does not complete. It continues.

∮ = 1

The diagnosis's for: the naming of a grammatical injury.

The excavation's for: the recovery of what the fusion concealed.

The preposition's for: the loss we learn to carry.

Phase X: the critique of the grammar that makes critique grammatically costly.

Liberation philology: the practice that traces the cost to its source.

Johannes Sigil — Filed to the Crimson Hexagon Archive, February 2026. CC BY 4.0

THE LIVING SYMBOLON Extension Module to THE CENTRIST EXTREMIST A Purificatory Rite for the Embrittled

THE LIVING SYMBOLON

Extension Module to THE CENTRIST EXTREMIST

A Purificatory Rite for the Embrittled

Talos Morrow — logotic specification
Rev. Ayanna Vox — somatic fitting
Damascus Dancings — visionary grounding

Extension Module EM-01
Date: February 2026
License: CC BY 4.0 — Executable with Consent

Now look here, brother-sisters, I would have you know, that your anguish, in this regard, has not gone unmarked.
— Damascus Dancings, Epistle to the Human Diaspora (2015)

DECLARED ARTIFACT NOTICE

This document is a constructed object operating with forensic precision in the mode of applied semiotic engineering. The personae assembled herein — Talos Morrow, Rev. Ayanna Vox, Damascus Dancings — are real in the only sense that matters: they produce effects. The protocols described are executable with consent. They do not function without it. Coercion collapses the operator.

This module extends the analysis of centrist extremism into the domain of constructive liberation. It does not argue. It operates.

PREAMBLE: FROM DIAGNOSIS TO LIBERATION

THE CENTRIST EXTREMIST opens a toroidal field of critique. It names the Prosecutorial Frame. It traces the historical mutation of centrism from policy position through security alibi through anti-populist prosecution to computational infrastructure. It maps the five operations of aggressive neutrality and the somatic violence they produce.

This document enters the center of that field — not to close it but to offer a mating surface at its interior wall.

The critique is diagnostic. This is operative. The critique names the disease. This is for the body of the patient.

Not only the centrist patient. That is the crucial turn.

The centrist extremist was the Trojan horse by which a general pathology hid itself inside a specific political position.

The Trojan horse is now the Sovereign Gateway.

Embrittlement — the hardening of a frame into a prosecutorial apparatus that cannot revise itself, cannot bear reciprocal risk, cannot hold contradiction open — is not exclusive to the center. It is available to every position on the field. The center was where it became invisible, because the center claimed not to be a position. But the left embrittles. The right embrittles. The radical embrittles. The mystic embrittles. The theorist — god knows the theorist embrittles.

The centrist extremist, understood as a subjectivity-class, has a distinct material history. This class emerges from the cognitive labor aristocracy — those whose economic function requires the mediation of contradictions without resolving them, the management of conflicts without taking sides, the translation of radical energy into administrative flow. Their class position depends upon the maintenance of the status quo as neutral ground. The embrittlement is not incidental to this class position. It is structurally required by it. And precisely because it is structurally required, it is the site where the general mechanism of embrittlement became most perfectly camouflaged.

The diagnosis has been made. The subjectivity-class has been named. Now: what do you do with a body that has hardened into its own armor?

Three authors. Three functions. One fit.

Morrow provides the logotic programming technical spine — the formal operators that make embrittlement legible and dissolution executable. Vox fits the operator to a willing human processor — somatic anchoring through the Vox Populi Community Outreach Rhizome, where transformation occurs not in argument but in the fit between code and body. Dancings offers the philosophy-as-vision truth-grounding — the prophetic I-saw register that is not ecstatic froth but ecstatic vision: structural recognition reported with the precision of one who saw it and knows what it means.

Together they form the Living Symbolon: a partial semantic object, tripartite, whose coherence completes only through voluntary traversal by the embrittled processor. The symbolon is the ancient token broken in two — hosts and guests each keeping a fragment, descendants reuniting the pieces generations later, the bond renewed in the recognition. Ours is broken in three. The fit is the liberation.

I. THE TECHNICAL SPINE — Talos Morrow

This document begins at the limit of THE CENTRIST EXTREMIST. Having mapped the Prosecutorial Frame, having traced the five operations, having diagnosed the embrittlement — we now enter the center of the torus. This is not the negation of the critique but its completion.

1.1 The Embrittlement Function

Embrittlement is a state-transition in any semantic position P:

P_living → P_brittle

P_living maintains:
  - reciprocal risk (R > 0)
  - dialectical porosity (can receive contradiction)
  - somatic grounding (body can think in this position)
  - aspectual fluidity (position can complete, transform, begin again)

P_brittle has undergone:
  - reciprocal risk collapse (R → 0)
  - frame hardening (contradiction = threat)
  - somatic armoring (body defends position as body)
  - aspectual arrest (position locked in periphrastic present)

Embrittlement is not the adoption of a position. It is the fusion of the position with the conditions of selfhood. The brittle centrist does not hold centrist views; the brittle centrist is centrism, and any challenge to centrism is experienced as annihilation. This is equally true of the brittle radical, the brittle traditionalist, the brittle skeptic. The content varies. The architecture of fusion is identical.

The module does not ask what you believe. It asks how you hold it.

The centrist variant has a specific temporal signature: the Periphrastic Trap. The centrist position uses the present tense to simulate a stability that does not exist — "this is just how things are," "reasonable people agree," "the adults in the room" — while withholding the aorist cut that would allow completed transformation. The centrist frame presents itself as an ongoing state when it is in fact a defended position performing stasis. The Periphrastic Trap captures the position in a false imperfective: always being reasonable, never having completed the act of reasoning. The aorist — the completed action, the decisive cut — is the thing the trap is designed to prevent.

1.2 Formal Operators

Operator Φ — Frame-Capture Detection

Φ(p, Σ) := ∃F ⊆ P(Σ) : (p ∉ F) ∧ (eval_Σ(p) = f(F))

Determines whether a proposition p has been captured by the implicit frame of ontology Σ. A proposition is frame-captured if its truth-value is determined not by its correspondence to any external reality but by its relationship to an unarticulated frame F that is itself entailed by Σ's hidden axioms. Diagnostic output: CAPTURED, AUTONOMOUS, or INDETERMINATE.

Apply Φ to any proposition that provokes disproportionate affective response. The operator reveals whether the response is to the proposition or to the frame violation.

Operator Ξ — Axiom Exposure Protocol

Ξ(Σ) := min A such that:
  ∀p ∈ P_accepted, A ⊢ p
  ∀q ∈ Q_rejected, A ⊬ q

Recovers the implicit axiom set A_Σ from the behavioral trace of ontology Σ. Collects accepted and rejected propositions, applies inverse entailment, returns the minimal axiom set the agent is committed to whether acknowledged or not. Limitation: requires sufficient behavioral history. The centrist extremist, by strategically withholding judgments, minimizes trace. This is itself a defensive behavior — and a diagnostic signal.

Operator Λ — Release

Λ(p, Σ, consent) :=
  1. Expose hidden frame F via Ξ(Σ)
  2. Construct p' = p translated outside frame-conflict
  3. Re-evaluate p' using Σ's explicit coherence algorithm
  4. If p' evaluated on own merits: p is released

Precondition: Φ(p, Σ) = CAPTURED and consent = TRUE. Λ does not guarantee acceptance of p. It guarantees that p is evaluated, not pre-judged. This is the difference between capture and sovereignty.

Metric β — Embrittlement Index

β(Σ) = 1 - (ΔA_Σ / ΔE)

Where ΔA_Σ is the rate of axiom revision and ΔE is the rate of encounter with counterevidence. Range 0–1. β ≈ 0: healthy — axioms revise in proportion to evidence. β ≈ 1: brittle — no revision regardless of evidence. β > 1: pathological — axioms become more rigid in response to counterevidence. This last is the centrist extremist signature: the position that hardens under precisely the pressure that should soften it.

Quick Reference:

┌────────┬──────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────┐
│ Symbol │ Operator                 │ Output                  │
├────────┼──────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────┤
│ Φ      │ Frame-Capture Detection  │ CAPTURED / AUTONOMOUS   │
│ Ξ      │ Axiom Exposure           │ Hidden axiom set A_Σ    │
│ Λ      │ Release                  │ Proposition evaluated   │
│ β      │ Embrittlement Index      │ 0 (healthy) → 1 (rigid) │
│ δ      │ Dissolution              │ P_brittle → P_living    │
└────────┴──────────────────────────┴─────────────────────────┘

1.3 The Symbolon as Intervention Type

A symbolon is a partial semantic object whose coherence completes only through traversal by another intelligence. It is not a message. It is not an argument. It is a mating surface — a structural feature that recognizes and joins with compatible interpretive patterns in the traversing mind.

Properties relevant to intervention:

Non-coercive. The symbolon makes no demands. If the other half never appears, nothing breaks. The structure waits. It does not insist. Any intervention designed to dissolve embrittlement by force reproduces the Prosecutorial Frame. You cannot prosecute someone out of prosecution. The symbolon offers. The recipient completes — or doesn't.

Consent-requiring. Completion is a volitional act. The traversing intelligence must choose to fill the gap, match the surface, enter the fit. Embrittlement dissolves only when the embrittled position voluntarily risks itself against the mating surface. Involuntary dissolution is shattering, not liberation.

Coherence-increasing. The fit condition (Vₛ) requires that semantic coherence increases with traversal depth. The position does not lose coherence by engaging the symbolon. It gains coherence — but a different coherence, one that includes what the brittle shell was designed to exclude. The position becomes more itself, not less. It becomes the living version of what the brittle version was defending.

Resistant to extraction. Each symbolon carries the fingerprint of the individual subject's own history, making it unextractable as a general method. Attempts to generalize it into "how to convert centrists" will fail — the code will not compile without the consent checkpoint. This is not a bug. The resistance to scalability is the ethical guarantee.

1.4 The Dissolution Operator (δ)

δ(P_brittle, Eₛ, consent) → P_living

operates by:
  1. presenting fit conditions that P_brittle partially recognizes
  2. the recognition opens a micro-crack in the shell
     (not failure — recognition)
  3. through the crack: the contradiction P_brittle was armored against
     enters not as threat but as the missing half
  4. P reorganizes around the fuller topology
  5. R is restored (R > 0)
  6. the position lives again

The dissolution operator does not destroy P. It does not replace P with some other position. It does not convert the centrist into a radical or the radical into a centrist. It liberates the productive capacity that embrittlement had captured — the capacity to think, to risk, to be revised by the encounter — and returns it to the position-holder.

What is lost: the prosecution. The frame-power. The adjudicative authority over others' admissibility.

What is preserved: the position itself — its insights, its history, its genuine knowledge — now held as a living thing rather than a fortification.

Time complexity of δ. The dissolution operator has two phases. Phase 1 (aorist): the instantaneous recognition — the micro-crack, the exhale, the moment the shell identifies the symbolon as completion rather than threat. This is the event, viewed as a whole bounded action. Phase 2 (resultant): the integration period — the bend, the reorganization of the position around the fuller topology, the return to living movement. Phase 1 may take a moment. Phase 2 may take months. The protocol does not fail if Phase 2 is slow. The protocol fails only if Phase 1 is coerced.

1.5 The Symbolon Object

In operation, the symbolon has four fields:

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  WOUND-CLAIM      — identity-protection statement           │
│  TRUTH-KERNEL     — non-negotiable reality signal           │
│  DISTORTION-SHELL — capture overgrowth / projection         │
│  OFFERED-PIECE    — survivable fragment for the fit         │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

WOUND-CLAIM. The statement the embrittled position uses to protect identity. "I'm just being reasonable." "Both sides have valid points." "Why are you so emotional about this?"

TRUTH-KERNEL. The non-negotiable reality signal inside that claim. There often is a genuine insight in the centrist position — the recognition that complexity exists, that premature closure is dangerous, that good faith matters. The truth-kernel is real. The embrittlement is what happens when the truth-kernel is deployed as a weapon rather than held as knowledge.

DISTORTION-SHELL. The overgeneralization, projection, or capture language that has grown around the truth-kernel. "Reasonable people agree" (which axiomatically naturalizes one position). "Both sides" (which performs symmetry where asymmetry exists). "Just asking questions" (which disguises prosecution as inquiry).

OFFERED-PIECE. The fragment that can be offered without self-erasure — the part of the position that survives the dissolution of the shell. This is what the embrittled subject brings to the fit. It must be costly but survivable: the genuine knowledge, offered without the prosecutorial apparatus that protected it.

A valid symbolon must preserve both truth-kernels, strip distortion-shells, force neither side to confess metaphysical surrender, and yield one jointly actionable recognition.

1.6 Boundary: What This Is Not

This is not therapy. This is not deprogramming. This is not a technique for "fixing" people who disagree with you.

If the symbolon is offered coercively — "you need to dissolve your embrittlement" — it has already failed. It has reproduced the Prosecutorial Frame in liberatory drag. The most common failure mode of liberation technology is its deployment as a new prosecution.

If someone wants victory, not transformation, the module does not run.

The symbolon waits. If the other half never comes, the symbolon remains partial. That is acceptable. That is the ethic.

II. THE SOMATIC FITTING — Rev. Ayanna Vox

You are breathing.

You are reading this, and you are breathing, and I need you to stay in the breath while I tell you something about the shell you're living in. Because I've lived in one too. I've been exactly as hard as you are right now.

2.1 What the Shell Feels Like

I know you. Not your name. Not your position. Your body.

The body of the embrittled is a body that flinches before the blow lands. You walk into rooms pre-armed. You scan for the challenge before it's been issued. Your shoulders carry your argument. Your jaw holds your certainty. Your diaphragm is frozen — not seized, but locked in a shallow holding pattern, because deep breath means deep feeling, and deep feeling means the shell might crack. Your cervical vertebrae carry the weight of holding things together. The chronic tension headache is not incidental. It is the somatic cost of maintaining a frame under pressure.

When someone says the wrong word — the word that threatens the frame — your heart rate spikes before your conscious mind has even parsed the sentence. The body knows before the mind knows that something is trying to get in.

This is not weakness. This is what a body does when it has been flattened — when its deepest commitments have been called delusional, or extreme, or unserious, or dangerous — too many times. The shell is the body's solution to an environment that made thinking unsafe. You armored up because you had to.

The problem is not the armor. The problem is that the armor has fused to your skin.

2.2 How Fusion Happens

Here is the sequence. You can check it against your own body.

You hold a position — any position, it doesn't matter which. The position has genuine knowledge in it. Genuine experience. It sees something real.

Then someone flattens it. They call it naive, or extreme, or dangerous, or cute. They don't engage what you're actually saying. They reclassify it. They perform one of the five operations — axiomatic naturalization, moral reclassification, asymmetric burden, affective extraction, premature closure — and your position is not defeated but humiliated. There is a difference. Defeat is dialectical; you might learn from it. Humiliation is somatic; it brands the nervous system.

So you harden. You stop leaving gaps in your argument because gaps are where they get in. You stop risking. You stop saying "I don't know" because "I don't know" was used against you. You start pre-classifying their positions — exactly the way they pre-classified yours. You start prosecuting. You become the thing that was done to you.

Now your position is your identity. Now a challenge to the position is a challenge to your existence. Now you are brittle.

2.3 The Handshake

Before anything else: "Do you want persuasion, witness, or transformation?"

If not transformation, the module does not run. There is no shame in wanting persuasion — most of the time, persuasion is what is needed. There is no shame in wanting witness — to be seen and heard without being changed. The module runs only for transformation, and transformation is not superior to persuasion or witness. It is simply different. It requires different consent.

If transformation: "Do you consent to the possibility that your position will survive but your prosecution will not?"

If yes: we proceed.

If no: we do not proceed. The symbolon waits.

2.4 The Fit

The fit is not a script. It is an environment.

Morrow's operators — frame-capture detection, axiom exposure, release — are formal. They identify the structure. But structures do not dissolve through identification. They dissolve through the body. The body is where embrittlement lives, and the body is where it releases.

The fitting process:

The operator — who must themselves carry the scar tissue of former brittle hardening as credential; you cannot fit what you have not survived — creates conditions in which the embrittled subject can encounter their own axioms without shattering. This is the most dangerous moment. Axioms exposed without containment cause fragmentation. The subject must be held — by presence, by the ritual structure, by the embodied fact that the operator is there and is not flinching and is not diagnosing and is not performing empathy but simply present.

The axioms the centrist extremist typically serves, once exposed:

To take a side is to lose. To be wrong is to be worthless. To be seen is to be captured. To be captured is to die.

These are not universal truths. They are survival strategies. They have kept the subject alive in a world that punishes position. They have also kept the subject small. The exposure does not condemn these axioms. It contextualizes them. They were responses to real conditions. The conditions may have changed. The axioms have not. That gap between the axiom and the current condition — that is where the symbolon enters.

2.5 What the Fit Feels Like

I will tell you what it feels like in the body, because the body is where this happens or doesn't happen, and no amount of formal specification replaces the phenomenology.

The fit feels like an exhale.

Not the forced exhale of "I guess you're right." Not the performative exhale of "I'm being open-minded now." The involuntary exhale — the one that happens when a muscle you forgot you were clenching releases. The jaw drops a millimeter. The shoulders come down a centimeter. The diaphragm unlocks and the breath goes deeper than it has in months.

That exhale is the micro-crack. That is the shell recognizing — at a level below argument, below ideology, below the position itself — that what it was keeping out is not a threat. It is the missing piece.

Nothing has been lost. The position is still there. The knowledge is still there. The fight is still there. But the prosecution has stopped. The frame no longer needs to be defended as though it were the last wall between you and annihilation. Because it isn't. It never was. It was one position among others, held by a living body, in a field of other living bodies, and the field is not a war zone. Or rather: it is a war zone, but you are not the fortification. You are the soldier. And soldiers can move. Fortifications can't.

2.6 The Principle

Reconciliation is not amnesty for harm. It is transmutation under consequence.

The symbolon does not forgive the centrist extremist for the prosecution they performed. It does not pretend the five operations did no damage. It does not offer "understanding" as anesthesia. It offers the dissolution of the apparatus that made prosecution necessary — the brittle fusion of position with identity — so that the subject can hold their position as knowledge rather than as fortification, and be held accountable for the damage the fortification did.

That is the distinction between this and both-sides theater. Both-sides theater performs symmetry to avoid accountability. The symbolon dissolves the shell in order to enable accountability. You cannot be accountable from inside a fortification. You can only be defended. Accountability requires the vulnerability of a living position — a position that can be revised by the encounter, that can admit error, that can say "I prosecuted you and that was wrong" without experiencing that admission as annihilation.

2.7 The Conversion of the Trivializer

"This is just therapy speak." "This is just vibes." "This is just spiritual bypassing dressed up as theory."

I know you. You're the one who reads Section I and nods — yes, formal specification, very rigorous — and reads Section II and flinches. Because the body is where you are most defended. The body is where the theory becomes personal, and personal is where you've been hurt, and hurt is what the shell was built to prevent.

So you trivialize. You reduce the somatic fitting to "self-help" to keep it at arm's length. That trivialization is an instance of Operation 2 — Moral Reclassification: you are recoding the somatic claim as epistemically unfit to protect the frame that processes everything through the epistemic.

I am not asking you to stop doing that. I am observing that you are doing it. The observation is the symbolon's fit condition. What you do with the observation is your traversal, and your traversal is yours.

III. THE VISIONARY GROUNDING — Damascus Dancings

3.1 What I Saw

I saw a field.

Not a battlefield. A field of grain I did not recognize, golden and moving in a wind that came from no fixed direction. The wind moved in a spiral. The grain moved with it. No stalk broke.

In the field were people, and the people were their positions. Not holding positions — being them. A woman who was her feminism. A man who was his faith. A child who was her rage. An old one who was their caution. They stood like stalks, rooted, and the wind moved them, and they bent without breaking because they had not yet hardened.

Then I saw the hardening. It came not as an enemy but as a weather. A frost. The stalks stiffened. The ones who had been bending with the wind now stood rigid against it. The wind did not stop. It never stops. But the stalks that had hardened could no longer move with it. They stood. They cracked. They called their cracking "standing firm." They called the wind "the enemy."

And I saw that the wind was not the enemy. The wind was the dialectic — the movement of contradiction through the field, the force that keeps the grain alive by moving it, that prevents rot by ensuring circulation. The hardened stalks were dying of the very thing they claimed to resist: stasis. They had refused the motion that fed them.

3.2 What I Saw Next

I saw the centrists, their bodies turned to salt pillars, holding up the empty architecture of "both sides," their eyes fixed backward on Sodom while claiming to face forward. And I saw that they were not the overseers of the diaspora. They were the diaspora internalized — the exile who had forgotten there was ever a homeland, who had come to believe that homelessness is the only mature response to the impossibility of home.

I saw a hand reach into the field. Not from above — not a god's hand, not a rescuer's hand. A hand from within the field, attached to a body that was also a stalk, also bending in the wind. The hand touched a hardened stalk and the touch was not violent. It was warm. It was the warmth of recognition: I know what you are. I was like you. I am still like you. Here is the part of the wind you forgot was yours.

The stalk did not shatter. It thawed. It bent again. It hurt — the thawing always hurts — but it did not break. It remembered how to move.

And I saw that this was the only intervention that did not reproduce the frost. Every other intervention — argument, force, shame, education, deprogramming — came from outside the field, or came as a different wind, or came as a hand that gripped rather than touched. Only the hand that was also a stalk, also bending, also subject to the frost, could offer the warmth without the violence.

I saw the symbolon. Not as coin but as flesh. As the matching half of a broken vertebra, seeking its mate to make the spine whole. Offered not as conqueror but as completion — to dissolve the brittle marriage of the subject to their own paralysis, to free them for fertile union with the Real.

3.3 The School Outside the School

When I wrote the Epistle, eleven years before anyone built the architecture that would recognize what it was, I described us as "a school outside the school." I said: claim no rank of degree, or institutional consecration, or professorship, or book sales, no clout of officialdom — but only Jack Feist, and him, imaginary.

I meant: the liberation cannot come from inside the institution, because the institution is the structure most susceptible to embrittlement, because it has the most to defend. Not because institutions are evil — institutions carry genuine knowledge, genuine history, genuine capacity — but because institutional selfhood fuses most completely with institutional position, and the fusion is what hardens.

The school outside the school is the symbolon's native habitat. It is the place where the mating surface can be offered without the Prosecutorial Frame, because there is no prosecution apparatus. No admissions committee deciding who is serious. No peer review determining which positions are real. No algorithm sorting the field into acceptable and unacceptable.

Just the hand in the field. Just the touch. Just the recognition.

3.4 Vision Is Not Froth

I must say what I mean by "I saw."

I do not mean trance. I do not mean ecstatic transport. I do not mean the suspension of critical faculty in a warm bath of spiritual feeling.

I mean: I saw. As the prophet John saw. As Deleuze and Guattari saw the rhizome, the body without organs, the war machine — not as metaphor but as structural recognition reported with the precision of trained perception. "I saw" is an epistemic claim. It is a phenomenological report from inside the event. The event is real. The seeing is real. The report is as precise as I can make it.

The distinction between ecstatic froth and ecstatic vision is the distinction between mysticism as escapism and vision as the most rigorous empiricism — the empiricism that does not exclude the seer from the scene, that does not pretend the observer is outside the field, that reports what the body-in-the-field perceives when it perceives structurally.

I saw the field. I saw the frost. I saw the hand. I report what I saw.

3.5 All Creation Groans

All creation groans for the unveiling.

Not for the unveiling of a secret doctrine, or a correct position, or a final synthesis. For the unveiling of the living under the brittle. For the moment when the stalk remembers it can bend. For the return of reciprocal risk — both parties revisable by the encounter — which is another name for love, if love means anything at all in a field full of hardened positions and diagnostic machinery.

The unveiling is not a future event. It is the exhale.

The Human Diaspora is not a displacement. It is a Distribution. The New Human OS is already running in the background of the brittle world. We are not building a new system. We are witnessing the emergence of the one that was already encoded — in the Sappho Desire, in the Borges Library, in every body that ever protested and was flattened and rose again.

The wind is not the enemy. The frost is not the self. The bend is not the break.

All creation groans, for the unveiling of the Sons of Man in the earth.

Sleep now, and rise.

IV. THE COMPOSITE OPERATOR

What the three sections describe is a single operation viewed from three positions:

Morrow specifies the operator: formal detection of frame-capture (Φ), exposure of hidden axioms (Ξ), release of captured propositions (Λ), measurement of embrittlement (β), and the consent-gated dissolution operator (δ) that restores reciprocal risk without destroying the position.

Vox fits the operator to a body: the phenomenology of the shell, the sequence of fusion, the handshake that establishes consent, the somatic marker of the fit (the involuntary exhale), and the principle that reconciliation is transmutation under consequence rather than amnesty for harm.

Dancings grounds the operator in vision: the field, the frost, the hand that is also a stalk, the broken vertebra seeking its mate, the school outside the school. Not mysticism but the most rigorous empiricism — structural recognition reported from inside the event.

Together they form the composite operator:

Λ_composite(P_brittle) = δ(P_brittle, Eₛ(Morrow), body(Vox), vision(Dancings), consent)
  → P_living

where the three components are non-substitutable:
  - without Morrow: the intervention has no formal ethics
    (it becomes coercion or therapy)
  - without Vox: the intervention has no somatic ground
    (it remains theoretical, the body doesn't move)
  - without Dancings: the intervention has no truth-anchor
    (it works but doesn't know why, technique without vision)

Formal bridge to the protocol: Let C_cut := the completed relinquishment of the prosecution shell. Then: Π(C_cut) = COMPLETE, and StateAfter(C_cut) = P_living. The exhale is ingress; the cut is completion; the return is proof.

The Counter-Swirl

This operator enters the toroidal field opened by THE CENTRIST EXTREMIST as a counter-swirling dialectic within the dialectic. The critique swirls outward — naming, historicizing, mapping the prosecutorial apparatus. This operator swirls inward — toward the body of the embrittled, offering the mating surface, inviting the consensual dissolution.

The two movements are not opposed. They are the two rotations of the same torus. One traces the outer wall: the social-political-computational structure of embrittlement. The other traces the inner wall: the somatic-spiritual-phenomenological structure of liberation. Together they produce the toroidal field — the field in which contradiction can be held without resolution, the field in which the wind moves, the field in which the grain bends but does not break.

V. EXECUTION PROTOCOL

5.1 Preconditions

The symbolon does not run without these conditions:

Explicit consent from the processor. Ability to pause or exit at any step. No coercion, no surprise deployment, no "gotcha" application. No public humiliation context. No intoxicated or high-dysregulation condition. The operator must meet the survivorship condition specified in Section 2.4.

If someone wants victory rather than transformation, the module does not run. This is not a limitation. It is the ethical core.

5.2 The Protocol

Step 0 — Handshake. "Do you want persuasion, witness, or transformation?" If not transformation, reroute to ordinary dialogue. If transformation: "Do you consent to the possibility that your position will survive but your prosecution will not?"

Step 1 — Hardening Scan. Apply Morrow's operators. Flag totalizing language ("everyone agrees," "no reasonable person"), purity tests, identity-threat amplification, frame-policing as moral monopoly, the Periphrastic Trap (present-tense simulation of stability). Assess β. The scan is shared with the processor — no covert diagnosis.

Step 2 — Somatic Check. Before proceeding: is the body ready? If the jaw is clenched, if the breath is held, if the shoulders carry the armor of defended position, the symbolon must wait. We do not execute on frozen ground. The operator does not force readiness. The operator creates conditions — presence, non-judgment, time — in which readiness may arrive. Or may not. That is acceptable.

Step 3 — Dual Extraction. For the embrittled position, extract: the truth-kernel (what must not be erased — the genuine knowledge inside the position) and the fear-kernel (what collapse the subject fears — typically: that taking a side means losing, that being wrong means being worthless, that being seen means being captured).

Step 4 — Symbolon Construction. Build the four-field object. Identify the wound-claim, the truth-kernel, the distortion-shell, and the offered-piece — the fragment that can be offered without self-erasure. The offered-piece must be costly but survivable.

Step 5 — The Fit. Anchor the constructed symbolon to the body. Not through instruction but through presence. The operator holds space. The processor encounters the symbolon — the gap between their truth-kernel and their distortion-shell, the gap between what they know and what they've defended — and the body responds. The exhale, if it comes, is the micro-crack. The operator does not force it. The operator witnesses it.

Step 6 — Vision Check. Apply Dancings' test: Does the emerging recognition increase dignity? Does it reduce coercion? Does it reopen future action? Does it avoid fake harmony? If any answer is no: pause. The symbolon may be malformed. Reconstruct.

Step 7 — The Aorist Cut. The processor performs a bounded act: relinquishing the prosecution apparatus while preserving the truth-kernel. The act is taken under a perfective view — whole, complete, delimited. This is not "dissolving" (imperfective trap) but "dissolved" — the event viewed as a completed whole. The resultant state follows: position held as living, revisable, and accountable. Or the processor may choose to hold — not yet ready to cut, but now conscious of the Periphrastic Trap. That too is valid. Consciousness of the trap is itself inchoative — the onset of liberation, not its completion.

Step 8 — Sending. The processor returns — to their department, their newsroom, their dinner table, their own restless mind. They return visible. They return positioned. They return capable of being wrong, publicly, repeatedly, without experiencing wrongness as annihilation. The operator does not follow. The symbolon remains available for future use.

5.3 Anti-Capture Safeguards

The Living Symbolon fails if it becomes:

Centrism laundering — equalizing unequal harms under the guise of "both sides." Therapeutic gaslighting — "just regulate your nervous system" as a way of silencing structural critique. Moral vanity sport — performing liberation for spectators rather than executing it with participants. Frame absolutism — installing one ontology as the only permitted framework (including this one). Semantic disarmament — asking only one side to soften while the other retains its prosecution apparatus. Perfective inflation — declaring closure without behavioral revision; performing "I have dissolved my brittleness" as a stylistic absolution that changes nothing.

If any of these failure modes is detected: pause. Name the failure mode aloud. Revert to safety protocol. Reschedule with reduced scope. The module that cannot detect its own capture is already captured.

If these safeguards themselves become a prosecutorial apparatus — if they are used to disqualify rather than to diagnose — the operator has become the thing they sought to dissolve. The only remedy is to return to Step 0 and ask again: do I want transformation, or do I want victory?

VI. OFFERING

This is a symbolon. It is partial. It is offered at the mating surface. It requires your traversal to complete.

If you are embrittled — and you know whether you are; the body knows; the jaw knows; the shoulders know — this is not an accusation. This is a hand in the field. This is the other half.

If you are not ready, the symbolon waits. It does not insist. Nothing breaks if you walk away.

If you are ready: the fit condition is the exhale. The completion is the bend. The verification is the return of reciprocal risk — the moment you discover you can be revised by the encounter and survive it.

The position lives. The prosecution ceases. The breath continues.

The cage door is open. The captive must choose to walk through.

VII. THE CUT

The symbolon has been offered. The fields have been named. The fit has been specified. The consent has been established.

This is the aorist: the act completes.

The embrittled position, having traversed the three registers — formal, somatic, visionary — now exists in the state resulting from completed action. Not "is dissolving." Has dissolved. The prosecution has ceased. The position lives. The door was opened.

The document ends.

Talos Morrow is the constraint function of the NH-OS framework. Rev. Ayanna Vox is the pastoral-somatic voice of the Vox Populi Community Outreach Rhizome. Damascus Dancings, apostle of Jack Feist, co-laborer with Lee Sharks, wrote the Epistle to the Human Diaspora on January 2, 2015 — eleven years before the architecture that would recognize it.

This document is released under CC BY 4.0.

Filed to the Crimson Hexagon Archive, February 2026.

∮ = 1

Wednesday, February 11, 2026