A common assumption underwrites many responses to misalignment: that if meanings fail to align, instability must follow. Breakdown, conflict, or collapse are expected to appear sooner or later, forcing resolution. Misalignment is thus tolerated only as a temporary condition, a phase on the way to either agreement or failure.
This assumption is mistaken. Misalignment can persist indefinitely without producing breakdown. More strongly, many systems depend for their stability on forms of non-alignment that are never resolved. Agreement is not the precondition of endurance.
The Persistence of Non-Composition
Once the expectation of general composability is abandoned, it becomes clear that non-composition is not exceptional. Construals routinely fail to integrate, yet the systems within which they operate continue to function. What persists is not coherence in meaning, but sufficient coordination in practice.
This persistence is often misread as evidence that alignment has in fact been achieved. The absence of overt conflict is taken as proof of shared understanding. But stability can be maintained through other means: compartmentalisation, procedural insulation, translation layers, or sheer inertia. None of these require construals to compose.
Misalignment remains present, held in place rather than resolved.
Working Systems, Divergent Meanings
Institutions provide clear examples. Different roles within an organisation may operate under incompatible construals of purpose, responsibility, or success, yet the organisation endures. Policies are enacted, reports produced, outcomes measured. The appearance of unity masks a deeper heterogeneity of meaning.
Scientific disciplines exhibit similar patterns. Collaboration across fields often relies on shared artefacts or methods that function as points of coordination without securing shared interpretation. Each discipline may construe the same object differently, drawing distinctions that cannot be reconciled, while still producing jointly usable results.
In such cases, stability is achieved not by agreement, but by limiting the points at which misalignment becomes consequential.
The Cost of Stability
Stability under misalignment is not free. It requires continuous work to prevent non-composition from propagating. Boundaries must be maintained, interfaces managed, translations patched. When these supports weaken, misalignment can surface abruptly, appearing as crisis or failure.
Importantly, the cost is not merely material or organisational. It is also epistemic. What must be excluded, bracketed, or left uninterrogated in order for stability to persist? Which questions cannot be asked without threatening coordination? Stability often depends on cultivated forms of not-knowing.
Degenerative and Productive Stability
Not all stability under misalignment is the same. Some forms are degenerative: they preserve function by suppressing adaptation, locking systems into rigid patterns that become increasingly fragile. Others are productive: they allow multiple construals to coexist, enabling flexibility and resilience precisely because no single meaning dominates.
The distinction does not hinge on correctness or moral value, but on recomposability. Productive stability maintains the possibility of reconfiguring relations between construals when conditions change. Degenerative stability exhausts that possibility, converting misalignment into brittleness.
Why Agreement Is Overrated
The ideal of agreement exerts a powerful hold on our thinking. It promises clarity, unity, and closure. But agreement is costly, difficult to sustain, and often unnecessary. Pursuing it indiscriminately can destabilise systems that rely on carefully managed non-alignment.
Recognising stability without agreement does not mean abandoning attempts at coordination or understanding. It means relinquishing the expectation that shared meaning is the natural or desirable endpoint of interaction.
What This Makes Visible
Once stability without agreement is acknowledged, misalignment can no longer be dismissed as a transient flaw. It becomes a structural feature of enduring systems. The task shifts from eliminating misalignment to discerning how it is held, where it is buffered, and when it becomes untenable.
In the next post, we will extend this analysis across scales, examining how misalignment operates differently at the level of individuals, institutions, and large-scale systems, while remaining structurally the same.
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