Thus far, misalignment has been treated without recourse to failure, error, or dysfunction. This restraint is often met with resistance. If misalignment is not something to be corrected, and if stability can persist without agreement, then what room remains for speaking of breakdown, harm, or pathology?
The answer is not to reintroduce norms by stealth. It is to distinguish carefully between normativity and viability. Pathology can be described without declaring what ought to be the case, and without appealing to standards of correctness, success, or value.
From Norms to Viability
Normative accounts of pathology begin by specifying a standard: a correct function, a healthy state, a proper alignment. Deviation from that standard is then labelled dysfunction. Such accounts are powerful, but they conflate diagnosis with judgement.
A non-normative account begins elsewhere. It asks not whether a system meets an external standard, but whether its construals remain viable in relation to one another. Viability here does not mean goodness or desirability. It means the continued possibility of sustaining relations without collapse.
Pathology, on this account, is not misalignment as such. It is the loss of viable recomposition.
When Misalignment Becomes Untenable
Misalignment becomes pathological when the mechanisms that previously contained it cease to function. Translation layers break down. Interfaces proliferate without coherence. Compartmentalisation hardens into fragmentation. What was once buffered begins to propagate.
Crucially, this transition does not require that any construal be false or mistaken. Each may remain locally coherent. What fails is their ability to coexist without mutual interference. The system can no longer hold its own heterogeneity.
This is experienced phenomenologically as crisis, paralysis, or runaway conflict. But these experiences are effects, not explanations.
Brittleness and Exhaustion
Two modes of pathology recur across domains. The first is brittleness. Here, stability has been maintained by rigid constraints that suppress variation. When conditions shift, even slightly, recomposition is impossible. Misalignment that was once contained becomes catastrophic.
The second is exhaustion. Here, the work required to manage misalignment increases over time. Translation, negotiation, and repair consume more resources, leaving less capacity for adaptation. Collapse occurs not through sudden shock, but through attrition.
Neither mode implies error. Both arise from the gradual erosion of recomposability.
Harm Without Blame
Pathology often carries harm. People suffer, systems fail, capacities are lost. A non-normative account does not deny this. It refuses only the inference from harm to fault.
Blame personalises what is structural. It identifies agents where relations are at issue. While blame may play a role within moral or political discourse, it does not belong to the ontology of misalignment. Pathology can be real, consequential, and devastating without being anyone’s fault.
Diagnosis as Description
To diagnose pathology without norms is to describe patterns of non-viability without prescribing remedies. It is to trace how construals interact, where recomposition fails, and which stabilising mechanisms have been exhausted.
Such diagnosis does not tell us what to do. It tells us what is happening. Any subsequent intervention—ethical, political, technical—must take this description as a starting point, not a conclusion.
What This Allows
Freed from the demand to judge, pathology becomes thinkable without defensiveness. Systems can be examined without first assigning guilt or prescribing correction. This does not make intervention easier, but it makes it more honest.
In the final post of this series, we will turn from pathology to orientation: how to live, design, and act in a world where misalignment is neither eliminable nor exceptional, and where recomposition is always partial and contingent.
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