Failure Without Operational Collapse: Pressure Toward a Second Geometry of Structural Contradiction

A system can fail before it stops operating. It can continue to function while losing the ability to maintain a coherent description of what it is doing. This note examines a class of structural failures that do not fit cleanly into CDSA's existing feasibility-first ontology: cases where the contradiction persists not because a required state is unreachable, but because the system simultaneously maintains incompatible descriptions of itself as valid. Three empirically grounded cases — Level Mismatch, the ВДПЧ governance mechanism, and the Basel II capital adequacy framework — each resist feasibility reduction without sacrificing diagnostic specificity. This note does not claim a complete second ontology exists. It documents the pressure that the current ontology encounters when applied to this class, presents the failed reduction, and proposes a working hypothesis: some failures belong to a coherence geometry, distinct from feasibility geometry, where the primary structural problem is not blocked operation but normalized divergence. The note closes with internal differentiation emerging within the coherence class itself, and a set of open tests that would either confirm or dissolve the proposed distinction.