This short working paper clarifies the scope and limits of the theory of Perceptual Misalignment and its two analytical dominants: Field of Force and Field of Access. The note argues that Perceptual Misalignment should not be identified with mediation in general, textual error, illusion, ambiguity, incomplete information, or descriptive vividness. The concept applies only when mediation becomes formally operative as non-coincidence: when an index of presence exceeds, displaces, delays, destabilizes, or outlives the scene, subject, support, or medium that appears to secure it. The note also distinguishes Field of Force from complex modernist syntax as such, and Field of Access from context, performance, or material culture as such. Field of Force names the concentration of presence as syntactic, rhythmic, temporal, and focalizing pressure; Field of Access names the distribution of presence across voice, body, formula, object, place, inscription, performance, memory, and scene. Its purpose is to prevent conceptual inflation: not all mediation is misalignment, not all modernist syntax is Field of Force, and not all archaic performance is Field of Access. This note clarifies the scope and limits of the broader framework developed in Field of Force, Field of Access: Literary Presence and the Formalization of Non-Coincidence.
Sandra Vass (2026) studied this question.