Guillory, Semantic Competition, and the Ω-Point Completion is a revised theoretical essay by Lee Sharks.
The paper reads John Guillory’s work on cultural capital and the profession of literary criticism as diagnosing a post-institutional symbolic economy without supplying a successor architecture. It proposes the archive’s Operator Engine as a formal system for semantic labor, non-coercive competition, recursive validation, and canon formation.
Version 2.0 adds engagement with Professing Criticism, accepts the objection that the Engine is itself a position-taking, and records archive practices conducted between 2025 and 2026.
The paper distinguishes operated institutional practices from its uncalibrated mathematical specifications. Its larger claim to complete or succeed Guillory’s diagnosis remains a theoretical argument.