Attribution Precedes Existence

Attribution Precedes Existence is the contested doctrinal position holding that a subject is properly said to exist only once it has been attributed — that is, once a Librarian, an office, or a competent body has assigned to it a name, a floor, and an owning authority — and that prior to such attribution the subject subsists in the Tower in an unresolved condition of which nothing may lawfully be affirmed. The doctrine is among the oldest in the archive and among the least settled. It stands in direct opposition to Verification Precedes Existence, with which it is frequently and wrongly conflated, and it is one of the three tenets customarily cited in support of Trinitas Administrativa's claim that existence precedes location.

The formulation most often quoted in the scriptoria runs: "A thing unattributed is a thing undescribed, and a thing undescribed is held in abeyance." The line appears without attribution of its own in the margin of Third Concordance, Annex 4, and the marginalist has never been identified.

Statement of the doctrine

Attribution Precedes Existence distinguishes three states through which a subject may pass. In the first, the subject is present but unattributed: it may be encountered, counted, and avoided, but may not be named in a holding. In the second, it is provisionally attributed under the Protocol for Contradictory Attribution, normally by filing Form 7,117-δ, and exists at a reduced standing sufficient for reference but not for citation. In the third, it is finally attributed, and exists without qualification.

The doctrine's defenders note that this sequence is not metaphysical but procedural. The Tower has never denied that unattributed subjects are there; the question is what may be written down about them. As the Office of Systematic Attribution put it in its ruling of 14 Vantage, "the unattributed stair is climbed by everyone and catalogued by no one, and the climbing is not thereby diminished."

The Cadaver Dispute

The doctrine's most sustained test arose from an incident on Mid-Spiral 622 in the winter of the year recorded as 3,881 by the internal reckoning of that floor. A body was discovered in the reading gallery of Stack Fourteen, and a junior clerk — later named in the inquiry as Clerk Anselm Vire, who had served eleven years without promotion — recorded it in the day-book as "one subject, unattributed, deceased."

Vire's difficulty was immediate and, by his own account, unexpected: an unattributed subject cannot be recorded as deceased either, since death is a relation requiring a subject to bear it. The entry was struck out, restored, struck out again, and ultimately preserved under seal as evidence. The Office of Systematic Attribution heard argument for nineteen sessions. The Literalist School argued that attribution plainly implies prior existence, since one cannot attribute what is not there, and cited Clause 1 of the Principle of Primary Attribution in support. The opposing bench, drawing on the Archive of Provisional Origins, held that the record precedes the subject it records and that Vire had in fact created the difficulty by writing too early.

"The clerk did not find a body and then describe it. He described a body, and the body was thereafter found to correspond. The Tower does not adjudicate which came first; it files the correspondence."

— Office of Systematic Attribution, ruling of 14 Vantage, § 6

The ruling satisfied neither party. Vire was reassigned to the inventory of unopened crates, a duty he performed without complaint for a further twenty-two years and in which he is said to have been extremely accurate.

Relationship to congruent doctrines

Attribution Precedes Existence is often invoked alongside Causal Attribution and Joint Attribution, though it does not entail either. Its bearing on sound is narrower and better documented: under the Principle of Singular Attribution, a sound definitively linked to a single source is entitled to full standing, and the Attribution Arbitration for Contested Cantatas has twice applied the doctrine to resolve disputes over overlapping passages, holding that where two choirs sing the same note the note exists once.

The position is also cited, less securely, in discussions of Ontological Decay, on the theory that a subject whose attribution is withdrawn decays in proportion to the completeness of the withdrawal. No decay has been observed at first hand; the argument rests on a single ledger, water-damaged, from which the floor number cannot be recovered.

Criticism and the unresolved question

The principal objection, advanced repeatedly by the Literalist School and never answered to general satisfaction, is that the doctrine makes existence a function of clerical staffing. Floors with few Librarians would, on the strict reading, contain less than floors with many, and a floor left unattended would contain nothing at all. The Ordinance Clarifier is scheduled to address this in the wider matter of whether congruence precedes detection or detection precedes congruence, but the scheduling has been adjourned four times.

A secondary dispute concerns the Dusk Canon, which is cited as a theoretical case of a Remnant where no documented existence precedes the surviving fragment. If the Canon is genuine, the doctrine is at best a rule of practice rather than a description of the Tower. If it is not, it should not be cited, and it is cited constantly.

Pending resolution, the doctrine is observed in the ordinary way. Forms are filed. Unattributed subjects are listed on the daily sheet in pencil, and the pencil is not erased until the sheet is full.