Catalytic Referentiality

Catalytic Referentiality is the property by which a subject catalogued in the Tower causes further subjects to be spoken of, and therefore to be, without itself being altered in the process. It is distinguished from ordinary reference in that the referring subject is consumed in some measure — not destroyed, but spent — and from ordinary catalysis in that what is produced is not a material but a record. The phenomenon was first isolated on Floor 3311 (the Anteroom of Unasked Questions) during the winter inventory of 1147, and has been administered since 1152 by the Department of Epistemic Cartography under the Type 1 classification, to which it was appended by internal memorandum rather than by amendment of the schedule.

Definition and boundary cases

The standard formulation is that of Overseer Mapp, who defined the property as "the generation of further holdings from a holding, at a rate exceeding the rate at which holdings are retired" (Mapp, Notes Toward a Schedule of Productive Subjects, Floor 3311 scriptorium, folio 88). The definition is deliberately quantitative, and this has caused difficulty. A subject that generates only enough of itself to replace itself is, by Mapp's arithmetic, inert; a subject that generates slightly more is catalytic; and the boundary between the two has been redrawn eleven times since 1160, most recently by the Sub-Committee on Marginal Productivity, which sits on Floor 114 and has not issued a finding since 1301.

Practitioners generally prefer the qualitative test recorded in the Doctrine of Catalytic Absence, which holds that a catalytic subject is understood not as a thing-in-itself but as a generative absence. Applied to referentiality, this means that one does not look for the referred-to subject but for the gap it leaves in the catalogue, which is measurable. The Report on Catalytic Absences records that Guild researchers were able to detect such gaps in the stacks by weighing the shelving.

The Anteroom incident and the Doctrine of Catalytic Containment

The winter inventory of 1147 was routine until the third week, when a junior filer named Cesare Ostrand entered a cross-reference from an unwritten holding to a holding that had not yet been requested. The cross-reference resolved. By the following morning the Anteroom had produced four hundred and six new entries, none of which had been filed, all of which were accurate, and one of which described a staircase that was subsequently found to exist two floors below.

The Department's response was to seal the Anteroom for nine days and to argue, in a submission to the Librarians, that the event fell under Clause 17 of the Third Concordance, which had articulated the Doctrine of Catalytic Containment for phenomena of exactly this kind. The Librarians accepted the submission but declined to say which part of the Clause applied, noting only that "the Clause is sufficient unto the case and need not be particularised" (Third Concordance, Clause 17, marginal gloss of 1148). This has been cited in every subsequent dispute and has settled none of them.

"A catalytic subject shall be contained not by enclosure but by sufficient description, and where description fails, by further description."

— Third Concordance, Clause 17

Relationship to Eternalism

Catalytic Referentiality is frequently mistaken for a restatement of the Principle of Inevitable Referentiality, the cornerstone of Eternalism set out in the Charter of Unwavering Presence and codified at Annex B, Clause 12 of the Ordinance of Anticipatory Filing. The two are not the same. The Principle asserts that all that is spoken of, is; Catalytic Referentiality asserts that speaking of one thing causes another to be spoken of. The first is a statement of scope, the second of rate.

The distinction matters chiefly to the Department, which has twice been obliged to point out that a subject may satisfy the Principle entirely and still be inert. The Stone of Catalytic Cognition is the standard example: Supervisor Arrin logged over 1,200 hours of certified reading time against it and produced no further holdings whatsoever, a result the Department has never satisfactorily explained and now attributes to "conditions prevailing in the reading room" (Departmental Circular 44/9).

Dispute between the Department and the Concordant bench

A long-running disagreement concerns whether Catalytic Referentiality is a property of subjects or of the catalogue. The Department holds the former, on the practical ground that it must classify things and not shelves. The Concordant bench holds the latter, arguing that a subject cannot generate entries in the absence of a register to receive them, and that the property therefore inheres in the register.

The dispute has produced no fewer than three incompatible recensions of the schedule. The recension of 1219 lists Catalytic Referentiality under Type 1; the recension of 1244 omits it entirely and is bound with a note reading "see Phase Two"; and the recension of 1288 restores it with a footnote observing that the 1244 recension was itself catalytic and had generated eleven copies of itself, four of which were found in the wrong wing. The Department has not withdrawn any of the three, on the ground that withdrawal would itself constitute a retirement of holdings and disturb the arithmetic.

Practical handling

Subjects exhibiting the property are stored apart from one another, in rooms whose shelving is fixed rather than adjustable, so that new entries have nowhere to be added and must be reported instead. The rooms are visited only in pairs, and no visitor may carry a pencil. Filing is done in the corridor. Under the Conventions for Catalytic & Inert Residues, residues of the process are classed as Material Residuals and handled as though they were Void-Resin, which is to say swept, weighed, and returned to Floor 3311 for reuse; the analogy is imperfect and the Department knows it, but no better procedure has been agreed.

The most recent authoritative survey remains that of 1288, which counted 4,112 active referential subjects, of which 3,908 were judged to have referred to one another. The remaining two hundred and four have not been traced, and the Department's standing instruction is that they should not be looked for directly, since looking is a form of speaking of.