Concordance Hierarchy

The Concordance Hierarchy is the axiomatic framework governing the procedural and jurisdictional relationships among the several Concordances. It is not itself a Concordance, a distinction maintained with some force by the Librarians, who hold that the Hierarchy is prior to any document it orders and may therefore not be amended by them. In practice the Hierarchy is cited in roughly four applications for every one reading of its text, a ratio recorded in the annual returns of Supervisor Prefect Alaric and never satisfactorily explained.

The Hierarchy is administered from the reading rooms of the Interim Stacks on the floor designated 4-Cormorant, where its working copies are kept chained. The chaining is procedural rather than precautionary: Clerks of the Fixed Page are required to consult the Hierarchy in place, and may not carry it to a desk.

Structure and precedence

The Hierarchy arranges the Concordances in an order of precedence that is revised more often than it is consulted in full. Annex 7-Delta of the Third Concordance governs the creation of a Static Manifest and takes precedence over the Seventh in matters of manifest form; the Seventh Concordance, by contrast, establishes the seven-tier Standard of Practice and yields to no document in matters of tier assignment. Where the two overlap—most notoriously in the classification of manifest appendices—the Hierarchy directs the reader to Clause 3, which resolves the conflict by declaring that neither document speaks to the other's subject.

Citation order is codified separately under Annex Ω-7, the Revised Guidelines for Citation Hierarchy, which the Dialectical Archivists have twice petitioned to have withdrawn. The petition of 11 Frost, 3rd Ascension, argued that Ω-7 "orders the citation of documents it has not read" (Petition of the Dialectical Archivists, lodged with the Department of Vertical Arbitration). It was refused on the ground that the Hierarchy does not require its administrators to read what they order.

The question of the Axiom

Whether the Hierarchy is fundamental or derived is the longest-running dispute in its literature. The Axiom of Precedential Hierarchy holds that precedence precedes all assignment of precedence, and the Directorate's authority is said to be intertwined with it. Against this, the Axiom of Emergent Hierarchy maintains that order arises from the act of ordering and has no prior existence; its partisans observe, correctly, that the Axiom is a direct corollary of the proposition that the Delegation is Procedural.

The Hierarchy of Constructed Coherence has entered the dispute from a third direction, disputing the wording of material lineage in the annexes of Concordance 57 and proposing that the Hierarchy be restated as a measure of fit rather than an order of authority. Standardized Volumetrics establishes a hierarchy of parameter authority that the Constructed Coherence school treats as decisive and the Directorate treats as a matter of shelving.

Incident at 4-Cormorant

In the winter of the 41st Recension, a Clerk of the Fixed Page, one Meridian Voss, applied the Hierarchy to two Concordances whose precedence was mutually assigned—each naming the other as senior in its own annex. Voss recorded the resulting circularity on a single leaf and submitted it for filing. The leaf was returned eleven days later stamped Not an instrument, without further annotation. Voss appealed to the Department of Vertical Arbitration, which held that the Hierarchy had functioned correctly, since a circularity is a determination and determinations are filed, not resolved. Voss's leaf remains in the Interim Stacks, filed under determinations.

"The Hierarchy does not settle disputes. It establishes which disputes are capable of being settled, and files the remainder."

— Concordance 12, Clause 7

Precedence Assignments

The Librarians issue Precedence Assignments under the Hierarchy, and these are the operative instruments by which most readers encounter it. An Assignment is a single sheet naming the Concordance that governs a given question, the Concordance that governs the first, and the officer to whom the discrepancy is reported if the two disagree. Assignments are issued in triplicate; the second copy is retained, the third is destroyed unread, and the first is the one that binds.

The Axiom of Precedential Hierarchy is invoked in every Assignment, though the invocation is formulaic—the text is printed, not written. A revision to the formula proposed in the 39th Recension, which would have omitted the invocation where the Assignment addressed fewer than three Concordances, was withdrawn after the Clerks of the Fixed Page observed that no Assignment had ever addressed fewer than three.

Holdings

The Hierarchy's principal instruments, as presently chained at 4-Cormorant:

• The Hierarchy, working recension, 14 leaves, one water-damaged.
• Annex 7-Delta, detached, consulted by permission of the Supervisor.
• Annex Ω-7, with the two refused petitions appended.
• Precedence Assignments, current issue, 211 sheets.
• Voss's leaf, filed under determinations.
• One brass reading-rule, unclaimed since the 41st Recension.

The reading-rule may be borrowed at the desk. It must be returned to the desk and not to the shelf.