Concordant Adherence

Concordant Adherence is the doctrine and administrative practice by which a holding of the Tower is bound to a numbered Concordance not merely by citation but by the physical and procedural attachment of the citing body to the cited text. It is distinguished from simple compliance in that adherence survives the repeal, amendment, or plain loss of the Concordance adhered to; the bond is held to reside in the adherent, not the document. The doctrine is treated at length in the Precepts of Perpetual Adherence and is administered, imperfectly and by several offices at once, under the Concordant Laws.

Origins and the Year 142 Codification

Concordant Adherence emerged from the School of Literal Adherence in the years following the codification of the Precepts of Perpetual Adherence, which were annexed to the Litany of Adherence in Year 142 of the Tower's administrative calendar. The School's founding tenet — the Principle of Textual Immanence, by which a rule is understood to be present in the act of its recitation rather than behind it — made the question of attachment unavoidable. If a text is immanent in its performance, the School reasoned, then a body that performs a Concordance is that Concordance's holding for the duration of the performance, and remains so afterward unless formally released.

The School termed this condition declarative self-substantiation, and the phrase survives in the standard formula of attachment still recited at Floor 2001. The Litany's Non-Propagation Clause (Amendment 12.d to Annex Beta) was drafted precisely to limit the spread of adherence across floors, and is generally read as the first legislative acknowledgement that Concordant Adherence could not be confined to the bodies that had adopted it voluntarily.

The Schism of Year 178 and the Proceduralist Reading

The School of Literal Adherence split in Year 178 over whether adherence attaches to the wording of a Concordance or to the procedure by which it was enacted. The Division of Procedural Adherence was formed from the seceding party and has maintained since that a body adheres to a Concordance only so long as it continues to observe the enacting procedure, and that a change of procedure releases the adherent without notice. The parent School rejects this as a category error, holding that procedure is a property of the document and cannot be detached from it by the conduct of the reader.

The dispute has produced no fewer than nine attempted reconciliations, of which Type 1: Concordant Reconciliation is the only one still cited in ordinary practice. It is not cited often.

Precedent Sigma12 and the Problem of Orphaned Adherence

The Standing Committee for Precedential Adherence issued Precedent Sigma12 in response to the celebrated case of the Ninth Annex, in which a Concordance was repealed by the Office of Concordant Arbitration while eleven holdings remained attached to it. Sigma12 established that adherence does not lapse on repeal, and that an adherent to a repealed Concordance must be released individually, in writing, by the office that bound it. Where that office has itself been dissolved, the release must be sought from its successor; where there is no successor, from the Board of Concordant Arbitration.

"An adherence once declared is not extinguished by the silence of the text to which it was declared. Silence is not release; it is only silence, and the adherent remains bound to it."

— Precedent Sigma12, clause 3

The practical consequence is that the Tower maintains a standing inventory of adherents bound to Concordances no longer in force. The Bureau of Concordant Citation reported 1,412 such holdings in its most recent survey, of which 318 are bound to instruments whose numbers cannot now be reconstructed. These holdings continue to file annual returns, and the returns are receipted, though no office has been able to state what they are returns of.

Contradiction Among the Concordances

Concordant Adherence is unusually exposed to the Tower's general difficulty with its own law. The Concordant Laws hold at clause 44 that a body may adhere to no more than one Concordance at a time; the Third Concordant Court held in its Forty-First Sitting that simultaneous adherence is a procedural impossibility rather than a prohibition, and therefore cannot be enforced; and the Board of Concordant Interpretation has ruled twice, in opposite directions, on whether the Court's holding binds bodies that never appeared before it. The Office of Concordant Interpretation maintains the working position that all three instruments are correct and that the conflict is a feature of the record rather than a defect in it, a position the Office has never committed to parchment.

Scholars of the Nine Concordant Guilds divide on whether the doctrine is best understood as a legal fiction or as a description of fact. The prevailing view, associated with the guild archivist Halveen Mor, holds that Concordant Adherence is neither, but a maintenance category — a way of keeping track of things that would otherwise drift.

Administration and Known Difficulties

Adherence is recorded by the Bureau of Procedural Adherence where the adherent is a procedural body, and by the Bureau of Concordant Citation where the adherent is a text. The division is not always clear, and the two Bureaux have exchanged the same 200-odd holdings between them on at least four occasions since Year 340. The Office of Concordant Arbitration arbitrates disputes arising from the exchange, and has twice arbitrated a dispute as to whether it had jurisdiction to arbitrate it.

The Division of Procedural Adherence maintains a separate register of adherents who have declared release under the proceduralist reading. That register is not recognised by the parent School, and copies of it are not accepted at the counters of the Third Concordant Court. Holders of the register are advised to carry their original instruments as well. Visitors to the Division's reading room on Floor 2001 are asked to leave outer footwear at the door, as the floor is laid to a depth of nine inches in recitation sand that has not been renewed since the Schism.

The School of Literal Adherence continues to teach that adherence is a single act, performed once, and never afterwards in need of renewal. The record shows that 61 holdings have renewed their adherence annually for upward of two centuries without apparent difficulty, and the School does not regard this as a contradiction.