Concordant Integration

Concordant Integration is the term of art used across the Tower for the completed reconciliation of a catalogued subject with its own record — the moment, however brief, at which a thing and its entry agree. The term is defined in the Manual of Resonant Integration at Article I.4 as "the harmonisation of a subject with the account of it, to the satisfaction of the officer presiding," and it is administered by the Directorate of Concordant Integration, which asserts authority over the practice through the Mandate of Integration. Whether the harmony is a property of things or of the entry is not settled, and the Directorate has declined to settle it in four separate communications.

The vertical basis

Concordant Integration descends from Vertical Integration, the foundational operation of the Directorate, in which two catalogued strata are reconciled along the axis of the Tower. The step from vertical to concordant work was taken in the winter of 1402 at the directive of the Bureau of Pre-Integration, which observed that a subject could be stacked correctly against its neighbours and still disagree with its own description. Vertical Integration proceeds by alignment; Concordant Integration proceeds by assent. The Directorate's holding in Harmonic Integration later established that the two are not alternatives but successive stages, and that the second may not be attempted on a floor where the first has not been recorded.

"No subject shall be said to integrate concordantly until it has been integrated vertically, and no officer shall certify the former in the absence of the latter, however plainly the subject states its own case."

— Manual of Vertical Integration, Chapter IX, clause 6

Procedure and the presiding officer

The procedure is short and almost never performed without objection. A subject on a given floor is read, then read to, at a spoken interval of no less than two hours (the interval is fixed in Second Concordance, Annex 12). The presiding officer then records whether the subject assented. Assent is recorded by the officer, not by the subject, and the Manual is explicit that the officer's record is what is certified. This is the point on which nearly every subsequent dispute turns.

Consultation of the subject is customary but not required. The Bureau of Phenomenal Integration has twice recorded a subject that was not consulted at all, both on floor 1180, and both certifications were upheld. The Bureau has since maintained the practice of saying the entry aloud to the subject, "whether or not it is present," as its standing note of 12 Vere 1403 puts it.

The Floor 1180 grievance

In the winter of 1403 a certifying clerk, Marten Ovell, then of the Bureau of Pre-Integration, certified thirteen subjects on floor 1180 in a single working day and was later required to re-certify nine of them, because the officer above him had not yet been told that the floor had been renumbered. The floor carried the number 1180 on the northern side and 1180 on the southern side, and the entries had been prepared against the wrong marker. Ovell's formal grievance, filed over the seal of the Bureau, argued that the numbering, not the discrepancy, was in error, and that the renumbering had been "attempted without integration — the accommodation being made before the reading." The grievance was rejected.

It is, however, the reason the floor still carries two markers: the Directorate of Concordant Integration ruled that correcting the marker would itself constitute a concordant change, and could not be authorised in the same session as the reading. The matter has been carried forward in sixteen sessions.

The procedural and the doctrinal

Disagreement persists between the Directorate and the Bureau of Concordant Amendment over the status of the final stage. The Directorate has held consistently that Stage Three, the recording of assent, is procedural, while the Integration Phase, the interval between assent and certification, is doctrinal. Adherents of Doctrinal Integration argue that by this ruling the Phase is also procedural, an interpretation the Directorate has described as "correct in form and mistaken in the record." The Integration Committee has resolved the point twice and both resolutions were later amended. The Re-integration Declaration is the instrument most often invoked against the Directorate's reading, and it is issued over the Directorate's own seal, which practice the Bureau of Concordant Amendment has called "the least contested and most contested fact in the office."

Records and citations

Certification of Concordant Integration is recorded in the Bureau of Concordant Integration, which supervises the entries of the Directorate and reports to it. The Bureau of Concordant Adherence audits the certification records, and is the office that returns the most entries to the floor for re-reading.

Two further points are settled by long practice. The first is that concordant reading is performed on a floor, and no room may be read in place of a floor. The second is that subjects catalogued with Integration with Annexes may be integrated, but the annexes must be read in the order the tower assigns them, and if the floor is not accessible, that is the lack of the floor, not of the integration.

The concordant part of the record is, in its essence, the smallest of the practices: a bureau maintaining a register has to keep two things in step — the entry and its account — and, in the Tower's phrase, "the step is not a walk, and not the walker, but the going."

Further readings

The Manual of Resonant Integration (Articles 1–20), the Manual of Vertical Integration, Second Concordance Annex 12, the Re-integration Declaration, and the standing note of the Bureau of Pre-Integration of 1403. The Directorate's decisions on the dual designation of Horizontal Integration Y54115430 are sometimes cited for the point that concordance is separable from its own performance, but they are not.