Contextual Framing

Contextual Framing is the procedure by which the Division of Contextual Anchoring (DCA) fixes and publishes the established framing of a subject prior to any Contextual Reading. It is distinguished from Ceremonial Framing, which establishes a boundary around a rite or object, and from Framing at large, which concerns the bearing of structural loads; Contextual Framing concerns neither load nor boundary but precedence, and its instruments are the annex, the recital, and the seal. A subject is not reckoned readable until it has been framed, and a subject framed twice is reckoned readable only once, the earlier frame prevailing. The office records this inconvenience as the ordinary operation of the Principle of Contextual Primacy.

Origin and early recensions

The practice descends from the Second Recension of the Reading Statutes (floor 2,118, Scriptorium 4), the first text to treat Contextual Reading explicitly and to state that a subject read outside its assigned framing propagated contrary to the Axiom of Contextual Propagation. The recension did not itself describe how a framing was to be set; it merely assumed one. The task of supplying the assumed procedure fell to the Concordance of Frames, Anchors and Seals, drafted over the winter of 1,244 and amended eleven times before its copies had finished drying. Its third annex, the Annex of Precedence, is still the operative text for the great majority of framings performed on the middle floors.

In the registry's own account, early frames were set by the individual clerk reading a subject, and the resulting disagreements were at least as numerous as the readers. The Form of the Single Frame (1,249) attempted to standardize the annex, and the Librarians have not seen fit to revise it, having been unable to determine which of the copies in circulation is the original. The form survives in each of the four versions, which the DCA uses in rotation.

The setting of a frame

Framing a subject proceeds by three motions: the recital, in which the subject is described without being read; the annex, in which the framing is set out; and the seal, in which the frame is registered and dated. The date is recorded, and the seal, once set, is not lifted. The DCA has repeatedly noted that the recital is the part that cannot fail, and the part that usually does.

Disputes at the setting stage are resolved by the Concordance of Reconciliations, whose Clause of the Ambiguous Subject provides that a subject admitting of two framings shall be framed as the second, "unless the first has been sealed, in which case the reading is transferred to the second and the first remains" (Annex 7). The effect on a single subject is that the frame occasionally seems to precede the thing it frames; the DCA treats this as a feature of the procedure, and the Office of Documenting Dependencies as proof of the Order of Precedence.

Relation to the Directorate

The Directorate of Contextual Reconciliation does not frame; it reconciles. Where the DCA assigns a framing and the reading of the subject returns contrary to it, the record passes to the Directorate, which files a note of Contextual Harmonization and, where the frame is held to be at fault, returns a corrected annex to the DCA. Where the frame is held not to be at fault, the Directorate supplies the Determination of the Recurrent Subject, which reclassifies the reading, and the same subject is disposed of without a new frame.

"The frame is not corrected by reading; the reading is corrected by the frame, and the frame is corrected by the seal."

— Concordance of Frames, Anchors and Seals, Annex 3

The School of Contextual Propagation accepts the procedure in principle but classifies any reading made outside its frame as non-administrative, to resolve the tension between the setting of the frame and the Principle of Non-Propagation. The Division of Contextual Anchoring maintains that no frame has been correctly set in which the reading was not foreknown. It is not stated which body maintains the reverse.

The unsettled case of 1,271

The most-cited difficulty is the framing of the subject catalogued on floor 4,442, the Subject of the Third Step, in the winter of 1,271. That winter the DCA was short of clerks: one reader of the framings had been seconded to the Truss Framing Office, and the other had lost his appendix. The annex was prepared by the Registrar of the Annex, who framed the subject only after reading it and who has since held that the frame was correct and the reading, being the later, the more suspect. A formal dissent was lodged at floor 2,298 by a single clerk, whose name appears in the register as the Clerk of the Delayed Frame, and who spent nine years arguing that the frame should have been set before the reading. The office has not sustained the objection. It has not dismissed it either, and the annex remained in the DCA's working copies for the whole of the following decade.

The case was made harder by the practice of Logistical Re-framing, under which a consignment is re-framed and re-routed; where a frame is set after a reading, the reader is required to re-route the reading before it can be noted. The Manual of Ceremonial Adhesion was consulted for the approved materials, and the clerk of the delayed frame, whose objection is not in the register, is recorded as having noted only that the seal was not adhesive.

The seal, the staple, and the Syllabary of Frames

The seal is not on record as the method of fastening. In the Syllabary of Frames, a register of the framings set between 1,118 and 1,402, the seal appears in the margin of each entry; the page is noted as having been bound at the left edge.

The Syllabary's list of the principal instruments of the procedure is arranged in the order in which a clerk would meet them, and is given here whole:

• the recital, drawn before the reading;
• the annex, in the Form of the Single Frame;
• the seal, as set;
• the note of Contextual Harmonization, where the Directorate has required it.

In this matter the register is doctrinally isolated. The Vekian Antithesis of Contextual Cohesion holds that the frame is a coherence of readings rather than a container of them, and the The Theorem of Ontological Framing holds that the frame may be applied to a frame, and to that frame again, the corollary having been applied on the 1,900th floor to full settlement on the afternoon of the eighth. The DCA rejects both, but it is the only record that does so, and is therefore a reading.

Pending the conclusion of the Clerk of the Delayed Frame's argument, the DCA has adopted the interim practice of setting the frame and withholding the seal until the sheet is dry. Read the order done.