Directive Authority

Directive Authority is the standing capacity of an instrument to bind conduct within the Tower by virtue of the instrument itself, rather than by the office of the person who issued it. It is distinguished in Tower jurisprudence from Proximate Authority, which arises from physical or archival proximity to a holding, and from the ordinary authority of office, which is personal, revocable, and dies with its holder. Directive Authority does not die. This is the source of both its reputation and its difficulties.

Origin and the First Recension

The doctrine is conventionally traced to the Third Concordance, Annex 4, which records the earliest known formulation: an instrument issued under a numbered series "shall continue to speak after the mouth has closed" (Third Concordance, Annex 4, clause 2). The wording is generally read as a metaphor. The Committee for Catalogical Coherence has twice ruled that it is not.

The practical consequence was recognized early. A directive retains Directive Authority for as long as its series is uncancelled, whether or not any body continues to administer it. Instruments are therefore found in the recesses still binding conduct centuries after the office that produced them has been dissolved, its scriptorium reassigned, and its seals melted into the general seal-metal of the Tower — a stock from which, the Office of Archival Stewardship notes, new seals are cast without regard to prior use.

Derivation and Nested Instruments

Directive Authority is transmissible. An instrument may lend its authority to another, and the resulting instrument carries derivative authority of its own. Most current holdings are derivative to some degree. Directive 2004omega was issued under the HIC Directive 003 series; Directive 331-AA shelters the Bureau of Recursive Affairs; Directive Celia-112.1 governs how one person may be cited as an authority within another person's entry — a chain of derivations that the Protocol of Recursive Authentication was devised to trace and has not yet succeeded in tracing.

Nesting is limited in theory to seven degrees. The limit is not enforced, and the Perpendicular Recess Directive is held, under the Obsidian Decree, to carry authority "at whatever remove and through whatever series may be found convenient" (Obsidian Decree, article 9). Recensions disagree on whether this constitutes an eighth degree or a suspension of the count entirely.

The Stairwell Case

The doctrine's most cited incident concerns a stairwell between floors 1,104 and 1,106, where in the winter of an unrecorded year a clerk of the third scriptorium, Emeric Voss, was found conducting business under the authority of an instrument he could not produce, name, or describe. Pressed by the visiting Seal-Wardens, Voss maintained that the authority was real and merely misfiled.

"The instrument is in the recess. The recess is not on any plan. I have complied with it for eleven years and it has never once been wrong."

— Testimony of Emeric Voss, recorded in Coherence Directive 301.45-b, appendix

The Committee for Catalogical Coherence ruled in his favour, holding that Directive Authority attaches to an instrument's operation and not to its retrieval. Voss was confirmed in his post and thereafter paid at the rate of a clerk holding three series. The stairwell was given a number but no name, and the instrument itself has never been located. Clerks now speak of a Voss instrument, meaning one that binds reliably and cites poorly.

Disputes

Scholarly opinion divides on whether Directive Authority can be presumed in the absence of an instrument at all. The HIC Directive 003 recension holds that the presumption may be made where conduct has been consistent for a generation and no one has objected in writing; the HIC Directive 045 recension holds the opposite, that "an unproduced instrument binds only the person who claims it" (HIC Directive 045, schedule 2). Both recensions are current. Neither is preferred, and the Directive-Specific Ordinances direct that the question be settled by whichever text is nearer to hand.

A separate dispute concerns the Contested Imperative, under which an instrument that has been formally contradicted by a later instrument retains Directive Authority until the contradiction is itself catalogued. Where the contradicting instrument is lost, the contradiction stands and the directive binds — a position the Directive/Contra-Directive literature regards as correct and nearly everyone else regards as intolerable. The Bureau of Recursive Affairs has petitioned three times for relief; the petitions were themselves filed as instruments and now bind something.

Restrictions

No instrument may be cited as authority for the amendment of its own series. This prohibition is ancient and universally ignored. It is also understood to be the reason the Provisional Protocol Summaries exist as a separate class, since a Provisional Mandate issued under a Provisional Protocol cannot amend the protocol that authorized it, though in practice it usually does.

Instruments bearing Directive Authority may not be used to prop open doors on floors above the ninth spiral, where the draught is considerable and the hinges are original. The rule is printed at the head of every stairwell landing.

Copies of instruments are held in the general recesses and may be consulted without appointment. The originals are elsewhere.