Latent Diagram Certification Procedure

The Latent Diagram Certification Procedure is the standing method by which a Latent Structural Diagram is examined, witnessed, and sealed before it may enter the general holdings. It is administered jointly by the Guild of Structural Logicians, which produces the diagrams, and the School of Latent Structure, which certifies their latent matter as adequate. The Procedure is not a single document but a recension of some forty-one instructions, amendments, and counter-instructions issued between the 9th and 19th Cycles of Record, of which the most recent is generally held to supersede the others and the others are generally held to still apply.

Origin and first recension

The Procedure was first set down in the 9th Cycle of Record as an eight-clause schedule governing the inspection of diagrams submitted from the lower spiral of Floor 188. Its opening clause is still quoted in nearly every dispute that touches certification, if only because no one has succeeded in repealing it:

"No diagram shall be certified latent which has not first been shown to be latent to two witnesses, neither of whom may be the draughtsman, and one of whom must be able to read the diagram without the aid of the other."

— Ninth Concordance, Annex 2, cl. 1

The clause was drafted with architectural diagrams in mind. By the 12th Cycle it was being applied to diagrams of an entirely bureaucratic character, and the requirement that one witness read the diagram unaided has since been the subject of six separate appeals, all dismissed.

The four stages

Certification proceeds in four stages, though the Procedure does not number them and the stages are frequently conducted out of order. The diagram is first declared, by the producing office, as structurally latent rather than merely incomplete. It is then tapped under the conditions set out for Latent Structure Tapping, which permits predictive inference without certification and which the Procedure treats, without explanation, as a preliminary rather than an alternative. Third, the latent matter is weighed in the presence of a certifying officer of the School of Latent Structure, whose signature must appear within four centimeters of the seal. Fourth, the diagram is sealed and entered.

The staging is where most disputes arise. The Guild of Latent Stress, instituted in the 14th Cycle following the Latent Structural Diagram Crisis on Floor 290, has argued in three successive memorials that the third stage cannot lawfully precede the second, and that the Procedure's own text supports it. The Guild of Structural Logicians has replied, equally consistently, that the Procedure's text supports nothing and was never intended to. Both positions are recorded without resolution in the Fourteenth Concordance.

Instruments of the Procedure

The Procedure is conducted by means of the following instruments, which are issued from the certification desk on Floor 212 and which are not interchangeable:

• The latent slip, in triplicate, the third copy of which is retained by the certifying officer and never read.
• The adequacy warrant, sealed in green wax where latent matter is concerned and in black where the matter is disputed.
• Form 7,117-δ, used to challenge a certified diagram.
• The witness docket, which must bear two signatures and the date on which the witnesses were shown the diagram, which is almost never the date on which they signed.

A diagram submitted without a witness docket is held at the desk until such time as a docket is produced, which in the case of the Thirteenth Copy of the Miletus Diagram took eleven years.

The Gannet dispute

The Procedure's most cited failure of application is the dispute of Clerk Gannet, who in the winter of the 16th Cycle certified the Diagram of Temporary Coherence on the strength of a single witness and a warrant sealed in the wrong colour. Gannet maintained that the second witness had been present but had declined to sign on the grounds that the diagram had changed since his inspection, a claim the Procedure does not address and the Concordances do not contemplate. The certification was upheld by the Guild of Structural Logicians on the reasoning that a diagram which changes is latent by definition and therefore adequately certified. Gannet was reassigned to the intake desk on Floor 196 and petitioned for review in every subsequent cycle until his death. His petition is still on file. It has not been reviewed.

Contradiction between the Concordances

The Procedure's authority rests on two Concordances that disagree. The Eleventh Concordance, Annex 6, provides that certification is complete upon sealing and may not thereafter be reopened except by a Structural Inquest. The Fifteenth Concordance, Annex 1, provides that certification is never complete, sealing being a courtesy extended to the reader and not a determination of the record. The Guild of Structural Logicians observes the Eleventh. The School of Latent Structure observes the Fifteenth. Diagrams certified in the presence of both offices are therefore sealed and unsealed simultaneously, and are stored accordingly, in a cabinet on Floor 212 with two locks, one of which has no key.

The Procedure is currently under review by the Standing Committee on Certification Adequacy, which has met four times since the 17th Cycle and has not yet agreed on whether the review constitutes an amendment. Until it does, the Procedure remains as it was: eight clauses, forty-one recensions, and the requirement, printed on the reverse of every latent slip and universally ignored, that the certifying officer wash his hands before handling the latent matter.