Meta Textual Artifact

Definition and Scope

Meta Textual Artifact is the collective designation, in Tower practice, for any document that references, describes, or purports to be a copy of a Concordance clause, when such a document is registered as a catalogueable object in its own right rather than as a textual holding of the clause it concerns. The category is defined by the Second Concordance, Clause 31, which establishes that such documents carry procedural authority independent of the clauses they discuss, and are therefore to be catalogued, handled, and shelved according to their own class, not their subject matter.

The distinction between a meta textual artifact and ordinary text is not one of content but of custody. A copy of a clause, filed as a copy, remains a copy. A copy of a clause filed as a document about the copying, however superficially identical, becomes a meta textual artifact on registration, and thereafter is subject to every procedure the class requires. The conversion is irreversible and, per Clause 31, retroactive to the date of the document's production rather than its receipt.

Administrative Suspicion of Intentionality

Meta textual artifacts are not a single uniform class. Under the taxonomy maintained for them by the Guild of Procedural Archivists, they are subdivided by the suspected intentionality of deviation: that is, by whether a departure from the source clause appears to have been introduced deliberately, inherited from an earlier recension, or fallen out by accident no one has been made to account for.

The Guild's guidance is precise on one point and silent on many others. A deviation inherited along an unbroken chain of marginal inscriptions is presumed accidental. A deviation that repeats an earlier deviation without a chain of custody is presumed deliberate, unless the repetition can be shown to be driven by scribal habit common to a single scriptorium. Where neither presumption obtains, the document is registered under a suspended class, which is not a class but a waiting state, and which has been full since the winter of the 4th and 11th Spiral closure.

The Doctrine of Coincidental Names and the Textual Wing

The specialized galleries for these objects occupy the Seventh Spiral Administrative Spire, whose Textual wing is the only wing in the Tower organized by a property that cannot be seen on a document. An artifact admitted to the wing is not filed by its content but by what a registrar believes its deviation was meant to do. The doctrine of coincidental names applies throughout the wing, though its application here concerns family names shared across classes rather than between the Tower and any other place.

The practical consequence is that two artifacts of identical wording may be shelved six floors apart and handled under different procedures, and neither may be moved without a fresh registration. Registration is by a single clerk. The clerk does not elevate questions of intent to a panel. Where intent cannot be determined, the document waits.

Procedure and Its Difficulties

The core procedures for meta textual artifacts are set down in Clause 31 of the Second Concordance and expanded in The Fifth Concordance Annex Iv Clause 88 a Line 1. The former establishes the artifact's procedural authority; the latter establishes how it is treated on receipt, including the requirement that its own margin be collated against the margin of the source before its composition is examined. This ordering has occasioned a persistent theological argument among registrars, since a deformed margin quite often voids the artifact whose interior it protects.

Two further instruments govern handling. Textual Collation and Textual Alignment determine whether the artifact is in conformity with its source; Textual Quarantine removes it from circulation when it is not. The Meta-Inquisitorial Panel may be convened to resolve a contested class assignment, but may not be convened twice on the same artifact. On the single occasion on which the panel sat twice, in the matter of the Sussembal reliquary recension, its second finding did not mention its first. Neither finding was withdrawn.

"No artifact shall be classified twice, nor shall any artifact be permitted to await classification beyond the fourth collation, excepting where the class itself is the thing in dispute."

— Clause 31, Second Concordance

There is an exception to the exception. Artifacts awaiting classification beyond the fourth collation are to be removed to a room near the north stairwell and turned face down once a day to prevent dust from settling in any one impression. This order was given in a hand no one on the present staff recognizes and is obeyed anyway.

Documented Irregularities

Three families of failure have been observed in the Textual wing with enough regularity to be named.

• Bleed — the gradual drift of a document's classification into the class of the document beside it, documented as Textual Bleed and most common between artifacts registered in the same fortnight.
• Collision — an artifact whose class assignment contradicts the class already recorded for it elsewhere, recorded as Meta-Catalogical Conflict.
• Emergence — the appearance of an artifact not entered in the schedule but fully formed in its proper class, posted under Emergent Artifact Classification.

Irregularities are reported using the Notice of Textual Irregularity, a form with three fields and forty lines of space for explanation. The forty lines are almost never enough, and the clerks have long used the reverse of the sheet, to which the form makes no reference. The reverse is ruled and the front is not.

Dispute Over Admissibility

There is no agreement on which meta textual artifacts are admissible as evidence of anything but their own existence. The strict reading, favoured by the older registrars, holds that an artifact may be cited only in the matter of its own classification, on the reasoning that Clause 31 grants procedural authority and nothing more. The broad reading holds that because a meta textual artifact may itself describe a Concordance clause, it must be permitted to speak as one, and observes that Clause 31 explicitly recites the authority of the clauses it catalogues.

The contradiction is real. The Fifth Concordance Annex Iv Clause 88 a Line 1 assumes the broad reading throughout, since it requires the artifact's margin to be collated against its source — a procedure with no meaning if the source is not permitted to be known. The Meta-Concordance on Hermeneutic Plurality declines to settle the matter, providing only that where two readings of a meta textual artifact are possible, both may be applied, though not to the same copy on the same day. Clerks resolve the question locally, and their resolutions are not circulated. The Meta-Clauses and the Fifth Concordance are frequently cited in support of one reading or the other, and the citations rarely survive checking.

A further layer of dispute concerns a class of meta textual artifacts whose central claim is itself an advisory matter: those that describe a document as provisional on the strength of a clause only partly quoted. Their treatment follows Line 88-A in the Fifth Concordance rather than Clause 31, and their custody is governed by the provisions on provisional floors, which were drafted for architecture and have never been comfortably applied to sheets of paper. The misfit is acknowledged in the record and has not been corrected.

The Guild of Procedural Archivists continues to maintain the taxonomy. It has never claimed the taxonomy is complete, only that it is the one in use. The Seventh Spiral Administrative Spire holds the registry of all subsequent classes. No one has asked the registry what it holds in reserve, and it is not clear that anyone dealing with the question would be answered.