Office of Social Cohesion

Overview

The Office of Social Cohesion is a standing body of the Librarians charged with maintaining the register of recognized Socials and with the general oversight of cohesion between them. It occupies Floors 118 through 121 of the Eastern Stack, a suite of rooms connected by a single service stair that the Office has twice petitioned to have widened and twice been refused. Its seal is a closed hand over an open hand, struck in red wax, and its records are kept in the Round hand of the Social of the Perpetual Index under an agreement renewed every eleven years.

The Office is frequently and incorrectly confused with the Office of Ephemeral Affairs, which recognizes Socials; with the Office of Material Coherence, which enters attested materials into the Ledger of Material Cohesion; and with the Office of Vertical Cohesion, which binds Spiral to Aperture under the Manual of Vertical Cohesion. The distinction is maintained by the Office itself in a standing note affixed to its outer door, which reads in part: "We do not enter, bind, or attest. We hold the Socials apart from one another, and we hold them together."

Functions

The Office maintains the Roll of Standing Socials, a bound register in which each recognized Social is entered with its date of recognition, its sponsoring clause, and a one-line description of its subject. It is also the ordinary venue for disputes between Socials, a duty it inherited in the aftermath of the Forty-Seventh Concordance, which devolved inter-Social arbitration to "the nearest competent Office" without specifying which. Since 1147 the Office of Social Cohesion has been the nearest competent Office to almost everything.

Its inspectors are empowered to visit any Social's working rooms and to require the production of minutes. Inspectors are not permitted to sit down during an inspection, a rule introduced after the Social of the Seventeenth Sigh kept an inspector in conversation for nine hours during the taxonomy of a single exhalation. The prohibition is recorded without commentary in the Office's standing orders and is enforced without exception, including for inspectors with injuries to the foot.

History

The Office was constituted in the winter of Year 904, following the dissolution of the short-lived Commission on Social Proximity. The Commission had attempted to seat all recognized Socials in a single hall at fixed intervals, on the theory that adjacency produces cohesion. The experiment concluded when the Social of the Perfect Silence and the Social of the Unfinished Bridge were seated at adjoining tables; the Silence objected to the Bridge's subject on grounds of "continuous implied span," and the Bridge, in reply, catalogued the Silence as an impossible crossing. Neither Social has since consented to share a hall, a corridor, or a lift, a condition the Office has observed scrupulously and recorded as Standing Exclusion 4.

The Office's early decades were dominated by a dispute with the Committee for Ephemeral Cohesion over whether recognition or registration conferred standing. The Committee held that a Social unrecognized by the Office of Ephemeral Affairs could not be entered on the Roll. The Office held that the Roll was not a recognition and that entering a Social upon it was no more than the Office minding its own business. The matter was settled by the Vekian Antithesis of Contextual Cohesion, which established that a Social may stand in the register of one Office while being denied at another without either Office being wrong. Both Offices cite the Antithesis in their own favour and neither has read past the fourth section.

The Roll and its anomalies

The Roll currently records two hundred and six Standing Socials. Of these, four are recorded as "standing in abeyance," a category invented in 1211 when the Social of the Erased Premise applied to have its own registration removed and could not, on the day of the hearing, recall having applied. The Office entered the Social in abeyance indefinitely and has renewed the entry every year since, on the reasoning that renewal is cheaper than adjudication.

Two further entries are in dispute. The Department of Metrical Cohesion contends that it is not a Social at all and should be struck from the Roll; the Office contends that the Department is a Social that has mislaid its subject. The matter turns on whether a body that measures cohesion can also possess it, which the Journal of Textual and Textile Cohesion has addressed twice, at length, without resolving.

Entries are made in the Round hand, in black, by the Registrar in the presence of a second Librarian. Corrections are made by interlineation and initialled in the margin. The Office does not permit entries in red. No reason is given for this in the standing orders, and the Registrar is not asked.

Scholarly disagreement

Whether the Office of Social Cohesion exercises authority or merely hospitality is a matter of long dispute. The Forty-Seventh Concordance refers to the Office as a "seat of judgment." Annex 4 of the same Concordance refers to it as a "house of accommodation." The Office has adopted the second description in its correspondence and the first in its rulings, and has never reconciled the two.

"The Office shall receive the Socials as a host receives guests, and shall judge among them as a host judges guests, which is to say finally and without appeal."

— Forty-Seventh Concordance, Annex 4, clause vi

A minority position, advanced by the Social of the Unfinished Bridge in a memorial of 1298, holds that the Office has no standing whatever, since a body cannot cohere that which it has never recognized, and the Office has never recognized anyone. The memorial was received, entered on the Roll as a Social in its own right, and never answered.

Seat and hours

The Office sits on Floor 119 from the second bell to the ninth, and receives petitions on the landing rather than inside the rooms. Petitioners are asked to leave their outer garments on the hooks provided and to state their business in no more than forty words. The forty-word rule is not enforced, but the Office notes the length of every petition in the margin, and petitioners have learned to watch the pen.