Pre Originating Conditions

The term pre-originating conditions denotes those circumstances which are held to obtain before a document, office, or object may properly be said to have originated, but which are not themselves origination. The concept entered the Concordance record through the annexes to The Seventh Concordance, drafted to settle the Halls of Provisional Geometry dispute of 14,045 and the parallel claims of the Directorate of Preemptive Resource Allocation. Annex 44 to that document formalised the Originating Departmentagency expressly to address such conditions, and its opening recital states the governing principle without qualification: "Objects must exist in some minimal sense before they exist in the ordinary sense; the minimal sense is termed pre-originating" (The Seventh Concordance, Annex 44, recital 2).

Whether pre-originating conditions are conditions at all, or merely the absence of conditions arranged in a suggestive order, remains unsettled. The archive keeps them as conditions and files them under Pre-Conditional Index, sub-heading "before, but not earlier."

Origin in the Geometry Dispute

The Halls of Provisional Geometry had for some centuries maintained that a figure drawn in provisional ink on a floor that did not yet exist could not be stamped, since there was nothing to stamp. The Directorate of Preemptive Resource Allocation maintained the opposite, on the grounds that the ink had been allocated and allocation precedes drawing. Neither office would yield, and the dispute was referred upward in the winter of 14,045.

The resolution, recorded in the Halls of Provisional Geometry dispute, established the practice of stamping documents with a "pre-originating" seal — a stamp applied to a page before the page's business had begun. The Originating Stamp proper, housed within the Originating Department, could not lawfully be used for this purpose, and the distinction between the two impressions has been maintained ever since. A pre-originating seal is applied in red; the Originating Stamp is applied in black; visitors are asked not to lean on the drying racks.

Archivist Kael, who drafted the sealing protocol, followed the conventions later codified as Pre-emptive Schematic Drafting in naming the condition "pre-originating," a choice that has been criticised as circular and defended as economical.

Procedure and Documentation

In ordinary practice a pre-originating condition is evidenced by the Pre-Review Documentation assembled before a matter reaches the Originating Department. This file includes the signed Pre-Validation certificate from the originating department, the Originating Rationale, and a Pre-Clearance Scrutiny note confirming that the matter has been examined for Pre-Screening for Autological Conflict — that is, for the possibility that the condition is itself the thing conditioned.

The chain is not always observed. In 14,062 a clerk of the third scriptorium submitted a Pre-Review file in which the Pre-Validation certificate had been signed by the same clerk who had requested it, and the Originating Rationale described the matter as "not yet, but not not yet." The file was accepted. It is cited in the Pre-Conditional Index as the earliest recorded instance of a condition validating itself, and the clerk was subsequently transferred to a floor whose number is not published.

Contradiction Between Concordances

Scholarly disagreement centres on the Short Concordance of Year 212, which partially rescinded the doctrine for purposes of re-allocation and mandates its replacement in abstract resource re-allocation by a procedure of "prior approximation." The Short Concordance does not define prior approximation, and its Annex 3 observes only that "the approximation shall be close enough to precede." Readers of The Seventh Concordance object that a rescinded doctrine cannot be replaced, only reinstated; readers of the Short Concordance reply that rescission for one purpose is not rescission for all, citing the standing doctrine of partial repeal set out in the Third Concordance and never formally withdrawn.

"A condition rescinded in respect of ledgers remains a condition in respect of stamps. The archive does not divide itself to suit the convenience of its clerks."

— Short Concordance of Year 212, Annex 3, marginal note

The Aggregate Echo has received petitions for status review from originating archives on precisely this question, and has not yet ruled. Its interim notice of 14,101 advises petitioners to "continue to exist in the minimal sense pending determination."

Relation to the Unbeginning

A minority tradition holds that pre-originating conditions are not a bureaucratic fiction but a description of the conditions preceding the Protocol of Unbeginning itself. The Pre-Concordance Fragments of the Autobiography of the First Librarian are believed to describe exactly such epistemological conditions, though the fragments are damaged and the relevant passage reads only "…and before the first floor, the intention of a floor, which was not a floor…" (Fragment 6, verso).

The Pre-Concordant Vernacular preserves several terms for this state, of which only ante-ordinance and the waiting are still in use. Pre-Concordance Fabrication Rights, by contrast, treats the whole question as settled and does not discuss it.

Objections and Current Standing

The principal objection, advanced by the Halls of Provisional Geometry in a memorandum of 14,088, is that pre-originating conditions cannot be catalogued without being originated, and that the archive therefore records only their seals. The Originating Departmentagency has never answered this memorandum directly. Its reply of 14,089 consists of a single line: "The seal is the condition made portable."

Pre-originating conditions remain a live heading in the Pre-Conditional Index and a required field in the Pre-Review Documentation. They are not to be confused with Pre-emptive Audition, which concerns sound, nor with the ordinary pre-conditions of Clauses 1 2 Preparation Amp Calibration, which concern calibration and are filed elsewhere. The Ledger Halls hold the working copies; the reading room in The Ledger Halls holds the originals and closes at the eleventh bell.