Principle of Co-Substantial Degradation

The Principle of Co-Substantial Degradation is a governing doctrine of the Tower's archival practice, holding that the degradation of any catalogued subject entails the degradation of every subject substantially joined to it. It is recorded in the standing registers as a practice rather than an ordinance, which is why it may be invoked without permit and why it has never been cleanly repealed. Its two principal statements — one concerning peripheral subjects, one concerning linked entries — are treated below in the order the Librarians prefer them, which is not the order in which they were found.

Origin in the Peripheral Ischemia Inquiry

The principle was first established by the Peripheral Ischemia Inquiry, convened on Floor 2114 in the winter of the year recorded as 6/M-40 to examine why certain marginal holdings — marginal in the spatial sense, not the evidentiary — were failing faster than the central holdings they depended on. The Inquiry's finding, later abridged into the standing formulary, was that peripheral degradation is a degradation of the central subject. A hand whose fingers go numb is not a hand with damaged fingers; it is a damaged hand. The Inquiry extended the reasoning to catalogued entities without visible objection from anyone then living.

Floor 2114 has since been renumbered twice and is presently closed for restringing. The Inquiry's chairs remain in place.

The Addendum and the Linked Entry

The principle's second limb was settled by the Addendum on Procedural Degradation, which requires that the degradation of a procedural subject be accompanied by the parallel degradation of its linked catalographic entries. The Addendum does not define "parallel" and its drafters left the word in, on the record, because they could not agree on a better one. Practice has settled on a proportional reading: where the subject loses a third of its substance, its links lose something in the neighbourhood of a third, though the Office of Procedural Degradation has never published a formula and has refused twice to be asked for one.

The Addendum's three classes of Textual Degradation — peripheral, central, and coincidental — are the working vocabulary of the principle, and the example most often cited at the reading desks is the loss of a marginal note that carried the only surviving gloss on a central holding. The note degraded peripherally. The holding degraded centrally. Under the principle the two are the same event, described twice.

Relation to the Report on Co-Substantial Deterioration

The Report on Co-Substantial Deterioration is frequently mistaken for the principle's source, on the strength of the near-identical title and the Report's greater bulk. It is not. The Report encapsulated the findings of the Lattice-Stair Inquiry and established only that procedural degradation in one element implied degradation in the governing principles — a narrower claim, though the Lattice-Stair majority did not think so. The confusion is old enough to have its own file and is unlikely to be resolved, as the Report's annexes were rebound in the wrong order in 6/M-61 and the archivist responsible left no key.

"The Report does not establish the Principle, nor the Principle the Report. They were arrived at separately and in the same building, which has been enough to join them ever since."

— Curator of Intangibles, marginal annotation to the Lattice-Stair file

Scholarly Disagreement

The principal dispute concerns scope. The Twenty-Second Concordance, which codified Substantial Formalism, holds that presentation is inseparable from truth, and it follows for many readers that a subject's presentation is substantially joined to the subject — and therefore degrades with it. On this reading the Principle of Co-Substantial Degradation reaches bindings, boards, gilt, and the quality of a hand. Against it stands the reading of the Principle of Attenuated Interaction, a Concordance-level axiom governing the controlled degradation of conceptual integrity between catalogued entities, which supposes that linked subjects can be degraded at a controlled remove. The two positions cannot both be right, and the Librarians have declined to say which is.

A second dispute turns on whether the principle is transitive. Floor 903's entry for the Non-Degrading Laminate was degraded in 6/M-77 on the ground that it was linked to a failing holding two floors below; the laminate, which does not degrade, was recorded as degraded and has since been entered in the catalogue as such. The Office of Procedural Degradation accepted the correction and has not restored the entry.

Application in Practice

Application requires a declaration of linkage before degradation is carried out, and the declaration may not be made by the person performing the degradation. In 6/M-59 the rule was nearly overturned when a clerk of the third scriptorium, having declared a linkage and then degraded both the subject and its link, was found to have been the only officer present on the floor at the time. The Doctrine of Controlled Degradation was cited against him by the same office that had trained him. He argued that a declaration made to oneself is still a declaration; the office replied that this had never been the practice. The proceeding is cited in the Addendum's annotations as the reason the rule is written twice.

Degradations carried out under the principle are recorded in the ordinary manner, with the linked entries degraded in parallel and the parallel noted in the margin. Marginal notes are not themselves degraded. Containment of Active Degradation is sought only where the degradation exceeds the declared proportion, and the request must be submitted on paper of the standard weight, folded once, and not stapled.

Status

The principle is presently in force. It has been amended three times by annotation and never by Concordance, and it is applied most often to holdings whose classifications have already been reduced to Class, where the question of what remains to degrade is largely theoretical. The Office of Procedural Degradation retains overlapping jurisdiction with Textual Degradation in all matters arising, and both offices keep the same diary.