Procedural Classification

Procedural Classification is the Tower's general term for the formal assignment of a subject to a category by the act of classifying it, rather than by any property the subject is held to possess beforehand. The distinction is not merely academic. Under the doctrine set out in Fourth Concordance, Annex 2, a subject becomes what it is classified as at the moment the classifying clerk's seal is affixed, and not one moment earlier. The corollary — that a subject may therefore be classified incorrectly and remain so — has generated more recensions, marginalia, and hard feeling than any other provision in the archive.

The practice is distinguished from Procedural Taxonomy, which arranges categories after the fact, and from the Grand Taxonomy, of which Procedural Taxonomy is the third branch. Procedural Classification concerns only the act of assignment. The Guild of Procedural Archivists maintains that this is the whole of the matter; the Bureau of Procedural Paradoxes maintains that it is not, and has said so in writing on eleven occasions.

Origins and the First Recension

The practice is traditionally dated to the shelving dispute of Floor 4,112 in the winter of the year recorded as 2,088 by the Tower's internal reckoning. Two clerks, Ilse Vann and Corin Apet, were assigned the same consignment of unlabelled crates and could not agree whether the contents were instruments or reliquaries. Neither would sign for the other's designation. After nine days the dispute was referred upward, and the ruling that returned — now preserved as the First Recension of the classification schedule — held that the crates were instruments, because they had been signed for as instruments, and that the question of what they contained was a separate inquiry not then before the office.

The ruling was regarded at the time as a compromise. It has since been cited in support of every position taken on the subject, including several that contradict one another directly. Vann's own marginal note, appended to her copy and preserved in the Hall of Procedural Anomalies, reads: "I do not accept this, but I have sealed it."

The Problem of Retroactivity

The central difficulty of Procedural Classification is what the Addendum on Procedural Degradation calls the retroactive shadow: if a subject becomes its classification at the moment of sealing, what was it before? Clause 5 holds that it was nothing, and that inquiries into the prior state are inadmissible. Clause 15 holds that it was whatever it would have been classified as had the clerk been more attentive, and that the record of this hypothetical classification should be filed alongside the actual one. The two clauses are both in force. They have been in force together since the Meta-Clauses review of the eleventh recension, which examined the contradiction at length and declined to resolve it on the grounds that resolution was outside its remit.

In practice clerks file both records, the actual and the hypothetical, and mark the second with a small sigma in the margin. Where the two agree, the sigma is omitted. Where they disagree by more than one category, the file is referred to the Department of Subsidiary Ontologies, which returns it, usually unaltered, with a note that the referral was correctly made.

Interaction with Non-Interference

Procedural Classification is held to be incompatible with Tier IV: Contextual Non-Interference, the classification established under Annex C for subjects whose character depends on the absence of direct observation. A subject that is classified has, by definition, been observed closely enough to be sorted. The Manual of Perceptual Hygiene records the resulting difficulty as a variety of Perceptual Contamination, subtype xi, "classification of the unobserved," and recommends that the clerk wash the seal before reuse. Compliance with this recommendation is not recorded.

The Immanentists have argued, in a series of pamphlets beginning in the year recorded as 2,140, that Procedural Classification is itself an instance of the Principle of Procedural Immanence and should be classified as such. The argument is considered clever and has not been adopted. A subject that classifies itself occupies two categories at once, and the schedule has no column for it. Procedural Anchor was proposed as a solution and was itself classified, which resolved nothing.

The Vell Dispute

The most sustained disagreement in the practice's history concerns the status of the classification of classifications. In the year recorded as 2,163 the clerk Ordo Vell, working the schedule on Floor 6,004, undertook to classify Procedural Classification itself. He assigned it to Category 2, "procedures that assign categories," and sealed the entry. The entry was then, by its own terms, subject to Procedural Classification, and Vell was obliged to classify it again. He did so. The second entry required a third. Vell completed nine iterations before the Procedural Authority intervened and instructed him to stop. The nine entries remain in the schedule. The tenth does not, and Vell's request to file it was refused in writing by the Authority on the ground that the schedule "does not require a tenth, and would not be improved by one" (Procedural Authority, letter of refusal, 2,163).

"The schedule is not a mirror. It is a shelf. Put the classification on the shelf and do not put the shelf on the shelf."

— Procedural Authority, letter of refusal to O. Vell, 2,163

Vell's grievance, that the ninth entry is arbitrary and the tenth would have been equally arbitrary, was noted and filed under Category 2. It has not been reopened.

Records and Referral

Every act of Procedural Classification is recorded in triplicate: the working copy, held by the classifying clerk; the schedule copy, held by the Guild of Procedural Archivists; and the witness copy, which is not read and is retained solely to establish that the other two agree. The witness copies are stored in the lower archive and may be consulted only by a clerk who has already consulted them, a condition that has been satisfied four times since the practice was regularised.

Where a classification is disputed, the standard recourse is to cite a Concordance. Which Concordance is a matter of taste. Procedural Governance advises the Third Concordance, the Bureau advises the Fourth, and the Inquiry Classification Code advises that the question of which to cite be itself classified before citation. Clerks generally cite the one nearest to hand. The seal is then affixed, and the subject is what it has been sealed as, and the dispute is filed.