Processualist

The Processualist position is the reading of legal and archival instruments according to the procedure by which they were made, amended, and filed, rather than according to their stated text. A Processualist holds that a document's meaning inheres in its sequence of custody — who stamped it, in what order, upon which desk — and that the words themselves are, in the phrasing of the Academy's Third Seminar, "the residue of the process and not its substance." The school is small, formally unaffiliated, and disproportionately influential, largely because the Office of Archival Integrity has endorsed its reading of Clause 31.

Origins

The term first appears in the marginalia of Floor 2288, a level given over almost entirely to retractions, where a clerk identified in the ledger only as Warden-of-Stairwell Theta began annotating incoming amendments with the phrase ex ordine — "from the order." The Warden's annotations were themselves catalogued in 4012 and are now consulted more often than the instruments they annotate. Early Processualists were chiefly concerned with the question of whether a document amended before it was signed differed in kind from one amended after; the school has never entirely settled this, and its founding dispute survives as the Precedence Question.

Core doctrine

Processualists advance three propositions, in a fixed order that they insist is not incidental:

1. That every instrument carries a trail, and that the trail is admissible where the text is silent.
2. That silence in the text is not an absence but a record of a decision not to write.
3. That a reading which ignores the trail is not a rival reading but a filing error.

The third proposition is the contentious one. Under it, Concordance 44 cannot be cited against a Processualist finding, because to do so is to cite the object under examination as though it were the examining authority. Processualists do not deny that Concordant Law governs disputes; they argue that it governs them only after the record of how each candidate Concordance reached the dispute has been assembled, which in practice can take longer than the dispute.

Practice and procedure

The school's working method is the Chain of Custody Reconstruction, a formal audit in which every stamp, seal, and transit endorsement attached to an instrument is logged and dated, and the instrument's operative clause is then read as the final entry in that log rather than as its heading. Reconstruction is laborious. A single clause may require examination of nine or ten intermediary hands, and the Academy estimates that a full reconstruction of an average floor's holdings consumes eleven archivist-years.

Practitioners work under strict conditions of Procedural Verification, though they are frequently accused of substituting their own chain for the one they were asked to verify — an accusation the school answers by pointing out that any verification requires a verifier, and that the verifier's own trail is therefore part of the record. See Referential Fumigation for the sanitisation steps applied to Reconstruction logs before they enter general circulation.

Controversy

The principal objection to Processualism is that it is unfalsifiable in the direction that matters. The Directorate of Archival Coherence has observed that a Processualist, confronted with a document whose trail is missing, will treat the absence as evidence of deliberate removal; confronted with a complete trail, will treat the completeness as evidence of later reconstruction. The Directorate's memorandum of 4 March 5789 calls this "a theory that cannot be surprised," and recommends that Processualist findings be marked as advisory pending review.

Processualists reply that the charge is a category error, since their method is not predictive but evidentiary: it does not claim to say what a document will mean, only what can be shown to have happened to it. The reply is widely regarded as correct and widely regarded as insufficient. The dispute has generated two competing annexes to the Standing Rules of Custodial Reading, neither of which has been repealed, and the incompatibility between them is itself now the subject of a Reconstruction.

Relation to other schools

Processualists are sometimes confused with Circulationists, who study a document's movement through the Tower without attending to the order of that movement. The distinction is precise: a Circulationist will tell you that an instrument passed through nine floors; a Processualist will tell you in what order, and will decline to say anything until they can. The two schools share field methods and disagree fundamentally about what those methods measure.

Relations with the Inquisitors are colder. The Inquisitors favour the text on the grounds that the text is available to everyone, whereas a chain of custody is available chiefly to whoever assembled it. Processualists do not contest this and have never claimed otherwise; they regard the objection as an accurate description of their position rather than a criticism of it. See also Contextual Sealing and Procedural Chilling for adjacent questions of when a record may be read at all.

Filed under Reading, Schools of. Cross-listed: Custody, Chains of; Silence, Evidentiary Status of. Reviewed by the Office of Archival Integrity, which endorses the Processualist reading of Clause 31 and takes no position on the remainder.