Redaction

Redaction is the general term for the alteration, occlusion, or removal of recorded material within the Tower, together with the corpus of practice and precedent governing that alteration. It is distinguished from Doctrinal Omission in that redaction leaves the document in place and marks what has been withdrawn, whereas omission never admits the material stood there. The distinction is honoured in principle and contested in nearly every instance.

The Tower recognises four grades of redaction, ranging from the excision of a single glyph to the voiding of an entire floor. Only the first three are reversible. The fourth — termed a terminal redaction — is administered solely by the Office of Esoteric Redaction and is the grade under which the seven contiguous theoretical floors were voided in the Great Redaction of 312-AP.

Grades of Redaction

In ordinary use a redaction is described by the extent of what has been withdrawn. A grade-one redaction covers a mark, a word, or a numeral. Grade two covers a clause or a table. Grade three covers a whole document, which is retained in its binding with its contents replaced by ruled bars. Grade four is not described by extent, because after it there is nothing to measure; the Office of Esoteric Redaction records only the floor number and the date.

The grades were fixed by Concordance 889-A, Section 7, which defines the Redaction Mandate and assigns enforcement to the Office of Esoteric Redaction under Directive 47-. The section is eight lines long and has been read into the record at every session of the Standing Recension since its promulgation. It has not been amended.

Procedure and the Bars

Material withdrawn at grade one or two is struck through with a single horizontal bar of scribal ink, applied by a clerk of the Bureau of Axiomatic Purity in the presence of a witness. The bar must pass over the withdrawn matter without touching it; a bar that touches the letterform is void and the redaction must be repeated. This rule has produced a subclass of clerks, the so-called steady hands, who are paid at grade-three rates and are much resented by the ordinary bar-clerks of the same floor.

Documents reduced under grade three are not burned. The Gallery of Superfluous Marks receives them, where Script-Moths reduce the paper to Archival Dust over a period of between nine and forty days, and the dust is returned to the originating office in a sealed phial. The phial is then redacted in turn — a small rectangle of card laid over the label — and shelved among the unlabelled phials of the same year. Nobody has asked what becomes of the phials.

The Question of the Ledger

Dissenting practice survives chiefly around the Ledger of Erasures, the running record of all redactions performed in the Tower. The Ledger redacts itself nightly, by a process detailed in the Librarians' recorded chronology and never witnessed in full. Each morning it is found with some earlier entries struck and others untouched, in no order that the Bureau of Precedential Analysis has been able to reconstruct.

The scholarly disagreement concerns whether this nightly self-redaction constitutes an act of the Office or of the document. The Seventeenth Concordance holds that the Ledger is an instrument and its redactions are therefore the Office's. The Fifth Concordance holds that an instrument cannot redact itself and that the nightly strikes are therefore not redactions at all but weather, an unofficial category the Fifth does not define. The Bureau of Coherent Truths has declined to reconcile the two positions on the ground that coherence is not a property it is empowered to supply to Concordances.

Writing on the matter in the winter of 187-AP, the clerk Ondrej Vasp — who had petitioned four times for the reclassification of bar-clerks — observed that the Office was enforcing a rule about the Ledger which the Ledger had already struck from itself:

"The Mandate is cited at the head of every entry. The Mandate is also among the entries that are struck. I do not say the Office is inconsistent. I say it is citing a page it cannot read."

— Vasp, Memorandum on the Ledger, Floor 4,099, filed and subsequently barred.

Perpetual Echo and Postponement

The Ordinance of Perpetual Echo operationalises the Mandate for documents that must remain legible while being officially unread — chiefly treaties of the Third Concordance and the standing orders of closed floors. Such documents are not barred but re-inscribed in a pale hand and filed under a heavier one, and are read aloud once each year by a duty clerk so that the sound of the text persists after the sense has been withdrawn.

Postponement is the Tower's preferred alternative where a redaction would be foundational. The Complete Redaction of Concordance 1.001, Clause 1 has sat on Floor 4,099 since 288-AP as a proposal to replace the Tower's founding clause with a blank page. It has been carried forward through eleven recensions and voted down each time by a margin of one. The Office occasionally cites the postponement as evidence of its own restraint.

Practical Notes

Visitors to the Redactions Copy on Floor 3,312 are reminded that the reading room is unlit by design, that lanterns may not be brought in, and that the year 312-AP is to be spoken of as "After the Great Redaction" in all written remarks. Bar-clerks are to be addressed by grade and not by name. The phials are not to be disturbed.