School of Latent Volition

The School of Latent Volition is a body of the Tower concerned with the registration, interpretation, and occasional redirection of intentions that have not yet been acted upon. Founded, by its own reckoning, in the year 1122 of the Vertical Reckoning, the School maintains that volition possesses a latent phase distinguishable from both inclination and act, and that this phase is a proper object of study, filing, and audit. Its seat is the western gallery of Floor 1122, a long low room of slate tables where the ambient temperature is recorded hourly and posted on the door.

Doctrine

The School holds that an intention, before it becomes a deed, passes through a measurable interval in which it is neither private nor public. This interval the School calls the latent term. Latent terms are said to vary in duration from a few seconds, in the case of intentions toward small conveniences, to upwards of nineteen years, in the case of intentions toward floors never visited.

The School's foundational statement appears in the Admonitions on Unspent Intention, Admonition 1:

"Nothing is so durable as a thing meant and not begun."

— Admonitions on Unspent Intention, Admonition 1

From this follows the School's characteristic preoccupation: the survey of volitions that have persisted without resolution. The School keeps no register of deeds. It keeps a register of the not-yet, which is to say the bulk of its holdings.

Relation to the Master Register

The School's principal instrument is the Master Register of Volition, established under Second Concordance, Annex 9, and amended no fewer than forty-one times. The School's clerks read the Register not for what it records but for what it records twice, on the argument that a volition entered at two separate addresses is one that has been postponed at least once.

Disputes over double entry occupy most of the School's calendar. In the winter of 1407 the clerk Ondra Vesk filed a grievance alleging that a single intention toward the relocation of a reading lamp had been entered at four addresses across three floors, producing a latent term of eleven years for an object that had never moved. Vesk's memorandum to the Bureau of Duplicate Entries is preserved in full and runs to sixty pages, of which fifty-eight concern the lamp. The Bureau ruled against her on the ground that the lamp had, in fact, been moved once, by someone else, in a direction she had not intended. The School cites the Vesk grievance as a cautionary instance of volition misread as effect.

Relationship with other bodies

The School of Latent Volition is a close but uneasy neighbor of the School of Latent Structure. The two schools share an interest in what is present before it appears, but they differ sharply on method. The Structuralists regard the Volitionists as imprecise, complaining that a latent term cannot be diagrammed without a subject and that the Volitionists refuse to supply one. The Volitionists reply that the Structuralists have mistaken a license for a finding. The School of Latent Structure has gone so far as to describe the Volitionists' reading of the Register as licensed pareidolia, a charge the Volitionists have never formally answered, though they have reprinted it in three successive annual reports without comment.

Due to its dependence on the Register, the School also works closely with the Register of Vertical Endeavors, to which it submits quarterly abstracts of unresolved trajectories. The School of Latent Potential is frequently named in the School's correspondence as a rival claimant to the same interval, and relations have been cordial since the Partition of the Latent Interval in 1188, which divided the field by duration: the Potentialists were assigned intentions exceeding one year, the Volitionists everything under. The partition is observed to this day, except in leap years.

The School maintains a standing objection to the methods catalogued under Latent Structure Tapping, which it considers an unlicensed intrusion into unspent intention. It has twice petitioned for a writ of restraint and twice been told the petition was already on file.

The certification dispute

A long-running disagreement concerns whether the School may certify its own surveyors. Under Fourth Concordance, Annex 2, certification of any body concerned with latent phenomena falls to the School of Latent Precedence, which processes such matters through Latent Structural Diagrams licensed from the School of Latent Structure. The Volitionists contend that this arrangement requires them to have their intentions diagrammed by a school that does not believe the diagrams apply. The Precedence School contends, reasonably enough, that a diagram is a diagram.

The dispute turned on a technicality in 1349, when it was discovered that Fourth Concordance and the later Ninth Concordance contradicted each other on the question of who may inspect a Register entry. The Ninth holds that inspection is a function of the School of Latent Actuality; the Fourth holds that it belongs to anyone who can read. The School of Latent Volition has adopted the Ninth for purposes of inspection and the Fourth for purposes of reading, and reports that this is working.

Holdings and practice

The School's reference collection is modest and its usage records are not. Its principal holdings are:

• Admonitions on Unspent Intention, four recensions, of which two disagree;
• the Vesk memorandum, sixty pages, plus an eighth-page correction filed in 1408;
• the Tabulature of Deferred Acts, an unfinished census of intentions toward actions never taken, discontinued at entry 4,116;
• the lamp.

The lamp is not an exhibit. It is in the room and is used for reading. Maintenance notes posted by the western gallery door prohibit the use of the stairwell landing for the review of unspent intentions during the hours of sweeping. The prohibition is dated 1407 and has been renewed annually.

Reception

The School of Particulars arose in part as a reaction to the School of Latent Volition, objecting that an intention examined before it acts is indistinguishable from a description of the examiner. The Volitionists have not disputed this. Their position, restated in the Reply of the Western Gallery (1411), is that description of the examiner is the only record the Tower reliably keeps, and that the School is content to work within it.