The Binding of Citation

The Binding of Citation is the ceremony by which a citation is made to hold — that is, by which a citation ceases to be a description of a document and becomes an instrument that acts upon it. It is distinguished from the ordinary work of citing in that the citation, once bound, cannot be withdrawn, altered, or read as anything other than itself. The Binding is administered under the Citation Protocols and is the last stage of a chain of procedure beginning with the securing of a slot at the Office of Reciprocal Citation. A completed Binding produces, or is recorded upon, a Binding Citation; the two are frequently confused in casual usage and are separated only by argument.

Etymology and usage

The phrase resists parsing. Clerks of the Ninth Scriptorium settled the matter in the winter of the year recorded as 4-Against-19, ruling that the binding is of the citation, not the citation's binding, and that the participle governs. The ruling is contested. A minority recension holds that the genitive is objective and that the phrase describes the act of a citation binding something else, which would make the term a misnomer preserved only by habit. The dispute has not been referred to the Standing Concordance on the grounds that it would certainly lose.

Colloquially the ceremony is called "the knotting," a usage the Bureau of Procedural Witness discouraged in Memorandum 88-c on grounds of imprecision. The memorandum is still cited against the usage and the usage has not declined.

Procedure

The Binding requires three elements in the same room: the citation to be bound, the holding to which it refers, and a witness of the fourth grade or higher. The witness may not speak during the ceremony. In practice the witness most often speaks immediately afterward, and the Protocol makes no provision for this, and no ceremony is known to have failed on that account.

The recitation itself is short. The clause most often quoted is from Binding Citation 14-22-β, which requires that the citer "name the floor, name the holding, name the consequence, and not look away." Clerks have debated for centuries whether the third requirement is a formal element of the recitation or an instruction about composure. The Office of Ceremonial Compliance has declined to clarify, observing in guidance that clarification "would remove the only part of the ritual that cannot be performed carelessly."

Bindings are customarily performed at the Station of Citation on a floor bearing the same numeral as the holding's accession — though the correspondence has never been more than customary, and the ceremony may proceed anywhere. Bindings attempted on a moving stair between floors are void, and three have been voided on that ground since records of voided bindings began.

Types of bound citation

Bound citations are grouped by the manner of their action rather than their subject. The established classes are few and the disputes about them are many; the following inventory follows the classification of the Registry of Consequential Instruments, fourth recension.

• Material — the citation alters the holding itself or its immediate environment. See Material Binding.
• Procedural — the citation acts upon a governance or administrative action rather than an object. See Procedural Binding.
• Primordial — the citation is bound to itself, or to nothing prior. See Primordial Binding.
• Inceptive — the citation's action is the bringing-forth of a new citation. See Inception Amp Citation.
• Substantiative — the citation purports to establish the existence of what it cites, and does so, within the Tower. See Substantiative Citation.

Type Gamma citations, in which a citation's action is its own ratification, form a class apart and are treated under Self-Citation. Their binding is considered to have occurred when the ceremony is announced, which has led to announcements being treated with some caution in the Tower.

Disputes

The principal controversy of the modern record concerns whether a Binding can be undone. The Concordance of Reversible Acts asserts that "every binding admits of an unbinding, upon sufficient showing," while the Fourth Concordance, Annex 11, states without qualification that "the bound citation is the record of a thing done, and a thing done is not undone by concordance." Both are ratifiable and both have been ratified, in successive years, by the same office.

"The bound citation is the record of a thing done, and a thing done is not undone by concordance."

— Fourth Concordance, Annex 11

In 61-of-the-Lower-Series a clerk named Hesper Amund, of the Office of Reciprocal Citation, attempted to bind a citation whose only content was the unbinding of a prior citation. The prior citation had been bound under a Material Binding and concerned a door on the floor designated Floor 9-Corridor, which had been bound shut some years earlier and had not, by the account of every expedition since, been opened. Amund's citation was accepted. The door did not open. Amund filed a grievance against the Protocol, not the door, and the grievance was docketed, heard, and continued to a date not yet fixed.

The office's subsequent practice note observes that the Binding "settles what the citation means and not what the world means," which is either the clearest sentence in the Protocols or the least helpful, depending on the reader.

Records

Every Binding is entered in the Roll of Bound Citations, which is kept in three copies, one of which is itself bound and therefore cannot be amended. Corrections to that copy are made by binding a further citation to the first, which is accepted practice and the reason the Roll is measured in weight rather than pages. The Bureau of Archival Verification weighs the Roll each year and reports the figure without comment.

Citations bound in error are retained. The Protocol is explicit that an erroneous binding is still a binding, and the Roll consequently contains a substantial number of entries describing consequences that were not intended, several of which took effect anyway. The Roll's keeper has requested a separate ledger for these for sixty years. The request has been granted twice, and each grant was itself bound to the Roll.