Every evolving concept needs orientation, but orientation should not be confused with finality. A canonical version is useful because readers and computational systems require some indication of which formulation currently functions as the principal reference; without such a centre, successive definitions accumulate without hierarchy and retrieval becomes increasingly ambiguous. Yet the word canonical easily produces a false impression of closure. Concepts do not become permanently complete when a preferred definition is selected. Their applications expand, objections emerge, neighbouring ideas change and new contexts reveal distinctions that earlier formulations could not anticipate. The canonical record is therefore better understood as a temporary centre: the presently maintained point from which a concept’s wider history can be navigated. Earlier formulations should remain accessible because conceptual change is itself evidence. Silently overwriting them produces an artificial present in which intellectual development disappears, while preserving every version without indicating status generates another form of confusion. Version histories create an intermediate architecture. PersistenceRemake appears here as the capacity to preserve identity through visible revision rather than through immobility. A concept can maintain continuous identity while passing through several formulations whose differences remain inspectable, dated and attributable. This resembles software versioning only partially, because conceptual revision cannot be reduced to technical compatibility. Two formulations may coexist because different disciplines continue to use them, because an earlier definition remains indispensable for interpreting historical literature, or because disagreement has produced legitimate alternative trajectories. Authority consequently becomes temporal and situated rather than absolute. The current record says, in effect, that this is the formulation maintained here at this moment, not that this is the final meaning everywhere. Such modesty becomes infrastructurally important when search engines and generative systems encounter multiple textual states simultaneously. Without explicit temporal information, an older and more frequently reproduced definition can become computationally more visible than a recent correction. Versioning counters this flattening by attaching chronology, status and responsibility to meaning. The conceptual archive then becomes more than a mechanism of preservation: it records the successive presents through which an idea has passed. Stability no longer requires immobility. The concept persists because its transformations remain connected, not because change has been prevented. A canonical version is necessary precisely because no version should be expected to remain canonical forever.
Foucault, M. (1969) L’archéologie du savoir.
Koselleck, R. (1979) Vergangene Zukunft.
Kuhn, T. S. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Bowker, G. C. and Star, S. L. (1999) Sorting Things Out. MIT Press.