Annex A: Definitions of Non-Adjacency

Annex A: Definitions of Non-Adjacency

Annex A: Definitions of Non-Adjacency is a working schedule of terms maintained under the Part I: Definitions of Litigation and cited wherever a dispute turns on the question of whether two things are near each other. It is not a floor, a chamber, or a body of persons; it is a numbered schedule, presently in its eleventh recension, held in the scriptorium beneath the Provost's reading room and consulted by appointment. The appointment is not difficult to obtain. It is simply required, and it has been required continuously since the sixth recension.

The Annex exists because non-adjacency, unlike adjacency, has no natural witnesses. A thing that touches another thing can be seen to touch it. A thing that does not touch another thing leaves no mark to inspect, and the schedule therefore carries the whole burden of the proof. Every definition in it is written to be asserted, in writing, by someone with standing to assert it.

Origin and recensions

The first recension was struck in the winter following the ratification of the Twelfth Concordance Annex Delta, which adopted Part I: Definitions of Litigation and thereby created a category of dispute — nearness contested as a matter of law — for which no vocabulary yet existed. The task of supplying the vocabulary fell to a drafting committee of four, of whom two resigned before the first recension was sealed and one, Librarian-Clerk Ovess of the Ninth Reading Room, resigned afterward and composed a memorandum describing the schedule as "a list of things that cannot happen, arranged alphabetically" (Ovess, Memorandum on the Draft Definitions, 11 of the eleventh month). Ovess's memorandum is preserved in the Annex's own file and is conventionally read by each new drafting committee before it begins work. It has never caused a committee to decline.

Recensions two through eleven are held together in a single chained volume. The chains are original.

Principal definitions

The schedule defines, among some four hundred lesser terms, the following principal ones:

• Divergent Non-Adjacency — the condition of two holdings separated by a floor that has been withdrawn from circulation.
• Suppressive Non-Adjacency — separation sustained by a door that has not been assigned a permission. See the usage recorded by Librarian-Archivist Thelon, who held in the Fifth Report on Non-Sequential Volumes that the Annex's walls are definitions and its doors are permissions.
• Apparent Non-Adjacency — separation that would dissolve if the intervening floor were renumbered. Apparent non-adjacency is not, for purposes of litigation, non-adjacency at all.
• Terminal Non-Adjacency — separation at a boundary beyond which further catalogue entries have not been attempted.

The definitions are ordered by severity rather than alphabet, a decision made in recension four and regretted in every recension since, as the order of severity was itself revised in recension seven.

Relation to non-sequential adjacency

Annex A is frequently confused with the doctrine of Ecology of Adjacency, and the confusion is reasonable. Non-sequential adjacency is a permissible ground for inter-floor cataloguing, requiring systemic resonance with a numbering schema, and it is routinely pleaded by parties who wish two distant things to be treated as one thing. The Treatise on Non-Serial Adjacency, which holds that Floor 9 is a procedural state rather than a spatial waypoint, is the standard authority for such pleas. Annex A supplies the opposing vocabulary, permitting a Librarian to answer that the resonance is not denied but that the floors in question are, on the schedule, terminally non-adjacent regardless.

The schedule is consulted from Non-Euclidean Stacks more often than from any other quarter, and the Adjacency Verification returns for the years since recension ten record Non-Adjacency pleadings in roughly one case in five.

The Orthogonal Objection

A persistent scholarly disagreement concerns whether non-adjacency may be predicated of a single object. Librarian-Surveyor Annek of the western galleries maintained, in the seventh recension debates, that a Folded Screen catalogued on the fourth gallery was non-adjacent to itself at its crease, and proposed a definition — reflexive non-adjacency — to cover the case. The drafting committee rejected the term by a margin of three to one and recorded its reasons under seal. Annek's supporting papers were filed in Annex Ω, where concepts whose definitions are actively hostile to their own premises are held, and portions are said to have been read to the committee a second time.

The rejection has not settled the question. Dissenters cite Ruling 4491, which permits a holding to be described as two holdings where its description so requires, and argue that a definition admitted for descriptions cannot be refused to objects. The schedule's own entry for reflexive non-adjacency reads, in full: "Not defined. See Annek." See also the Scroll of Recursive Definitions, catalogued on Spiral 881 of the Annex of Procedural Anomalies, which has been cited on both sides of the dispute without resolution.

Drafting and amendment

Proposed definitions are drafted under the authority of the Font of Unwritten Definitions, which produces draft definitions administered jointly with the Custodial Spire for Recursive Amendments, and are then returned to the drafting committee for comparison against the schedule. The School of Fixed Points has objected on three occasions that the procedure imperils the position it advances for the Nudging Ceremony — namely that non-existent subjects may hold potential adjacency — since a schedule of non-adjacency, once sealed, forecloses by definition what the Ceremony leaves open. The latest objection is under consideration. The two before it were also under consideration at the time of their supersession.

A further source of difficulty is the provisional character of the zones to which many of the schedule's definitions apply. An Annex Theta is established by procedural necessity rather than by spatial adjacency, and it has been argued that a zone which does not stand anywhere cannot stand near anything. The committee has not adopted this argument, holding that the schedule defines non-adjacency rather than defending it.

Access

The chained volume is produced for consultation on written request. Only one recension may be held open at a time, and the volume is not to be unsealed in a reading room containing an active Definitions dispute. Visitors are asked to leave the chain attached.

"The schedule does not tell you where a thing is. It tells you what you may say about where it is not, and to whom."

— Supplement to the Ninth Concordance, note on the eleventh recension