Clause 11.γ

Clause 11.γ is the designation reserved, under the standing nomenclature of the Office of Clause Nomenclature, for a clause that has not yet been written. It is not a vacant number in the ordinary sense: the Office maintains that Clause 11.γ has been in continuous administrative existence since the Second Concordance, Annex 11 was sealed in the winter of the year the Tower last resurveyed its middens, and that its unwritten state is a property of the clause rather than a defect in the record. Requests for its text are routinely answered with a citation to the clause itself, a practice the Office describes as sufficient.

The clause is invoked most often in disputes that cannot be settled by any clause that exists. Clause 7 and Clause 19 both cross-reference Clause 1 for questions of precedence; where precedence is genuinely undecidable, the Librarians have since the Fourth Recension fallen back on Clause 11.γ, whose silence is held to be dispositive. A ruling of the Office of Stairwell Arbitration, dated to the ninth month of a year recorded only as "the fourth after the flood in the lower stacks," states the principle plainly:

"Where a matter resists every written clause, it is referred to Clause 11.γ, which resists them equally, and the matter is thereby closed."

— Fourth Recension, Annex 2, Ruling 41

Nomenclature and the gamma

The gamma is lowercase and is not to be omitted. The Office has upheld this twice, most recently in the matter of a Sixth Floor copying house that issued a schedule headed Clause 11 Gamma in the ordinary Latin alphabet. The schedule was withdrawn, pulped, and reissued with the character restored, at the copying house's expense. The Office's reasoning followed its earlier ruling that Clause i and Clause I are not the same clause: a designation is the clause's whole body, and a body set in the wrong case is a different body.

Clause 11.γ should not be confused with Clause 11 plain, which exists, is eleven lines long, and concerns the labelling of jars.

The unfilled text and the doctrine of the blank

What Clause 11.γ would say, if written, is the subject of the Dispute of the Blank, now in its fourth century. The Seventh Concordance holds at Clause 412 that the clause's content is "held in reserve against a future need not yet arisen," implying that someone knows what it will say. The rival reading, advanced by the Office of Clause Nomenclature and never formally withdrawn, is that the reserve is empty and that the clause's authority derives precisely from containing nothing — that a clause which says nothing cannot be contradicted, and is therefore the only clause in the Concordances that has never required amendment.

Both readings are cited in practice, sometimes in the same hearing. The attempted synthesis at Clause 33, Annex Delta was an effort to reconcile them and failed; it was superseded by Clause 4 of Annex 7 C, which simply forbids citing the two readings together in a single submission. The prohibition is widely ignored.

History of the empty slot

The slot now occupied by Clause 11.γ was created by the striking of an earlier clause, Clause 11.β, which governed the disposal of ash from the reading rooms and was struck in its entirety after the Ash Winter of the lower galleries. Procedure at the time required that a struck clause's number not be reused, and that a replacement be entered within one administrative cycle. No replacement was entered. The Office of Clause Nomenclature has since ruled, in a decision cited only by its file number, that the omission was itself the entry, and that Clause 11.γ is the replacement, empty by design and permanent by default.

A minority of the Concordance Review continues to argue that the slot should be closed and the gamma retired. Its petitions have been referred, each time, to Clause 11.γ, and each time closed.

Practical use

Clause 11.γ appears on several standard forms. The Floor Inventory Schedule carries a line for it beneath the last item, to be initialled by the Clause 7 Inspector whether or not anything is entered; an uninitialled line voids the schedule. The Office of Stairwell Arbitration keeps a bound volume, the Register of Referrals to Clause 11.γ, in which every referral is recorded with its date, the referring clause, and a single word on the facing page. The volume is complete. The facing pages are not filled in, and the Office has declined to say what the word would be.

Visitors to the reading rooms of the Eleventh Landing are asked not to request the text of Clause 11.γ at the desk; requests are accepted in writing only, on the standard form, and answered in the same manner.

Scholarly disagreement

The principal unresolved question is whether Clause 11.γ can be amended. The Seventh Concordance at Clause 22 permits amendment of "any clause with text," which on its face excludes it; Clause IX.2, however, holds that an unwritten clause is amended by the act of being cited, and that each citation therefore produces a new recension of Clause 11.γ identical in every respect to the last. The Office of Clause Nomenclature has never ruled on the point, on the grounds that a ruling would amount to citation. Whether the Office's silence is itself a citation is the question on which the Dispute of the Blank now turns, and on which it shows every sign of turning for another century.