Twenty-Seventh Concordance

The Twenty-Seventh Concordance is the instrument by which the Panel of Ontological Differentiation was constituted and granted standing to rule upon petitions for the establishment of distinct ontological taxa. Ratified in the winter of the year recorded in the Tower's registers as 4,112 by the reckoning of the Sixth Librarianate, it remains in force on all floors where its seal has been affixed, and is the only Concordance never to have been amended in whole — a distinction its defenders attribute to drafting and its critics to neglect.

It occupies forty-one articles and two annexes. The first thirty-nine articles concern procedure; the fortieth establishes the Panel; the forty-first, in a single sentence of unusual length, forbids the Panel from explaining itself.

Origin and the Question of the Ninth Landing

The Concordance was drafted in response to a dispute on the Ninth Landing concerning whether the residue that accumulates behind the shelving there constituted a taxon in its own right or merely a condition of the floor. The question had been referred upward four times and downward twice, the second downward referral being irregular and later struck from the record by the Twenty-Ninth Concordance.

The drafters declined to settle the matter directly. Instead, Article 40 establishes that such questions shall be put to a Panel, that the Panel's determinations shall carry the weight of the Concordance, and that no determination shall be reopened except by a subsequent Concordance of equal or greater number. A marginal note in the drafting hand of the clerk Ovida Sarn, preserved in the Scriptorium of Unamended Texts, records the reasoning with characteristic economy: "This will hold."

"The Panel shall be nine, and shall sit as eleven."

— Twenty-Seventh Concordance, Article 40, Clause 2

The discrepancy between nine and eleven has never been reconciled in text. The Panel of Ontological Differentiation has sat as eleven since its first convening, on the ground that Clause 2 is unambiguous about the sitting and merely silent about the appointment of the additional two.

Relationship to the Twenty-Second and Twenty-Third

The Twenty-Seventh was drafted under the regime of the Twenty-Second Concordance and inherits its vocabulary of Substantial Formalism without inheriting its apparatus. Where the Twenty-Second required petitions to be framed in the formal categories of substance, accident and remainder, the Twenty-Seventh permits petitions to be submitted in any legible hand. This was not an intended reform. It was the consequence of the drafting committee's failure to locate the relevant schedule before the seal was set.

Whether the Twenty-Seventh survives the supersession of the Twenty-Second Concordance by the Twenty-Third Concordance is a matter of live scholarly dispute. The position maintained by the Office of the Twenty-Third Spire is that supersession operates upon the whole corpus of the Twenty-Second and therefore upon all instruments drafted beneath it, the Twenty-Seventh included. Against this, the Seventh Librarianate has observed that the Twenty-Seventh was not drafted beneath the Twenty-Second but alongside it, having received its own seal, and that instruments with their own seals do not fall with the collapse of their neighbours.

The Keeper of the Twenty-Third Spire has declined to rule on the question, noting in a minute of 4,196 that the Keeper's authority derives primarily from the Twenty-Third and that a ruling either way would be "an exercise in preferring one's own furniture."

The Panel's Jurisprudence

The Panel has ruled on some two hundred petitions. It does not publish reasons, per Article 41, and its determinations are consequently known only by their operative clauses, which are archived on Floor 707 in a room of their own because of their brevity. The most cited is Determination 88, concerning the Mindfelt Padding regulated by the Twenty-Second Concordance, in which the Panel found that the Padding was a taxon for the purposes of the Twenty-Seventh but not for the purposes of the Twenty-Second, and that this was not a contradiction.

Determination 143 is often paired with it. Asked whether the echo on Floor 707 was the same entity as the sound that produced it, the Panel held that it was, and that the difference between them was a matter of arrival. Incoming sonic phenomena on Floor 707 are separately governed by the Twenty-Second, which the Panel's determination did not displace; the two instruments have coexisted on that floor without incident since 4,159.

Criticism and the Sarn Petition

The Concordance's principal vulnerability is its silence on how the Panel is to be replenished. Article 40, Clause 2 fixes the sitting at eleven but names no appointing authority. In 4,204 the clerk Ovida Sarn petitioned the Panel to rule on whether the Panel itself was a distinct ontological taxon, on the reasoning that a body with no appointing authority might not be a body at all.

The Panel accepted the petition for filing and has not determined it. The acceptance is itself thought by some to answer the question, and by others to be the most complete answer available, since a body that can accept a petition against itself is, on any formal reading, a body. Sarn's later memorandum on the subject — circulated among the Sixth Librarianate and never formally withdrawn — argues that the Panel's silence is consistent with either finding and that the archive should stop expecting otherwise.

Textual History

Three recensions of the Twenty-Seventh are held. The recension of 4,112 is the sealed text. The recension of 4,140 incorporates seventeen clauses pertaining to cartographic standardization that were later rendered inoperative by the Twenty-Ninth Concordance, which enjoys an exemption under Clause 881 of the Twenty-Third Concordance as a Specialized Continuity Document. The third recension, undated and incomplete, breaks off in the middle of Article 40, Clause 2, at the words "shall sit as."

Readers consulting the sealed text on the Ninth Landing are asked to replace the volume on the shelf with its spine facing outward. The residue behind the shelving is not to be disturbed.