Alternative Hypotheses of Dimensional Hubris
A Department and Its Contents
There exists, in the lower catalogue of the Vorpel Foundation, an entry that reads: “Department of Alternative Hypotheses of Dimensional Hubris—scope: see attached.” The attachment runs to twelve volumes.
The original proposal, which preceded the twelve volumes by several decades and the Department itself by a period that archivists have agreed not to specify, comprises seven pages. The distance between seven pages and twelve volumes is not merely a record of institutional growth. It is the subject of the Department’s own research, applied, with characteristic obliviousness, to the Department itself.
The AHDH was established to examine dimensional models of human existence. This was, at the time of founding, a reasonably coherent brief. Atlas von Entenbraten, whose relationship to conventional chronology the Department treats as a secondary concern, had proposed that human beings occupied not one dimension but several, had declined to say how many, and had suggested that the examination of this proposition constituted a legitimate field of enquiry.
The original seven pages agreed with him on all three counts. What the seven pages did not anticipate—what seven pages rarely do—was what happens when a department organised around a deliberately unspecified concept begins to decide what falls within its remit. The answer, reliably, is everything. The current catalogue includes essays on intelligence, theoretical physics, Roman sexuality, language change, educational method, several memoranda on ducks, and one receipt for twelve yards of green baize. The Secretariat continues to regard this arrangement as temporary, a position it has maintained since 1923.
The mechanism by which a department founded to examine dimensional models of human existence acquired the Roman sexuality papers is not entirely mysterious. Dr Veronika Haas of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, who catalogued the AHDH’s holdings in 1997 and subsequently published her findings under the title The Expanding Field: Institutional Drift and the Problem of Remit, identified what she called “the von Entenbraten effect,” defined as “the tendency of any field organised around a sufficiently abstract founding concept to discover, upon examination, that everything is relevant.” Haas considers this a problem.
The Department, predictably, considers Haas’s paper a contribution to the field and has filed it accordingly. “Von Entenbraten demonstrated,” she writes, with the patience of someone who has spent considerable time in archives, “that a concept broad enough to explain everything explains nothing in particular. His followers have taken this as permission.” She does not appear to have intended this as a compliment. The Department quoted it in its 2003 prospectus without removing the context that makes it critical, which suggests either remarkable self-awareness or a failure to read past the sentence they liked.
The duck memoranda deserve particular attention, not because they illuminate the Department’s intellectual programme, but because they do not, and the failure is itself informative. There are seven of them. They range in date from 1891 to 1954 and address, in sequence: the navigational habits of displaced waterfowl, the epistemological implications of the duck-rabbit figure, a practical complaint about ducks on the Foundation’s south lawn, a theoretical response to the practical complaint, a synthesis of the preceding two documents that the author describes as “the dialectical duck problem,” a brief memo noting that the ducks have moved on and the problem is therefore resolved, and a 1954 addendum observing that the ducks have returned and the resolution must be reconsidered.
No one has satisfactorily explained why the AHDH holds all seven. The most credible hypothesis, advanced by Petra Holst in her archival inventory, is that the first memorandum was filed by someone who considered the navigational habits of displaced waterfowl relevant to dimensional theory, that subsequent memos were filed because they referenced the first, and that the system thereafter perpetuated itself on the basis of internal consistency rather than external purpose. This, Holst notes with visible satisfaction, is “an essentially von Entenbraten situation.”
The receipt for twelve yards of green baize presents a different problem. Green baize, at twelve yards, covers a billiard table with material to spare. No record exists of a billiard table in any AHDH premises. No record exists of why the receipt was retained. It sits in Volume Eight of the catalogue between a 1938 essay on the topology of self-referential statements and a 1939 memo on the epistemological implications of wartime rationing.
Professor Cyril Fenchurch of the University of East Anglia, who delivered a keynote address at the 2008 symposium on institutional knowledge management titled “What Archives Know That We Don’t,” devoted four minutes to the green baize receipt, arguing that it “represents the irreducible remainder of institutional life—the object that refuses categorisation and thereby reveals the limits of any categorical system.” He received warm applause.
The receipt itself remains in Volume Eight, uncategorised, which is presumably what Fenchurch intended to point out. He cited von Entenbraten’s remark about the interesting dimension being the omitted one, which von Entenbraten almost certainly did not intend to apply to upholstery, but which Fenchurch deployed with the confidence of a man who has found a quotation that fits and has no intention of questioning the fit.
This is the second most common thing that happens to von Entenbraten’s ideas. The most common thing is that they are cited as the foundation for conclusions the man himself would have treated with suspicion. Professor Sir Aldous Membrey-Cross, whose confidence in the stability of von Entenbraten’s framework famously exceeded the framework’s own self-assessment, told the Annual Conference of Dimensional Studies in 1965 that “the AHDH represents the institutional realisation of von Entenbraten’s vision—a single body capable of holding the full range of dimensional enquiry within a coherent administrative structure.” He said this looking at a catalogue that already contained the duck memoranda and the baize receipt, a point no one raised from the floor. Sir Aldous continued: “The breadth of the Department’s holdings is not a sign of confusion. It is a sign of ambition.” The Department engraved this on a plaque. It now hangs above the catalogue room, where it overlooks twelve volumes of holdings whose breadth Sir Aldous mistook for ambition and which subsequent administrators have mostly mistaken for precedent.
The intelligence papers deserve a paragraph, if only because they illustrate how a department can expand its remit through the logic of adjacency—the intellectual equivalent of leaving a door open and then discovering, some years later, that the room next door has been absorbed. The original connection was plausible enough: if human beings occupy multiple dimensions, the question of how they perceive and navigate those dimensions touches on cognition, and the question of cognition touches on intelligence, and before long the Department holds seventeen papers on intelligence measurement, two critiques of intelligence measurement, one paper arguing that intelligence measurement is itself a dimensional error, and a conference report from 1967 in which Dr Edmund Stave of the Institute for Applied Cognitive Structures announced that “the AHDH’s approach to intelligence is the most sophisticated in the field, precisely because it refuses to define intelligence in advance of studying it.” Stave made this claim on the basis of having read one of the seventeen papers. He appears not to have read the critiques. He certainly did not read the paper arguing that intelligence measurement is a dimensional error, which was filed the following year and which would have revised his opinion significantly. The Department thanked him for his contribution and filed his conference remarks under “External Endorsements.”
Language change arrived by a similar route. Theoretical physics arrived because someone on the acquisitions committee in 1931 read an article about the new quantum mechanics and noticed that the concept of superposition—an entity existing in multiple states simultaneously until observed—bore what they described as “an unmistakeable von Entenbraten quality.”
Whether it does or not is a question on which theoretical physicists and AHDH researchers have, for almost a century, carefully avoided sharing a room. Dr Friederike Baum of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science in Frankfurt noted in a 2011 paper that “the tendency to discover von Entenbraten in fields he never addressed is a symptom of the concept of Boulderdash as he actually defined it—or rather, as he refused to define it—but the symptom points in the wrong direction. Those who see him everywhere suffer from the condition he diagnosed.” Baum’s paper was published in a philosophy journal. The AHDH requested permission to reprint it in its newsletter. Baum declined. The request and the refusal are both in the archive, filed under “Correspondence: Ongoing.”
The Roman sexuality papers remain the most discussed anomaly in the catalogue, primarily because they are substantive, well-researched, and bear no relationship to dimensionality that anyone has managed to articulate. They arrived in 1971 as part of a bequest from the estate of Professor Heinrich Lund, a classicist who had corresponded with the Department on unrelated matters in the 1940s and who left his papers to it “in the conviction that the AHDH would find them of interest.” It is unclear on what basis he formed this conviction. The papers are of interest. The Department has not, in the fifty-odd years since their arrival, managed to explain why they are in a catalogue of dimensional research rather than a classics library, and has instead settled into the position that their presence is “a question the Department continues to examine.” This is the institutional version of von Entenbraten’s own procedure: one declines to commit to a conclusion on the grounds that the examination is ongoing, and the examination remains ongoing on the grounds that no conclusion has been reached.
What the catalogue reveals, if one reads it at sufficient length—and twelve volumes constitutes sufficient length—is not a department that lost its focus but a department that was built around a focus whose defining feature was that it could not be held in a single place. Von Entenbraten designed, or stumbled into, or declined to define his way out of, a founding concept with no stable boundary. A dimension omitted is always present by implication. Any field that might illuminate an omitted dimension falls, by extension, within the brief. Roman sexuality and duck navigation and twelve yards of green baize all occupy dimensions. Everything does. This is either the problem or the point, and the Department has spent the better part of four centuries being unable to tell them apart, which von Entenbraten would have called Boulderdash, meaning something he refused to define precisely, meaning something with at least one interesting dimension he considered it premature to specify.
The Secretariat continues to regard the arrangement as temporary. The twelfth volume of the catalogue currently sits on a desk awaiting the start of a thirteenth. The seven pages of the original proposal remain exactly as they were, which is the most dimensionally interesting thing about them.
You are here: Alternative Hypotheses of Dimensional Hubris