On the Recursive Classification of Missing Working Parties and the Experimental Theology of Garden Sheds
A Paper from the AHDH, Volume Eleven
The archive has produced, in the course of the Vorpel Foundation’s operational history, a category of document that deMallard has labelled with the precision of someone who has encountered the thing often enough to name it accurately: “Working Parties: Constituted, Convened (Not), Outcomes: Pending.”
The folder is thin. The category is not. A working party that never meets generates, in the Foundation’s administrative experience, almost exactly the volume of paperwork produced by a working party that does meet, with the significant difference that the paperwork of the non-meeting working party contains no record of anything said, decided, or contested, because nothing was said, decided, or contested, which means the paperwork consists entirely of the apparatus surrounding the work rather than any record of the work itself: the constituting memo, the terms of reference, the list of members, the apology for absence from the first proposed meeting, the rescheduled proposed meeting, the second apology for absence, the note from one member indicating they understood the group to have been disbanded and could someone confirm, the reply noting that the group had not been disbanded but that its terms of reference were under review, and the subsequent silence, which the Foundation files under a heading deMallard has developed specifically for it: “Active (Dormant).”
The classification presents a philosophical problem that the AHDH identified in an internal paper circulated in 1993 and never formally published, titled On the Ontological Status of the Unconvened Working Party, attributed to no author but bearing, in the bottom right corner of the title page, a small ink drawing of a duck that three handwriting analysts have independently attributed to von Entenbraten, a finding that is either impossible, significant, or both, which is also von Entenbraten’s characteristic register. The paper argues that a working party constituted by memo and never convened occupies a dimensional position that the Foundation’s administrative categories cannot contain: it exists as an intention, a list of names, a set of terms of reference, and a folder in the filing system, but it does not exist as an event, a discussion, a decision, or an outcome. It is, the paper proposes, “the purest form of institutional presence: the body that is everywhere in documentation and nowhere in practice, the committee as Platonic form, hovering above the minutes it will never generate.” Professor Ünsel, discovering this paper in 2001 and recognising in it a quality he associated with von Entenbraten’s known work, submitted a commentary to the AHDH in which he argued that the unconvened working party represented “the administrative realisation of the dimensional concept—the thing that exists in one register and not another, the body that occupies the interesting dimension and declines to enter the observable one.” He cited this as evidence of von Entenbraten’s continued intellectual presence in the Foundation’s affairs. DeMallard, who typed both the commentary and the covering memo, noted in the transfer log that the commentary contained four references to the duck drawing and no references to the working parties themselves, which had been the paper’s stated subject.
The question of the garden shed enters the record through a working party whose constituting memo dates to 1984 and whose terms of reference describe its purpose as “the experimental examination of alternative sites for contemplative and generative academic work, with particular reference to domestic outbuildings.” The working party had five members, three of whom responded to the constituting memo with expressions of enthusiasm, one of whom requested clarification of the word “generative,” and one of whom, Peter Thasselcroft, submitted a flowchart illustrating the relationship between contemplative and generative work in a domestic outbuilding context that the memo’s author, unidentified, described in a handwritten marginal note as “helpful in ways that will become apparent.” The working party never met. It remains, in deMallard’s classification system, Active (Dormant). Its folder contains the constituting memo, the four responses, the flowchart, the marginal note, and a typed summary of a meeting that did not occur, which deMallard believes someone produced in error by anticipating the meeting’s occurrence and filing the anticipated outcome in advance, a procedure she describes in the transfer log as “chronologically ambitious.”
The theological dimension arrived, as theological dimensions tend to arrive in the Foundation’s archive, without announcing itself and in a folder filed under the wrong heading. The paper that introduced it—Garden Sheds and the Experience of the Numinous: Toward an Experimental Theology of Domestic Withdrawal—appeared in Volume Eleven of the catalogue in 1997, submitted by a Dr Colm Farrer of an institution described in the submission as the Centre for Practical Divinity, whose address the Foundation’s correspondence office has failed to locate on three separate attempts. The paper argues, with the confidence of someone who considers the connection obvious once stated, that the garden shed functions in the domestic landscape as a site of what Rudolf Otto called the numinosum—the experience of the holy as simultaneously attractive and overwhelming, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans—with the significant variation that the shed’s version of the numinous is characterised not by transcendence but by incompleteness. The shed contains, Farrer argues, the projects that were begun and not finished, the tools whose purpose has been partly forgotten, the objects displaced from the main house by domestic negotiation over decades, and the plans written on the backs of envelopes and stored in the shed because the shed was where they would eventually be needed and where nobody else would disturb them. It is, Farrer proposes, “the architecture of the provisional, the spatial form of the intention not yet abandoned, the building that houses everything the house cannot contain and the mind has not yet let go.”
Professor Miriam Seacroft, reviewing Farrer’s paper for the Journal of Material Theology in 1999, wrote that it “achieves something rare in the literature of sacred space: it relocates the experience of the holy from the monumental to the accidental, from the cathedral to the corrugated roof, from the deliberate architecture of transcendence to the improvised architecture of postponement.” She added that Farrer “stands in a tradition that includes Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, in which the drawer, the chest, and the wardrobe are treated as sites of intimate cosmology, and extends it to the outbuilding in a move that Bachelard, who was French and therefore suspicious of the garden as a concept, would not have made himself.” Seacroft’s review ran to six pages, of which five concerned the implications of the argument and one addressed what she called “the paper’s most significant limitation: it describes the shed as an experience without describing any actual sheds, a methodological choice that Farrer defends in a footnote as ‘preserving the phenomenological integrity of the inquiry’ and which a more sceptical reader might describe as not having visited any.” This is the review’s most accurate sentence, and Seacroft buries it in her fifth page, which is also characteristic.
The recursive element—connecting the unconvened working party to the experimental theology of the garden shed, and justifying the AHDH’s decision to file both under the same catalogue section—is the relationship both bear to the category of things intended but not enacted, present in documentation and absent in experience, constituted and not convened. The working party that never meets and the shed that houses the project that never quite begins occupy the same dimensional position that the 1993 paper identified: present in one register, absent in another, Active (Dormant) in both. Dr Brookmere, encountering the Farrer paper in Volume Eleven and submitting a commentary in 2003 noting its etymological dimensions—shed, she pointed out, derives from a variant of shade or shadow, the outbuilding as a shadow-structure of the main house, a word that preserves in its roots exactly the quality of secondary status that the building itself occupies—argued that “the shed names its own condition: it is the shadow of completion, the shade cast by the project that has not yet entered the light.” She cited this as support for Farrer’s thesis. Farrer, reached by the AHDH for a response, replied on a postcard that said “Yes, though I would have put it differently,” without specifying how.
Arthur Blandy, who attended the 1980 meeting in his capacity as co-convenor and who has contributed to the Foundation’s catalogue a volume of editorial apparatus proportionate to his output in the meeting room, addressed the garden shed in a footnote to the Collected Mallard Papers that occupies more space than the passage it annotates. He writes that the shed represents “the heuristic space of the genealogical imagination: the place where the working papers go when the archive cannot contain them, where the draft becomes the final version by virtue of never being superseded, where the family history sits in a box that someone will deal with later and that later has now arrived without bringing anyone with it.” This is Blandy at his most characteristic: a sentence that sounds like it is going somewhere and that arrives, after considerable scenery, at a location the reader can recognise but not quite map. It is also, stripped of its characteristic indirection, a reasonable description of what sheds contain.
The Duke of Mallard, who sent a letter to the 1980 meeting he had not been invited to attend, submitted an unsolicited response to the Farrer paper in 1998 on notepaper embossed with a crest that the College of Arms has not confirmed as registered. He wrote that “the garden shed is the honest building. It makes no claim to permanence. It knows what it is for and it knows that what it is for will change, and it accommodates the change without requiring a reclassification memo or a working party to authorise the reclassification. The academy could learn a great deal from the garden shed, if the academy ever finished arguing about whether the shed constituted a legitimate site of inquiry and went and sat in one.” He signed the letter “Mallard” with a flourish that Blandy later described, in a footnote, as “ducal.” DeMallard filed it under “Mallard, Duke of: Correspondence (Unsolicited, Second Item). Filed under M.” She noted in the transfer log that she agreed with the letter but that this was not a filing criterion.
Blandy, asked by the present account whether the shed working party of 1984 had ever reconvened, said he believed there had been a proposal to reconvene it in 1991, which had produced a constituting memo for a reconvening working party, which had itself never met, which meant that there now existed in the archive a working party established to reconvene a working party that had not convened, and that the folder containing both was correctly labelled and sitting in Volume Eleven next to the Farrer paper, which had not been placed there deliberately but which deMallard had left in place on the grounds that the arrangement was, as she had noted in the transfer log, “thematically accurate.”
DeMallard, who has a shed and who mentioned it to the present account in the context of filing methodology, said it contained two archive boxes from 1994 whose contents she remembered in general terms, a folder of correspondence pending the resolution of a cross-referencing question now resolved but not yet actioned, and a bag of labels she had ordered when the Foundation’s central supply failed to stock them. The shed was dry, she noted. Correctly shelved. Nothing pending for more than six years, which was acceptable for a domestic outbuilding and excellent by the standards of the Foundation’s Transfer Corridor. She said she did not consider her shed a site of the numinous, and that if Farrer had spent more time in actual sheds he would know that the dominant experience was finding a thing you needed behind a thing you had forgotten and feeling, briefly, competent. “That’s not theology,” she said. “That’s just looking properly.” She paused and added, with the precision of someone adjusting a label: “Though I suppose those might be the same thing.”
The recursive classification of missing working parties and the experimental theology of garden sheds appear together in the AHDH’s catalogue because whoever organised Volume Eleven placed them in adjacent folders and deMallard has declined to separate them on the grounds that the separation would require a reclassification memo that would itself require a working party to authorise it, and the working party would be constituted and not convened, and the folder containing its constituting memo would sit beside the shed theology folder for the same reasons its predecessors sit beside one another, and the archive would grow by one more item in the category Active (Dormant), which it grows by often enough already. The present arrangement is therefore retained. The folder is correctly labelled. The label is deMallard’s. It reads, in capitals that leave no room for ambiguity: “SHEDS. WORKING PARTIES. SEE ALSO: EACH OTHER.”
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