see · codex paratext anonymous lamplighter lexicon
volume iv · pages 312–314 · ed. l. m.
a school of thought; not a building, not an institute, not a faculty — an attitude inherited by those who write the paratext as if it were the text.
The noemic school is the loose, mostly posthumous tradition gathered around the noemata project and its smaller descendants. Its members did not call themselves a school; the term is the editor's, supplied here for the convenience of the catalogue. The school holds, in broad outline, four things at once: that what surrounds a work is part of the work, that the author is a courteous fiction, that the long durational practice is itself the practice, and that error is an admissible part of the record.
The first axiom — the doctrine of paratext — gives the school its visible signature. A noemic page tends to display its scaffolding: its errata are reprinted at the foot, its catalogues are bound into the body, its margins are not blank. The reader is treated as a competent person who may go on reading once the seams of the work have been disclosed.
The second — the administrative anonymity of the writer — is the school's quietest doctrine, and its most easily mistaken. The noemic author is not a hidden author. The author is a small set of household names which the work uses interchangeably and discards as needed. Several entries in this encyclopedia are themselves attributed to nobody in particular in this sense.
The third axiom — that the practice is the practice — appears in the school's preference for the long, slow, unfinished work. A site that has been running since 1995 and shows no sign of being finished is, by noemic lights, in good repair. The fourth axiom, on error, finds its expression in the slip pasted into the back of every noemic book: a list of mistakes the reader is asked, not to forgive, but simply to note.
The school has no founding date and no first member. Its strongest concentrations of activity are in the north, where the dialect (see north noemic) preserves several of the school's words; and in the labyrinth, where the present encyclopedia is being slowly compiled. There are, by the editor's count, no more than eight or nine practitioners active in any given decade. The school is small; its books are smaller; its readers, smallest of all.