Book Section
This essay presents some thoughts about lists and draws on a range of material, from Lauren Berlant to George Perec. It acts as an introduction to a series of short meditations on individual instances of listing. Usually presented in a sequence and assembled according to some practical or conceptual necessity, lists offer the promise, perhaps the illusion, of keeping track, of bringing control to the flux of things and thoughts, of putting confusion to a halt. They relate to reduction in two ways: first, as a quantitative reduction — as a form of making smaller or less; and second, as a qualitative reduction — as a form of condensation to the most salient data.
Keywords: Lists; Categories; Accumulation; Enumeration; Form (Aesthetics), Continuity; Berlant, Lauren; Eco, Umberto; Contzen, Eva von; Tankard, Paul; Belknap, Robert; Boyer, Anne; Didion, Joan; Perec, Georges; Sontag, Susan
Rights: © by the author(s). Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Part of The Case for Reduction Containing:
Introduction / Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Jakob Schillinger
The Case and the Signifier / Iracema Dulley
Haptic Reductions / Rachel Aumiller
Disalienation and Structuralism / Christopher Chamberlin
Black Box Allegories of Gulf Futurism / Özgün Eylül İşcen
Lines that Reduce / Sam Dolbear
Post-anti-identitarianism / Ben Nichols
Nothing Beyond the Name / Sarath Jakka
Reduction in Computer Music / Federica Buongiorno
Reduction in Time / Alberica Bazzoni
Seeking Home / Amina ElHalawani
Law Is Other Wor(l)ds / Xenia Chiaramonte
On the List
White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy / Ben Nichols
Proust List Impulse / Sam Dolbear
A List of Fears / Claudia Peppel
How to Bake X Cake / Iracema Dulley
Walking Away, Walking in Circles, Writing Lists / Rachel Aumiller
Title
On the List
Author(s)
Sam Dolbear
Ben Nichols
Claudia Peppel
Identifier
https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-25_13
Description
This essay presents some thoughts about lists and draws on a range of material, from Lauren Berlant to George Perec. It acts as an introduction to a series of short meditations on individual instances of listing. Usually presented in a sequence and assembled according to some practical or conceptual necessity, lists offer the promise, perhaps the illusion, of keeping track, of bringing control to the flux of things and thoughts, of putting confusion to a halt. They relate to reduction in two ways: first, as a quantitative reduction — as a form of making smaller or less; and second, as a qualitative reduction — as a form of condensation to the most salient data.
Is Part Of
The Case for Reduction
Place
Berlin
Publisher
ICI Berlin Press
Date
11 October 2022
Subject
Lists
Categories
Accumulation
Enumeration
Form (Aesthetics), Continuity
Berlant, Lauren
Eco, Umberto
Contzen, Eva von
Tankard, Paul
Belknap, Robert
Boyer, Anne
Didion, Joan
Perec, Georges
Sontag, Susan
Rights
© by the author(s)
Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Language
en-GB
page start
253
page end
261
Source
The Case for Reduction, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Jakob Schillinger, Cultural Inquiry, 25 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 253–61

References

  • Online Etymology Dictionary (2022) <https://www.etymonline.com/>
  • Belknap, Robert, The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004) <https://doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300103830.001.0001>
  • Berlant, Lauren, ‘First Things’, in Berlant and Kathleen Stewart, The Hundreds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), p. 3 <https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478003335>
  • Boyer, Anne, ‘Not Writing’, in Boyer, Garments Against Women (Boise, ID: Ahsahta Press, 2015), pp. 41–43
  • Butor, Michel, ‘The Book as Object’ (1964), quoted in Brian Dillon, ‘Why Literature Loves Lists: From Rabelais to Didion, an Incomplete List of Listmakers’, Literary Hub, 14 September 2018 <https://lithub.com/why-literature-loves-lists/> [accessed 20 April 2022]
  • Comay, Rebecca, ‘Testament of the Revolution (Walter Benjamin)’, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, 50.2 (2017), pp. 1–12
  • Contzen, Eva von, ‘Theorising Lists in Literature: Towards a Listology’, in Lists and Catalogues in Ancient Literature and Beyond: Towards a Poetics of Enumeration, ed. by Rebecca Laemmle, Cédric Scheidegger Laemmle, and Katharina Wesselmann (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2021), pp. 35–54 <https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110712230-003>
  • Didion, Joan, The White Album [1979] (London: HarperCollins, 2017)
  • Eco, Umberto, The Infinity of Lists: From Homer to Joyce, trans. by Alistair McEwen (London: MacLehose Press, 2009)
  • Kafka, Franz, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans. by Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken, 1977)
  • Perec, Georges, ‘Notes on the Objects to Be Found on My Desk, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris’, in Perec, Thoughts of Sorts, trans. by David Bellos (Boston, MA: David R. Godine Publisher, 2009), pp. 11–16
  • Searle, John, ‘The Storm over the University’, The New York Review of Books, 6 December 1990 <https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1990/12/06/the-storm-over-the-university/> [accessed 21 July 2022]
  • Sontag, Susan, ‘Notes of a Childhood’, in Reborn: Susan Sontag, Early Diaries 1947–1963, published posthumously and ed. by her son David Rieff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), pp. 106–29
  • Tankard, Paul, ‘Reading Lists’, Prose Studies, 28.3 (December 2006), pp. 337–60 <https://doi.org/10.1080/01440350600975531>

Cite as: Sam Dolbear, Ben Nichols, and Claudia Peppel, ‘On the List’, in The Case for Reduction, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Jakob Schillinger, Cultural Inquiry, 25 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 253-61 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-25_13>