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List Cultures
We live in an age of lists, from magazine features to online clickbait. This book situates the list in a long tradition, asking key questions about the list as a cultural and communicative form. What, Liam Cole Young asks, can this seemingly innocuous form tell us about historical and contemporary media environments and logistical networks? Connecting German theories of cultural techniques to Anglo-American approaches that address similar issues, List Cultures makes a major contribution to debates about New Materialism and the post-human turn.
- GenresNonfiction
196 pages, Hardcover
Published May 23, 2017
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January 11, 2018
My interests in literary studies have shifted over time from the formalist to the sociological, so this didn't seem like it was going to be quite my flavor, but I was won over just about immediately.
We start with Umberto Eco, so from page one of the preface we're right where I want to be. "The list is the origin of culture," that's Eco. From there, the Young launches a formalist book that meaningfully attends to all the things that I care about (the role of media in community formation), and surprised me page after page with great writing, sharp observations, and tantalizing sources to chase down.
The book follows the shifting functions of the list through history, revealing a form that "mediates boundaries between administration and art, knowledge and poetics, sense and nonsense" (10). As Young's argument goes: wherever systems of order surround and enframe human society, the list is there. Lists are used to shape and shift the social world as new deployments of the list are discovered, adapted, modified, and abandoned. As a searching exploration of the way that our intellectual tools "simultaneously conceal and reveal, enforce and subvert” social systems, List Cultures is really an excellent book. Plus, I'm a big fan of attempts to do big history and longue durée stuff, so it turned out this book is my flavor after all.
Young uses List Cultures to reinsert formal analysis into the critical discourse I'm more familiar with: divided between analyses of institutions, contexts, and particular historical uses of texts. Beginning with a rereading of the earliest cuneiform writing (inventories and transaction records), Young builds his case for the primacy of the list by explicating the ways lists negotiate tensions and paradoxes that have persisted across time. Young extends the work of Foucault, Latour, Borges, Poovey, Benjamin, Ong, Innis and many others (yum yum yum), demonstrating that listing is a cultural technique that constitutes concepts and categories on which technical systems and social institutions are built. So it's formalist analysis, but in the best way.
The argument explores the pop charts and the innerworkings of Buzzfeed, where lists draw borders, create hierarchies, and provide points of reference in the world of tastemaking and fandom, and speed the spread of viral media through databases, traced signatures, and "Big Data" (vom). As an extension and counterpoint, the exploration of lists in the administrative states of Renaissance Italy and Nazi Germany provide careful reflections on how lists have been used to establish facts, determine personhood, police subjects, and build structures of knowledge that expose bodies to violence.
Making the case for modernity as primarily logistical in orientation, List Cultures closes with a delightful meditation on list poetics. Touching on a number of poetic devices, and some flim stuff with Chris Marker, the last chapter is on ways the list has been used to remake old orders, explode boundaries, and extend horizons of possibility. It's the list in the mode of heteropotia: inclusive, infinite, and leveling rather than exclusive, limited, and heirarchical. Following Wolfgang Ernst's argument that real-time data collection channels ancient forms of organizing time, this chapter also plays with a binary of narrative and non-narrative modes of writing and thinking in regards to time and consequence; i.e. considering the ways that list poetics engage looped and expansive time rather than linear cause-and-effect time.
So by the end, Young asks us to consider how list poetics can displace the logic of logistical modernity driving the machines of Renaissance Italy, Fascist Germany, and the inverted totalitarianism of present moment in all its databases and listicles. To Young, the list is most alive when it structures a heterotopian space for thinking "other." I love it.
We start with Umberto Eco, so from page one of the preface we're right where I want to be. "The list is the origin of culture," that's Eco. From there, the Young launches a formalist book that meaningfully attends to all the things that I care about (the role of media in community formation), and surprised me page after page with great writing, sharp observations, and tantalizing sources to chase down.
The book follows the shifting functions of the list through history, revealing a form that "mediates boundaries between administration and art, knowledge and poetics, sense and nonsense" (10). As Young's argument goes: wherever systems of order surround and enframe human society, the list is there. Lists are used to shape and shift the social world as new deployments of the list are discovered, adapted, modified, and abandoned. As a searching exploration of the way that our intellectual tools "simultaneously conceal and reveal, enforce and subvert” social systems, List Cultures is really an excellent book. Plus, I'm a big fan of attempts to do big history and longue durée stuff, so it turned out this book is my flavor after all.
Young uses List Cultures to reinsert formal analysis into the critical discourse I'm more familiar with: divided between analyses of institutions, contexts, and particular historical uses of texts. Beginning with a rereading of the earliest cuneiform writing (inventories and transaction records), Young builds his case for the primacy of the list by explicating the ways lists negotiate tensions and paradoxes that have persisted across time. Young extends the work of Foucault, Latour, Borges, Poovey, Benjamin, Ong, Innis and many others (yum yum yum), demonstrating that listing is a cultural technique that constitutes concepts and categories on which technical systems and social institutions are built. So it's formalist analysis, but in the best way.
The argument explores the pop charts and the innerworkings of Buzzfeed, where lists draw borders, create hierarchies, and provide points of reference in the world of tastemaking and fandom, and speed the spread of viral media through databases, traced signatures, and "Big Data" (vom). As an extension and counterpoint, the exploration of lists in the administrative states of Renaissance Italy and Nazi Germany provide careful reflections on how lists have been used to establish facts, determine personhood, police subjects, and build structures of knowledge that expose bodies to violence.
Making the case for modernity as primarily logistical in orientation, List Cultures closes with a delightful meditation on list poetics. Touching on a number of poetic devices, and some flim stuff with Chris Marker, the last chapter is on ways the list has been used to remake old orders, explode boundaries, and extend horizons of possibility. It's the list in the mode of heteropotia: inclusive, infinite, and leveling rather than exclusive, limited, and heirarchical. Following Wolfgang Ernst's argument that real-time data collection channels ancient forms of organizing time, this chapter also plays with a binary of narrative and non-narrative modes of writing and thinking in regards to time and consequence; i.e. considering the ways that list poetics engage looped and expansive time rather than linear cause-and-effect time.
So by the end, Young asks us to consider how list poetics can displace the logic of logistical modernity driving the machines of Renaissance Italy, Fascist Germany, and the inverted totalitarianism of present moment in all its databases and listicles. To Young, the list is most alive when it structures a heterotopian space for thinking "other." I love it.
Displaying 1 of 1 review