How to Read Lists (Well): a Response to Jed Esty

PRINT

Let's call the lists that we encounter and produce on a day-to-day basis ordinary lists. Examples might include shopping lists, contact lists, to-do lists, bucket lists, packing lists, mailing lists, and guest lists. The ordinary list is usually arranged vertically on the page or screen. It eschews the lateral sprawl of the sentence in favor of the columnar. In this sense, it is classical. The ordinary list's vertical orientation suggests that its contents are countable and finite. Think of it as a little machine that renders the teeming world as a discrete set of objects and actions that can be "checked off," or, as Umberto Eco so neatly put it in an interview, as a "cut out of infinity."1 The ordinary list, from the Sumerian King List to last week's shopping list, is a protective ritual designed to overcome, or at the very least repel, the world's infinitude. The etymology of the word—rooted as it is in the Middle English liste, meaning border or edge—gestures to the list's capacity to set limits and give form to an otherwise monstrous mass.

The ordinary list behaves differently when tipped on its side, that is, when written as a sentence. If a vertical list imposes a finite order onto the world, then a horizontal list lists the other way, toward disarray and infinitude. There is a reason why no one writes their grocery lists in prose form. "Eggs, milk, bleach, and so forth and so forth"—we'd never make it home. In his essay, Jed explores how horizontal lists might productively distort and deform our writing, and by extension, our thought. Jed warns us away from those punchy lists of three that slot ever so neatly into the sentence form. In contrast, good lists make for baroque sentences, which Jed describes as "bad yet indelible." His key example comes from Eve Sedgwick, which I reproduce in full here:

The very blandness of the "American" compacting of borders—the, as it were, bad pun between the name of a continent and the name of a nation—how much must it not owe to the accidents of a history of geographic, economic, imperialist entitlement, a path into "nation-ness" no more "normal," no more as opposed to the same set or even the same kinds of definitional others, than that of the nation-ness of Canada, the different nation-ness of Mexico, of the Philippines, of the Navajo Nation (within the U.S.), of the Six Nations (across the U.S.-Canadian border), the nationalism of the non-nation Quebec, the non-nationalism of the non-nation Hawaii, the histories of African-American nationalisms, and so forth and so forth and so forth.2

Sedgwick's sentence is rickety because her list is agile. Every item she adds effects a minor variation in the list's curatorial logic, and she leaves it to the reader to pay attention to how its contents touch and are touched by one another. Sedgwick's bristling punctuation might make her sentence unwieldy, but it does the crucial work of structuring relations. The soft hook of the comma, the sharp jag of a hyphen, and the smooth curve of a parenthesis each suggest different types of touch, different ways of fastening or gripping things together.

Particularly in her later writings on affect, Sedgwick connects the physical sense of touch with the affective relations that animate the spaces between people and things. Touch's intimacy, Sedgwick says, destroys the clear distinctions between Self and Other and so "makes nonsense out of any dualistic understanding of agency and passivity."3 In a remarkable passage from Touching Feeling, Sedgwick uses a photograph of the textile artist Judith Scott clasping one of her sculptures to demonstrate how to read touching as relation. Sedgwick writes that "there is no single way to understand the 'besideness' of these two forms," before using the point of contact between the artist and her artwork—the height, breadth, force, and gradient of their touch—as a point of departure to imagine the environment of affective intensity that their touch creates.4

Her close reading is a model for how to read horizontal lists (well), even if hers is just a list of two. We must attune ourselves to the spaces that exist between each item. What delicate links inhere between the first and the second item on a list? Between the second and the third? This task invites another. As Sedgwick uses the fact of touching to sketch the contours of a complex scene of relation, so we must use the list's contents to outline in our minds a common ground upon which all its items could possibly meet. Think of it as a double movement—we move serially through the list's items and spin outward in so many concentric circles to imagine the total field, the larger order of things, that would allow for these things to coexist.5

This world-building never ends because Sedgwick's list never ends. It sets in motion a game of perpetual permutation, the emblem of which is that culminating "and so forth and so forth and so forth" to which Jed is ceaselessly drawn. The and so forth is a hole in the list's side, a crack in its frame. Through it, we can glimpse an inhuman temporality that Jed describes in a slightly different context as a "pure time" that "cannot be framed or compassed."6 This is the final baroque twist of Sedgwick's sentence. She lets in infinity to show that, in the words of Edouard Glissant, "all knowledge is to come and that this is what makes it of value."7 Humans prefer peaks to thresholds, and so they willingly mistake the cusp for the crest. Perhaps then what finally separates the ordinary list from the (good) horizontal list is the relationship to and disposition towards the future. The ordinary list is an attempt to overcome, or at the very least, stave off, infinity. The horizontal list, in contrast, dares to cast a glance toward infinity and recognizes it as an absolute outside that can be neither grasped nor known. This glance is the condition of possibility for the good scholarly list, which finds its value precisely in the promise that there will come not only new orders and new frames, but new grounds for thought.

Frances McDonald is assistant professor of English at the University of Louisville.  Her research and teaching focus on twentieth-century American literature and film, critical theory, and digital humanities. Abiding scholarly interests include avant-garde literature and cinema, science fiction, horror, affect theory, media studies, visual culture, and the relation between theory and practice. Her current book project examines the relationship between representations of laughter in postwar American literature and film, and the "cracking up" of the subject in poststructuralist theory. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literature and The Atlantic. With Whitney Trettien she edits thresholds, a digital journal for critical/creative scholarship.