Arguments & Methodological Notes

This thesis offers four intersecting arguments: the first is disciplinary and

methodological. It proposes that contemporary media studies would benefit greatly from the importation of the constellation of approaches and concepts that I group

under the rubric ‘media materialism.’ These approaches can, I argue, give a more accurate account of media networks and environments, contemporary and historical, because they take into account more than devices, institutions, texts, and

audiences. Media materialism ‘un-black boxes’ the usual objects of media studies to illuminate the forms, formats, techniques, protocols, programs, etc. that play crucial roles in the establishment and functioning of media networks, but which are too often typically conflated under broad concepts like ‘media’ and ‘network.’

The second argument presents the list as a concrete example of what media materialism makes available to analysis, positioning listing as a cultural technique that performs ontic operations that inscribe epistemological structures (concepts and categories) upon which social institutions and relations are built. Such

categories and concepts go on to become standardized and institutionalized. As a form that is constitutive of certain kinds of knowledge, and as an epistemological operator, the list can tell us much about the material circumstances in which human beings enact thought and action.

The third and fourth arguments are about lists themselves. Argument (3) is that lists cannot be easily dismissed or endorsed. It is not enough to say lists are good or bad. Their complicated and sometimes contradictory operations—observed throughout this thesis—demand a precise tracing of how they function. Argument (4) proposes that the enduring presence of the list in our thoughts, texts, and programs arises from its unique capacity to negotiate tensions and paradoxes that have beguiled humans for centuries. Such tensions include those between fear and desire, wonder and horror, entropy and order. The latter tension, which Eco (2009) describes as ‘etcetera’ vs. ‘everything-included,’ is particularly important to this thesis. I will show that, on the one hand, the list’s tendency toward ‘everything included’ (i.e. the drawing of borders) has led it to be harnessed in the modern period by forces of rationality and governmentality that categorize and administer people, words, and things (see chapters two, three, and four). Yet, on the other

hand, the list also contains within itself the capacity to negate such forces and establish a space for thinking other. The poetics of etcetera can challenge the logic of everything-included; the paradigmatic AND, AND, AND of the infinite can displace the syntagmatic IF/THEN of the finite; the list can intrude on the monopoly of

narrative (see chapter five). This double function resonates with the dialectic Goody sketches above (in which lists challenge the boundaries of knowledge that their borders materialize), and with Heidegger’s understanding of the relationship between art and technology, wherein the ‘saving power’ exists precisely where the ‘danger’ is most imminent. These four arguments run parallel and often intersect.

Methodological Notes

Because it is both ubiquitous and seemingly innocuous, it is difficult to bring the list into focus as an object of study. It is so woven into the fabric of our medial and informatic environments that we do not often notice its presence. The list is part of what McLuhan called the ‘ground,’ the challenge for this study is to make it a ‘figure.’ I argue the most effective way to do so is to trace it through the world, to see what the list tells us and shows us when its operations are probed in various contexts. Therefore, rather than isolating one major argument about the list and selecting case studies which would allow for the repeated emphasis of this argument, I believe a more productive approach is to weave each of the four arguments identified above through a series of case studies that delve into the realms, respectively, 1)

knowledge and classification; 2) administration; 3) logistics and computation; 4) poetics.

It is important to clarify that the arguments and case studies do not simply map onto one another in a one-to-one ratio. I will not be arguing that the list

functions only as a format in administration, nor that its poetic tension is observable solely in the aesthetic realm. The four arguments will weave their way through each

case study, but their emphasis and arrangement will differ. Some tendencies of the list are more evident in certain contexts than in others. By foregrounding such differences I will be able to more clearly demonstrate that the list cannot be reduced to any single thing. Again, this is why the attempt is to study what lists do, rather than what they are.

This approach can allow the analysis to escape the trap of having inscribe a value judgment on the list—as either good or bad, this or that, here or there—and thus to move beyond stock ideological critique. Such an approach, and the binary categories it relies upon, is not very helpful in thinking about a form that has been in constant use for five thousand years. Of course there are ideological dimensions to lists—such an adaptable form of organizing and communicating information can and has been mobilized for various ends. However, such a critique would place too much emphasis on the content of lists at the expense of their operations. Looking at the latter, at the material structures and functions of lists, can tell us both what they actually do, and how they do it. I therefore seek to follow Latour’s first rule of method: instead of black-boxing the technical or material aspects of the list and then looking for social influences and biases, I seek to “be there before the box closes and becomes black” (1987, p. 21). Put another way, the goal is to clear space for examining the “infinitesimal mechanisms” from which Foucault’s “ascending” analysis of power (mentioned above) can be elaborated.