Toward a Media Archaeology of the List:

Knowledge & Materiality in History

by
Liam Young
Paper presented at Network Archaeology
Miami (OH) University, April 20, 2012
Ill start with a bit of context regarding the origin of this inquiry, which was the simple
observation that lists are totally ubiquitous in contemporary culture. We are inundated with them
at every turn: online, offline; at work, at play; in high culture, in low culture, and so on. It
seems one of the foremost characteristics of what we variously call the network, digital, or
information society is this massive proliferation of lists.
Observing this leads one to start thinking about why this explosion of
lists, and why now? My first thought was that it must have something to do
with massive increases in the volume and velocity of information flows,
which seem to facilitate a shift toward the list. Certainly, both producers and
consumers have turned to itthe former to quickly communicate info, the
latter to help navigate an information deluge. It follows from this hypothesis,
then, that the list might be considered a prime example of the total
subsumption of life, labour, and practice by capitaleven those seemingly
banal or neutral spaces such as lists. Certain research gestures toward such
a conclusion, given that the form has proven a highly efficient and effective
device by which to reduce noise in the communicative channel, and not just
in the realm of consumer culture, as we can observe via Terranova (2004)
and Baurdrillard (1993), among others.

But hang on a minutethis so-called information overload is not a

phenomenon unique to digital or network cultures: as Anne Blair (2011)
points out, weve been complaining that there is too much to know since at
least to the early modern period. And the list itself is most certainly not a
new formJack Goody (1977) shows us that in fact the earliest surviving
forms of writing are administrative lists of the ancient Sumerians, scrawled
first on the walls of caves, and later on clay tablets. Indeed, Goody and
others, some of whom Ill mention today, show us that the list stands
alongside almost every new media-technology and its corresponding flood
of informationfrom ancient administrative writing, through early modern
manuscript

culture,

modern

print

culture,

the

analog

world

of

gramophone/film/typewriter, and into the digital code of whatever period

were in now. This being the case, I came to realize that my preliminary
hypotheses regarding the list as either a corollary of network societys socalled information overload, and/or as a surreptitious agent of capital, are
obviously not sophisticated enough to do justice to a form that exists in
almost every inscription system on record.
So how to give an account of a form, then, that defies easy definition?
After all, the list can function variously as a communicative device, a cultural
formation, an administrative form of writing, a storage or archival device,
and a mediator; it can be past, present, or future-oriented; which is to say:
retroactive, administrative, or prescriptive. Consequently, it seems to me
that focusing on what the list is or what it means may be less useful than

focusing

on

what

it

doeshow

it

functions

in

different

historical

constellations of power/knowledge.
Hence my desire to pursue something like a media archaeology of the
list. This emergent approach, I think, offers the kind of tools required to
pursue such a functional history or genealogy of a material form like the list.
Given that media archaeology is, in the words of Wolfgang Ernst (2011: 239)
a kind of epistemological reverse engineering, it allows one to excavate
certain capacities encoded within or black-boxed by the list that are related
to the ways in which it processes, stores, and transmits data over space and
time. Which is to say, by teasing out certain programmatic dimensions of the form, media
archaeology can offer us crucial insights into dimensions of this history of inscription
systems that are elided by conventional cultural or socio-political approaches.
Keeping this all in view, what Id like to do with the rest of this paper is
map out some functional connections between the list and the idea of the
network, which will allow me to gesture toward what a media archaeology of
the list might look like. The talk is organized in 3 sections: first Ill explore the
list as network by making some observations about lists in the aesthetic and
epistemological realms; section two regards the capacity of lists to facilitate
networks of action in the realm of administration and files; finally Ill end this
talk with a few remarks about digital networks and lists in relation to
programming and code.

1. List as Network

If we want to think about first how the list functions as a network, it makes
sense to point out that the list is, before anything else, a form that draws
things togetherit collects, translates, abstracts, and places words and
things in relation to one another. Umberto Eco (2009) & Michel Foucault
(2009) demonstrate this functionality of the list in the aesthetic realmwho
can forget the encounter with a list in a Borges story that Foucault describes,
in The Order of Things, as inaugurating his entire archaeological approach to
knowledge and history (2009: xvi-xxvi). By drawing together a network of
things that doesnt just resist, but radically negates any conventional
classificatory mechanism, Borges list literally materialized to Foucault his
inability to think outside the conditions that delimited and structured his own
thought. What interests me in particular about this event is that the role of
the list in collecting, organizing, and structuring informationin creating
networks of knowable things, i.e. knowledgeis here laid bare to Foucault,
and us, via this negation that is achieved through the materiality of form.
Eco, meanwhile, celebrates a certain poetics of the list by tracing a long history of its use
as descriptive and figurative model in literature and visual art. The list seems for Eco to
have a unique capacity to collect the world; it is suggestive of what he
(2009: 49) calls the topos of ineffability, which is something like an
aesthetic gesture toward the infinite, the unknowable, or the not-yet-known,
which stimulates the reader/viewers imagination. John Durham Peters, too,
is fond of this capacity of lists. He describes their function in his own writing
as both a battle against his own finitude and an always already futile

attempt to catch the cosmos (2011: 45). These kinds of lists point us
toward the interconnectedness of all things on a vast, macrocosmic scale.
The identification by both thinkers of a certain topos of ineffability that is
encoded in the list as a literary and aesthetic form is, in fact, exactly the kind
of media archaeological project that Erkki Huhtamo (2011: 28) calls for in
identifying topoi, analyzing their trajectories and transformations, and
explaining the cultural logics that condition their wanderings across time
and space.
In each of these examples lists collect and contain entities drawn together from the world.
Any list forges connections between its contents that did not exist prior to the act of listing. This
can be for the purposes of suggesting the infinite, as weve just seen, but it can also be for more
practical purposes, in the documentation of science, knowledge, and everyday life. Bruno Latour
talks often about these types of practices, and his work can help us understand the list is a kind of
black-boxed actor-network. Which is to say, he shows us that if we un-black box a list, we can
see how its collected objects come to be stabilized, mobilized, and combined as information.
Latour (1987) calls forms that do this kind of work (such as lists) immutable mobiles, which
draw things together and allow us to control their contents from a distance. As he says, when
someone is said to master a question or to dominate a subject, you should normally look for
the flat surface that enables mastery (a map, a list, a file, a census, the wall of a gallery, a cardindex, a repertory) and you will find it (1990: 45). I have explored elsewhere the ways in which
forms such as lists congeal the various components of a field such as popular music, wherein
songs, artists, moments, and memories are abstracted away to become data in a multitude of lists,
such as this one. Through this form, collective archives and canons emerge, the field itself is

measured, and mastery of knowledge is performed. Unfortunately, I am unable to say much more
about this example due to time constraints, but I raise it simply to point toward a constitutive
capacity of lists on fields of knowledge. But now, Ill move to the second section of this paper.

2. Lists facilitating networks

To understand how lists facilitate networks, Ill turn toward the lists
capacities for signal processing, storage, and transmission, which are much
easier for the media archaeologist to excavate than some of the more
slippery cultural or aesthetic concerns Ive just discussed. The main point Ill
make in this register is to say that the list facilitates networks of action in the sense that it
programs action. For instance, we can look to its implication in both internalized
technologies of self-administration, and also in externalized technologies of
control over human populations. Max Weber (2001: 76-77) talks about the
former in his discussion of the religious account-books of reformed
Christians, which function as a kind of internal checklist used by the
conscientious Puritan to supervise his/her own state of grace. On the other
hand, examples of the list facilitating the externalized control over human
populations can be observed most heinously in the census and death lists of
the Nazi administrative apparatus. By reducing human beings to an entry in a
registration and abstracting away bare life into numbers and figures, such tactics served not just
to de-humanize subjects, but also, according to Aly & Roth, to transport them to a new reality
namely, death (2004: 1). Kenneth Werbin argues that the materiality of the list (i.e. its
visible borders) did crucial work for the Third Reich, that the list was at the

heart of these schisms that marked modern Nazi governmentalityhealthy ||

diseased; Aryan || Jew; us || themserving the delimitation and policing of
abnormal cases in populations [and] installing caesuric social fractures.
(2008: 44).
The

implication

of

material

forms

such

as

lists

is

not

often

acknowledged in accounts of Nazi governmentality, wherein they are viewed

simply as the detritus of the administrative arm of a vast mytho-ideological
apparatus. Lists are thus often discarded as noise amongst the archival
material out of which conventional, narrative, causal histories of the Third
Reich are written. But as Media Archaeologists such as Kittler (1999; 2010),
Parikka (2011), and Ernst (2011) teach us, noise can be as crucial to
understanding a discourse network as any other factor (if not moreso).
Bracketing the whole host of ethical issues that emerge out of this
implication of lists in the administration of human life, Ill emphasize that in
these administrative examples, lists prescribe and determine networks of
actionthe Nazi census produces a series of lists and documents that
program the actions of its agents, the structure and organization of its
institutions, and the trajectories of its subjects, while the Puritans internal
checklist prescribes his/her future actions, and overall way of being-in-theworld. This points us toward a programmatic dimension exhibited by lists
what we might go so far as to call an algorithmic capacity.
Here it is useful to turn to Cornelia Vismann (2008), who also isolates
this dimension. Her treatment of lists is in relation to a broader meditation on files as the

privileged unit of information transmission, storage, and processing in the Western tradition
very briefly, she argues that files actually make the world in the sense that they are constitutive of
truth, subject, state, and the law out of which the West was forged. Lists are crucial in this
process, she notes, given that they actually prefigure files themselves and govern the inside of
the file world. That is, while files are process-generated algorithmic entities, the process
generators are list-shaped control signs (2008: 7). So, lists prescribe any files movement
through space and timea file note issues a command for the next movement of a files
existence (to where or to whom the file will travel, at what time, by which means, etc). Each
executed command triggers another one, and over time these notes accumulate, one after the
other, to form a list. They therefore both program and preserve a record of a files life.
Vismanns description shows us that lists can take on a machine-like character. They
streamline, standardize, and help accelerate the processing of information in whatever mediatechnological network they are functioning (and because it is malleabile, the list can function in
many such networks). Combining Vismanns work with insights from Software Studies might
allow us to better understand the processing/storage/transmission capacities of the list in relation
to digitization. And so this is where Ill turn now, offering some very preliminary remarks on the
digital realm of code as a means by which to wrap up this presentation.

3. Digitization & Code

The logic of the list is integral in the world of computing in data structures such as queues, stacks
and databases, as Alison Adam (2008) and Lev Manovich (2001) teach us. More specifically, the
programming language LISP (short for List Processor) is the second oldest computing language

still in use and will serve as a useful case study here. Adams argues that because LISP is a
dynamically-typed programming language (rather than statically-typed), lists allow for the
mixing of data types (a data type is any kind of thing) within the same list, because they do not
require a programmer to declare or categorize them according to any guiding principle (whereas
most programming languages require variables to be declared at the outset; and if a variable
doesnt match the value assigned previously, it cannot be processed).
LISP programming doesnt require a human programmer to establish its criteria; rather,
its lists are self-typing and thereby inherently more flexible. Adam notes that this malleability
makes the list a form particularly attractive to AI researchers. Because its not limited by preexisting abilities, it is an elegant data structure that can both absorb, and reason through (rather
than simply process), a significant amount of data. And this flexibility to do so is inherent in the
materiality of the form.
Because it is flexible, the list persists, Adam argues. This resonates with what Eco says
about lists in the aesthetic realm. Namely, that at the heart of the lists survival over space and
time lay a poetics that emerges out of a tension between the logic of everything included, and
that of etcetera. Everything included lists are for Eco closed structures that offer the pleasure of
the finite (such as Homers description of Achilles shield, a self-contained unit, in the Odyssey).
Similarly, data structures in computing such as Arrays (important in programming languages
such as C) are closed structures in which all terms are set out beforehand (by a human agent).
That is, everything is included. On the other hand, there are Ecos lists of etcetera, such as
Homers famous catalogue of ships, again in the Odyssey, in which the topos of ineffability is
made manifest. In programming, we see in the LISP language a poetics of etcetera in the very
flexibility and malleability of a self-generating structure that does not rely on a human agent.

This comparison is meant to show in a very preliminary way that in these realms at a deep,
possibly ontological level, there seems to be this constitutive tension between everything
included and etcetera. Media archaeology opens up our capacity to observe these connections
between the aesthetic, socio-political, and digital.
Admittedly, this digital dimension of the list is the least fleshed out (and I look forward to
comments and suggestions), but in general terms the future trajectory of this project will follow
thinkers like Ernst, Vismann, and Kittler in identifying the extent to which the lists role in
processing information in the pre-analog and analog worlds can offer us glimpses of an emergent
inscription matrix that anticipates and prefigures the appearance of the digital computer. That is
to say, to explore the extent to which certain computational processes that enable digitization are
observable in the forms that make up pre-digital administrative practices and technologies going
back all the way to the origins of writing. But such questions must be left for another day.

References
Adam, Alison. (2008) Lists in Software Studies: a Lexicon, ed. Matthew Fuller. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press. 174-178.
Baudrillard, Jean. (1993) The Order of Simulacra in Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain
Hamilton. London: Sage. 50-87.
Blair, Anne M. (2011) Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern
Age. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.
Eco, Umberto. (2009) The Infinity of Lists. New York: Rizzoli.
Ernst, Wolfgang. (2011) Media Archaeography: Method and Machine versus History and
Narrative of Media in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, eds.
Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
239-255.
Foucault, Michel. (2009) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human
Sciences. New York and London: Routledge.

10

Goody, Jack. (1977) The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Gtz, Aly and Karl Heinz Roth. (2004) The Nazi Census: Identification and Control in the Third
Reich. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Huhtamo, Erkki (2011) Dismantling the Fairy Engine: Media Archaeology as Topos Study in
Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, eds. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi
Parikka. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 27-47.
Innis, Harold. (2008) The Bias of Communication 2nd ed. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
Kittler, Friedrich. (1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and
Michael Wutz. Stanford, Cal: Stanford University Press.
. (2010) Optical Media, trans. Anthony Enns. Cambridge UK: Polity.
Latour, Bruno. (1987) Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
. (1990) Drawing Things Together in Representation in scientific practice, eds. M. Lynch
and S. Woolgar. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press. 19-68.
Manovich, Lev. (2001) The language of new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Parikka, Jussi. (2011) Mapping Noise: Techniques and Tactics of Irregularities, Interception,
and Disturbance in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, eds. Erkki
Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 256-277.
Peters, John Durham. (2011) Becoming Mollusk: a conversation with John Durham Peters
about media, materiality, and matters of history in Communicaiton Matters: Materialist
Approaches to Media, Mobility, and Networks, eds. Jeremy Packer & Stephen B. Crofts. London
& New Work: Routledge.
Terranova, Tiziana. (2004) Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London: Pluto
Press.
Vismann, Cornelia. (2008) Files: Law and Media Technology, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young.
Stanford, Cal: Stanford University Press.
Weber, Max. (2001) The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
trans. Talcott Parsons. New York and London: Routledge.

11

Werbin, Kenneth. (2008) The list serves: the apparatuses of security and governmentality. PhD
Thesis, Concordia University.

12