The Allure and Tyranny of Lists

From 'bullet points to best of' lists are ubiquitous

In the early days of teaching university courses, I devised a meticulous system to track student projects. A grid of names, dates, and key ideas, pure order, absolute clarity. Yet, as the semester unraveled, so did the system. The list, meant to impose structure, became an evolving entity, revealing patterns of engagement and inertia, of silent defiance and quiet diligence. It was here that I realized the paradox of lists: they are an attempt to grasp the boundless, to contain the uncontainable.

Lists have seduced minds from Homer to Borges, from the medieval theologians who catalogued angels to the modern compilers of “greatest of all time”, “best books of…”, “12 Rules for Life”, etc. rankings. They promise order where chaos reigns, yet they are often a tacit admission of the indescribable.

When Homer, in the Iliad, recites the ‘Catalogue of Ships,’ he is not merely listing; he is invoking an army so vast that it surpasses the capacity of metaphor. The catalogue serves both as a historical record and a poetic device, emphasizing the sheer immensity of the Greek forces while reinforcing the idea that no singular account can encompass their totality.

‘Tell me, O Muses,’ he pleads, ‘for you are goddesses and are everywhere, and know all things.’

To Homer, even the omniscient required lists.

The dual nature of lists, simultaneously exhaustive and incomplete, was starkly apparent on one visit to the Louvre, where I encountered the resplendent chaos of the Wunderkammer. Cabinets of curiosities, those Renaissance predecessors to modern museums, sought to collect the entirety of the known world in a single room. Seashells nestled beside mechanical clocks; religious relics shared space with taxidermied beasts. Each object, meticulously placed, reflected an ambition that wavered between encyclopedic precision and futile excess, much like the lists that pervade literature and philosophy. Yet no collection could ever be truly complete. The list, no matter how long, always ends in an ‘etcetera.’

Even as they offer the illusion of control, lists have a disruptive power. The Surrealists leveraged this phenomenon through their ‘exquisite corpse’ games, where fragmented, disjointed lists disrupted linear thought, inviting new, unpredictable meanings to emerge.

A Literary of Lists

André Breton’s poetic inventories and Marcel Duchamp’s enigmatic catalogues of readymades exemplify this playful defiance of conventional structure. Breton, the father of Surrealism, used lists as a means of automatic writing, producing seemingly random sequences of words that undermined rational order and revealed the subconscious. His Manifesto of Surrealism brimmed with such enumerations, turning everyday objects into poetic symbols of an unstructured, dreamlike reality. Breton declared:

“Let us not mince words: the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.”

Insisting that randomness and juxtaposition could birth profound meaning. His lists of objects: roses, telephones, shadows, fragments of conversations ...were less inventories than incantations, evoking the hidden poetry of existence.

Duchamp, in contrast, challenged artistic conventions through his readymades, objects stripped of their traditional functions and reclassified through simple recontextualization. His catalogues of these works, whether featuring bottle racks or urinals, disrupted not just the boundaries of art but the very act of classification, mocking the rigid taxonomies imposed by institutions.

Together, their works reveal that lists, rather than merely organizing knowledge, can actively dismantle and reconfigure it.

In Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais uses absurdly long lists, especially those filled with nonsensical names of giants, not simply as an exercise in excess but as a deeper commentary on language. By overwhelming the reader with an unstructured flood of names, he forces us to question the nature of meaning-making. Are these names mere placeholders, or do they, in their accumulation, generate a new form of significance?

Classification

This technique reflects a broader Renaissance fascination with classification and knowledge. Rabelais was writing in a period when encyclopedic efforts to document and categorize the world were gaining momentum, yet he mocks the very idea that such endeavors could ever be complete. His exaggerated lists defy easy interpretation, highlighting the instability of language, how words can create a reality but also undermine it through sheer absurdity.

This same principle appears in Joyce’s Ulysses, where an inventory of mundane objects in Leopold Bloom’s kitchen transcends its literal function and becomes a reflection on the interconnectedness of memory, identity, and daily life.

In both cases, what begins as a simple list turns into something much more: a meditation on how language shapes our understanding of the world.

Creating The World

What of the lists that define our modernity? Are we living under the tyranny of lists, where enumeration dictates reality rather than merely describing it? The spreadsheeted realities of bureaucracies, the algorithmic taxonomies of Big Data, the ranked inventories of internet culture. These lists do not merely reflect the world; they create it. The quantified self, the commodified preference, the curated identity, all structured through the relentless march of bullet points (I cringe at the thought).

Yet, one might argue that the list, in a structured chronological sense, is where culture begins, an attempt to impose meaning on an ever-expanding world. Even our most mechanized AI's reverberate with the ancient impulse to name, to count, to grasp at the infinite and make a list.

In the end, my lecture project sheet failed me. Yet, in failing to impose strict order, it underscored something far greater, the wonder of lists as reflections of human complexity, ever incomplete yet endlessly generative. The list had not imposed order; it had revealed deeper human elements, of presence and absence, of intention and excuse, of inspiration and action. It had, in its way, told a story of my students intrinsic motivation.

And perhaps that is the true purpose of lists: not merely to catalogue, but to narrate. Lists function as meditations on language, revealing not just the things they contain but the structures of meaning they construct, and, often, deconstruct.

The list, at least my lists, resist completion. Lists expand, retract, and reshape, always hinting at an unreachable totality. And therein lies the allure and tyranny of lists, etc.

I leave you with a list, as a poem, from the Polish Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska “POSSIBILITIES” (1985)

Stay curious

Colin