Lists in the World
Excerpt from "On Lists," first published in Issue 2 of SUBMIT by BarBar Publishing (2024).
The rest of this essay, “On Lists,” may be found in Issue 2 of SUBMIT, in print or as a PDF.
Finding a handwritten list on a desk or a counter top can be a strange thing, like finding someone lying down, asleep, but with their eyes wide open. When Siegfried comes upon Brünnhilde in her ring of protective flame that both exposes her and seals her away, he must feel the wonder, only by a far greater magnitude, that we feel when, spotting an off-white square of paper with upward-facing listed elements on a table, we are presented with an opportunity to explore a novel succession of items, declamations, things-to-do, half-had ideas, assorted words, places and dates written by someone else at some unknown time in, usually, the not-so-distant and yet persisting past.
These lists represent something at once active and static, and in this way the horizontally-lying list is like the loiterer, the degenerate form of the flȃneur of the 19th century. The list loses this charmingly decadent quality when it is placed vertically. A note on a refrigerator, for instance, still has a job to do. It stands up for something. It is posted, not unlike a guard. A list tacked to the wall above a desk has a certain dignity. It takes up the same plane that the window occupies, which lets in the landscape of houses and streets and people, as well as the changing light of the day and varied colors of street light at night.
Thus the vertical list has something to do with the world outside, as well as with the life of the house inside. It knits them together, associates them and, like the posted note on the fridge and the list of groceries pinned to the cabinet door, has an occupation. Walter Benjamin writes of such vertical language in another context:
Printing, having found in the book a refuge in which to lead an autonomous existence, is pitilessly dragged out onto the street by advertisements and subjected to the brutal heteronomies of economic chaos. This is the hard schooling of its new form. If centuries ago it began gradually to lie down, passing from the upright inscription to the manuscript resting on sloping desks before finally taking to bed in the printed book, it now begins just as slowly to rise again from the ground. The newspaper is read more in the vertical than in the horizontal plane, while film and advertisement force the printed word entirely into the dictatorial perpendicular.1
These vertical lists also occupy the dictatorial perpendicular. The literary list, on the other hand, “taking to bed in the printed book,” is on the side of the loiterer, the side of leisure, jobless and free. It would prefer to lead an autonomous existence like the book, even if it never attains to anything greater than a collection of the names of people to be invited over for a party later in the week: there I see a kitchen with its windows open, there is warm summer afternoon air and the quiet rushing sound of trees outside, and all is empty, there is nobody around, and there is a list of names stuck flat to the counter top waiting to be read by the next person who walks into the kitchen through the house’s back door, and all is a hovering stillness, insensible to the “brutal heteronomies of economic chaos,” advertisements, and orders.
Walter Benjamin, “Attested Auditor of Books,” Reflections. Schocken Books, New York. 77–78.