Cosmopoetica

I "finished" "reading" Umberto Eco’s fantabulous essay/anthology The Infinity of Lists. The scare quotes are necessary because Eco’s 400+ page volume is two books in one: an extended essay on the idea and example of lists in art and literature and an accompanying anthology od excerpts and hundreds of color plates illustrating his points. I read (and in a few areas re-read) and marked up the essay but only read perhaps 1/4 of the anthology. I’ve read some of the work before… and trying to read all of the examples is just too much. I’ll be returning to the book many times!

The Infinity of Lists is a beautiful book. It’s well designed and produced on quality paper. It features scores of full-page color plates in addition to at least twice as many smaller ones. The selections of art and writing encompass both the familiar and the unfamiliar– Eco strikes a nice balance between examples that readers will expect, which are nice to have close to hand, and examples that are sure to be new to even bibliophiles and visual art connoisseurs.

The fundamental premise of the book is to examine various ideas of the "list" as they play themselves out in art and literature. Taking on the topic of lists in visual art– and assuming one wishes to go beyond the obvious kinds of list in literature– presents a daunting task. As Eco notes in the Introduction:

…I had never set myself the task of making a meticulous record of the infinite cases in which the history of literature (from Homer to Joyce to the present day) offers examples of lists (though names such as Perec, Prévert, Whitman, and Borges all come to mind right away). The result of this hunt was prodigious, enough to make your head spin, and I already know that a great number of people will write to me asking why this or that author is not mentioned in this book. The fact is that not only am I not omniscient and do not know a multitude of texts in which lists appear, but even if I had wished to include all the lists I gradually encountered in the course of my exploration, this book would be at least one thousand pages long, and maybe even more.

Then there is the problem of deciding what a figurative lists may be. The few books on the poetics of lists prudently limit themselves to verbal lists because of the difficulty in explaining how a picture can present things and yet suggest an "etcetera," as if to admit that the limits of the frame oblige the picture to say nothing about an immense number of other things.

Among the kinds of list Eco describes are: referential & practical lists, poetic lists, assemblages, Vunderkammern, cabinets of curiosities, curations, repertories, metaphorical alignments, chaotic enumerations, and lists of vertigos.

Eco first explores the contrast between referential lists (the non-infinite kind) which enumerate– or attempt to enumerate– everything in a domain, and infinite lists. A simple example of a referential list is a telephone book, which lists all phone numbers in an area at a particular point in time. The discussion gets more complex (speaking analogously: what of new and unlisted numbers, what of the series of lists exemplified by such directories, etc), but it anchors one end of the discussion.

The second kind of list is the infinite kind, the one created when the creator can’t possible enumerate all members of the set, but instead "proposes a list as a specimen, example, or indication, leaving the reader to imagine the rest." Needless to say, "the rest" must be important enough that the reader wishes to– and can productively– imagine more. This kind of list explores the "topos of ineffability" (a phrase, I must say, I love).

I couldn’t help but think how apt the list is as a form and framing device and motif for writing in and with this now-newish media and platform of blogging. Many of my favorite examples in the medium demonstrate the richness of the list in a variety of forms, sometimes a stream of consciousness by an individual or this or that group; sometimes a curation; sometimes a new-media rich commonplace book. The constant flow of memes, almost all of which are lists of a distributed kind, has become closer to a living thing than it ever could in another medium. The ability to flow, reflow, browse and meander with tags, categories, search and link make for living, breathing lists.

I’m sure I’ll post some excerpts from The Infinity of Lists to my own commonplace book, but it’s really a book one needs to experience– as a well-illustrated essay, as an anthology, a fascinating "art book" or all three.

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I’m an inveterate list-maker and reader of lists. My notebooks are full of lists of various kinds; my otherwise haphazard “productivity” system is based on lists; I love anaphoric poems; found lists are one of my favorite finds inside used-books… so it’s natural that this interview with Umberto Eco charmed me with his discussion of lists of all kinds. Eco makes some interesting observations about lists in literature, considers why we make lists in light of the (practically) infinite bounds of the subjects of many lists, and even ventures into thinking about lists and Google. Good stuff. A few choice bites:

SPIEGEL: But why does Homer list all of those warriors and their ships if he knows that he can never name them all?

Eco: Homer’s work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that. We have always been fascinated by infinite space, by the endless stars and by galaxies upon galaxies. How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn’t have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see. Lovers are in the same position. They experience a deficiency of language, a lack of words to express their feelings. But do lovers ever stop trying to do so? They create lists: Your eyes are so beautiful, and so is your mouth, and your collarbone … One could go into great detail.

SPIEGEL: Why do we waste so much time trying to complete things that can’t be realistically completed?

Eco: We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.

[...]

SPIEGEL: But you also said that lists can establish order. So, do both order and anarchy apply? That would make the Internet, and the lists that the search engine Google creates, prefect for you.

Eco: Yes, in the case of Google, both things do converge. Google makes a list, but the minute I look at my Google-generated list, it has already changed. These lists can be dangerous — not for old people like me, who have acquired their knowledge in another way, but for young people, for whom Google is a tragedy. Schools ought to teach the high art of how to be discriminating.

SPIEGEL: Are you saying that teachers should instruct students on the difference between good and bad? If so, how should they do that?

Eco: Education should return to the way it was in the workshops of the Renaissance…

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Detritus, chaff, leavings, tailings, offal, filings, ruminations, machinations, disputations, contentions, inventions, illuminations, parentheticals, tangentials, orthogonals, meanders, asides, one-offs, take-offs, cast-offs, put-ons, take-downs, run-ups, fix-ups, surmises, surprises, repeats, repetitions, do-overs, gristle, bone, skin, shells, peels, seeds, drop, dollops, pinches, smidgens, dashes, intrigues, insights, imitations, condemnations, refutations, quotations, aphorisms, flailings, wailings, railings, protestations, genuflections, reflections, dejections, corrections, misdirections, intimations, snippets, clips, fragments, shards, hints, clues, MacGuffins, secrets, shadows, incantations, spells, whispers, tricks, diversions, revisions, drabs, dribbles, reversions, concepts, precepts, intercepts, exceptions, exclusions, inclusions, delusions, confusions, stratagems, hypothesis, tenets, schemas, parallels, motifs, motives, rationales, tropes, analogies, allegories, metaphors, similes, similarities, hilarities, ambiguities, clarifications, corrections, ruins, ruin.

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I am stretched too thin. I can’t think. It’s time to wean and weed. I follow many more blogs, sites, and publications than are listed in my always outdated sidebar and it’s become too much. I don’t have time for it and I don’t think I’m getting much intellectual return from most of them.

So over the next weeks I will be evaluating my engagements. I will look at every blog and mailing list I participate in and every site I follow and ask myself the fundamental question: is this doing anything good for me? Is it adding to what I am rather than subtracting? I’m going to gather what little intellectual muscles I have in preparation for trying to make some kind of leap.

I don’t mind being challenged. I like strong differences of opinion. But it’s still opinion. I don’t believe in an absolute, non-relative, non-subjective reckoning of art and literature. If a site authors basic approach includes things like:

• Emphasizing non-productive, artificial, and almost wholly subjective divides like the “School of Quietude” and the “Post-Avant” or “real” poets vs “posers”
• Confusing attacks on others with forceful statements of their own positions
• Mockery and condemnation of whatever group(s) the blogger dislikes
• Continuous moaning, bitching, complaining, whining
• Constant discussions about art without at least examples of the art itself… the endless abstraction
• Staking a claim that their aesthetic taste represents the Truth about what is good and worthy or, conversely, that they can also recognize and share the Truth about what is bad and unworthy of our attention

then I don’t have time for it. Similarly, if a mailing list is predominantly of this ilk then it has to go. Book discussion mailing lists are the worst in this respect. I’d love to be able to find a good group to discuss books with, but most of the lists I have found are dominated by a few blowhards… which wouldn’t be bad if they didn’t add active attacks on any who dare disagree with them to their already annoying output.

Even the (much more fun) groups that talk around art simply because they are such immense time sinks will be ruthlessly culled because they are such time sinks.

Many “post-avant” sites and blogs don’t define themselves through negativity and I’ve appreciated them as I tried for the last few years to make sense of their kind of writing. Some of those will be winnowed because I still don’t understand them. I like poems and fictions that I can read and make some kind of sense of… and that other readers can make a stab at explaining. I’m sorry that I don’t have the intellectual firepower to appreciate word art that doesn’t convey meaning or follow any rules of syntax that connect it with my frame of understanding. My taste and understanding have been enlarged thanks to many great bloggers and zines, but I have to have my own arbitrary borders as well, without which I will not retain my sanity.

And that is really what all of this comes down to in the end, the constant arbitrariness of aesthetic judgment. Tell me what you like; tell me why; better yet, show me why… don’t run down the things you don’t like, don’t try to convince me of the Rightness of your opinion, don’t try to convince me of the wrongness of my own. I can deal with a fair amount of defending of one’s own arbitrary aesthetics, but I have no stomach any longer for those who mistake that for some kind of doorway to universal truth.

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