New Books In Communications

The list is the origin of culture. At least, that’s according to Umberto Eco, whose words open Liam Cole Young‘s new book, List Cultures: Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to Buzzfeed (Amsterdam University Press, 2017). Young follows shifting functions of the list through history, revealing a form that “mediates boundaries between administration and art, knowledge and poetics, sense and nonsense” (10). Where systems of order surround and enframe human society, the list is there. Lists shape and shift the social world as new uses for the list are discovered, adapted, modified, and abandoned. As a searching exploration of the way that our intellectual tools “simultaneously conceal and reveal, enforce and subvert social systems,” List Cultures proves to be a rewardingly vigorous and sweeping intellectual history. List Cultures restores formal analysis to a critical discourse divided between analyses of institutions, contexts, and particular historical uses of texts. Beginning with a rereading of the earli