Going into this class, my main ideas of lists were to do lists, shopping or packing lists, to read/watch lists, guest lists etc. As said by Twenlow “most of us attempt to give our working days some semblance of purpose of control by listing them on paper” (p. 41, 2003), and these were the type of organisational lists I thought of, what you’d refer to as X list, to help you keep track of different things.
I never even considered that things like invoices or menus could be considered lists, but Echo (2008) showed me that those examples and more can be considered a practical (or pragmatic) list. He created some basic rules, those being they have a referential function, are finite, and cannot be altered. This helped me understand how for example a menu can be considered a practical list, because it refers to objects (food) and has the purpose of showing you your choices, there is a clear end to the menu, and (generally) you can’t alter it or add to it.
One quote from Echo that further cemented the concept was;
“they confer unity on a set of objects that, no matter how dissimilar among themselves, comply with a contextual pressure, in other words, they are related for their being or for their being expected to be found all in the same place, or constitute the goal of a certain project.” (pp 113 – 116, 2008).
This also made it easier for me to understand the concept of the poetic list as my narrow viewpoint of lists was expanding.
With that new viewpoint on lists, I was able to see how Twemlow’s (2003) formal elements of a list applied to Echo’s (2008) examples, and use both their tools to help me create a concept for my experiment. At first, it took a little to remove the idea of a written list, so I struggled with how to show my scattered and often abandoned to do lists in this experiment. Class discussion of ideas like recipes or shopping lists, and a key quote as cited by Twemlow (2003), “a camera is a list maker, the film nothing but a series of shots in the order of their snapping” (Gass, p 43, 1996), made it much easier to formulate my idea. The quote helped me move on from the idea of a tangible list in the shots, and the class discussion combined with the readings brought me to the idea of the list of my everyday makeup products (back when we could leave the house). Whilst I don’t have a physical list, I use these products in these order when getting ready, and would mentally go through this list when packing a simple makeup bag. It has a referential function, it is finite, and is (generally) not altered.
Twenlow, A, 2003, ‘Vertical Writing’, Eye: the International Review of Graphic Design; London 12, 38–47.
Eco, U, 2009. There are Lists and Lists,’ in: The Infinity of Lists.
