The everyday work of lists

This article explores the work of lists in mediating the materiality and complexity of everyday life. In contemporary cultural contexts the endless proliferation of listing forms and practices takes on a “self-reflexivity” that signals their functional and productive role in negotiating the everyday. Grocery lists, to do lists, and other fragmentary notes work as personal tools for ordering and managing daily needs and activities. But what do these fragments tell us about the work of lists? Do they “merely” describe or provide analytical insight into the everyday? To address these questions we explore the issues and anxieties raised by everyday consumption drawing on theories of everyday life. These concerns, which are examined in detail in the second part of the paper, lie at the heart of French writer Georges Perec’s interest in the “infra-ordinary”—that which resides within the everyday. In the parts of his writing that he designated in retrospect as “sociological,” Perec takes the form and function of lists as a starting point for a range of literary experiments that work as tools of discovery and invention capable in their seeming banality of both mapping and disrupting everyday life. Les Choses (Things) and Je Me Souviens (I Remember), for example, take the form of endless and repetitious lists of things, places, people, and memories, collections of fragments that aim to achieve a new kind of sociology of everyday life. While this project may be contentious in terms of its “representativeness,” as a discursive method or mode of ethnographic practice (Becker) it points to the generative power of lists as both of the everyday and as an analytical tool of discovery for understanding the everyday. Perec’s sociology of the everyday is not, we argue, articulated as a form of a cohesive or generalizable characterisation of social institutions, but rather emerges as an “invent-ory” of the rich texture and disjunctures that populated his everyday spaces, personal encounters, and memories.