Lists

Pickstock uses the “list” as a crucial example of the dominance of asyndeton of modern discourse. Lists provide “a powerful organization of random phenomena,” but at the same time the order slips into chaos because there is nothing linking the “unrelated elements” of the list. They are merely juxtaposed spatially, and the apparent unity of the items of a list is “shattered by the inherent violence of linearity,” so that the reader of the list must provide coherence by his own private effort. As a result, “the citizen of the spatial city experiences the need to control, but only as a palliative expedient, within the confines of private hermeneutic activity.” The citzen relates to reality as something to “control by force.”

The poor list. Source of so much grief. But I come to praise the list not to bury him. Pickstock’s charge seems wholly unjustified – unless Pickstock is suggesting that Genesis 10, Numbers 7, 1 Chronicles 1-9, Matthew 1, Romans 16 are anticipations of the modern asyndeton and spatialization. For that matter, much Hebrew narrative is inherently asyndetic, with clauses linked by waws and conjunctions of subordination and superordination and temporal relation supplied by translators.