This chapter examines the function of lists as epistemological operators2 in popular culture and mass media. Its animating question is: how does the list structure the production, circulation, and reception of cultural knowledge and information? The goal is to demonstrate that lists are constitutive of fields of knowledge, and, as such, delimit communication and social action in and around these fields. I have chosen popular music charts as a case study because of their privileged status in that field. But first, a few notes on the historical role of lists in the formation of knowledge.

What is the relationship between lists and knowledge?

Any list forges connections between its contents—even if just the basic fact of being placed together—that did not exist prior to the act of listing. This can be for the purposes of suggesting the infinite in a poetics of ‘etcetera’. It can also be for more pragmatic purposes, as in the documentation of science, knowledge, and ‘everyday life’. In both cases, the list is aimed at reducing entropy, allowing us to help combat or even ‘become superior to that which is greater than us.’ ‘Utilitarian’ lists are more about doing than showing, but it would be a mistake to write them off as essentially less complex than lists used for aesthetic purposes.

Focusing on utilitarian lists shows the important role that interstitial forms of writing play in historical shifts in ways of knowing and acting in human societies. Such forms of writing are typically overlooked. They enter into relations with other nodes in media-technological networks (whether human or non-human) that have implications for knowledge production and dissemination. Latour and Serres suggest that the goal of analysis should be to trace these relations. An example is Goody's account of the prescription, a documentary form that emerges from the writing down of medical ‘recipes’ in the third millennium BCE. Prescriptions began as a solution to a simple storage problem—a wish to preserve and share information over space and time. Once put down on paper, however, a process of trial-and-error is enacted on the information.