In the following two chapters, I want to show that lists operate not only in fields of knowledge related to cultural production, commodity circulation, and self-identification as outlined in Chapter two, but also in establishing administrative apparatuses that police and observe subjects. We move from observing the role of lists in making knowledge to what Hacking calls ‘making up people’, from lists of words and things to lists of numbers and human beings, from cultural economies to protocols of governmentality. Listing is again conceived as a cultural technique of order and enumeration that processes the distinctions and caesurae that establish systems of categorization and classification. However, my problematic expands to encompass broader political questions. This is done with an eye towards understanding the role enumerative listing plays in establishing new ways of seeing the world, and thus new arrangements of power/knowledge. Serious ethical and philosophical stakes emerge that demand investigation, particularly regarding the role of lists in controlling populations and subjecting human beings to power. Animating questions of these chapters are thus: how does the list operate when human beings are its entries? How does one see the world through lists of people? More broadly, what is the relationship between listing and modernity?

In pursuing these questions, I develop a genealogy of the list as a cultural technique of ‘logistical modernity’. Circa 1500, a new way of approaching and understanding the world emerged. This orientation found extreme expression in the mid-twentieth century with the Nazi attempt at a totally administered society. We should conceive of this orientation not simply as modern, but as logistical. Under its rubric fall three privileged processes associated with modernity: compression, calculation, and circulation. Certain values, institutions, protocols, and systems emerge in the modern period to facilitate these processes: rationality, efficiency, speed, and bureaucracy, to name a few. Compression, calculation, and circulation are a nest of mutually-reinforcing processes that find expression in modern institutions (e.g. bureaucracy) and values (e.g. rationality).