A list is not just a convenient way to hold information
The corpus repeatedly turns inventories, rosters, catalogues, checklists, cast lists, specifications and overgrown enumerations into prose forms. This deserves separation from the wiki’s existing work on numbered series: a list can have no meaningful mathematics at all and still reorganize attention.
What accumulation does
- flattens hierarchy — a sacred reference and a cheap object can occupy adjacent bullets;
- creates escalation — each added item raises pressure until quantity itself becomes the joke;
- simulates total knowledge — the document looks comprehensive while the choice of entries reveals its blind spots;
- buries the signal — the important item can hide among trivial ones;
- builds worlds cheaply — names, brands, streets and procedures imply systems larger than the scene;
- invites recipient editing — a list can be reordered, extended, amputated or misread.
Dense nodes
.EXE: 150 People I Don't Need, Described makes a people-list into autobiography by subtraction. Sketches of San Lucero uses enumeration as city-building. YOU ARE NOT ON THE LIST: makes list membership itself an institutional threat. Starvation Artist in a Hostage Telethon turns accumulation into a pressure system around audience, form and excess.
Corpus footprint
Explicit list/inventory/enumeration vocabulary appears in 94 of 212 archived works; the actual formal practice is broader because many long lists never call themselves lists.