A Question Without Notice

A draft introduction to the essay that passed my desk:

In the journal ‘Alien Phenomenology,’ Ian Bogost discusses how lists of objects that lack ‘explication’ can draw ‘greater attentiveness’ towards them. Bogost explains how people naturally want to ‘join the dots’ and create relationships between things. When objects are stated on a list, they don’t have the narrative structure of a sentence. This makes it harder to form relations between the objects. It also makes it harder for the reader to make sense of what they are seeing. Especially when the list lacks explanation and description. This in turn can make the audience more attentive as it requires a deeper level of understanding. Bogost also talks about how lists that are disjointed and illogical can excite viewers as they have to put more effort into understanding them. [snip]

Not quite, or perhaps. A list does not make it harder to make relations between things but encourages the opposite. How are these things related, how might they join? They encourage more ways to join and relate things to each other because they do not provide an explanation, where explanation is a way of explaining the relations between these things. Oh, and it’s a book, not a journal.