Friday, May 27, 2005
(12:04 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
An Index: What is desired therefrom
I am working on my index of this book:
My work has prompted reflection on what we want from indices. When I began work last night on the index, Anthony said that it was good for me to make an index, because he trusted me to make the right decisions about what should go in there. He and I both agreed that indices are usually deeply disappointing, and I think I know why. What we want is not a list of all the places where Jennings discusses "grace," but where he refers to Afghanistan, or something like that. In the same way, in an index of a Žižek book, we really don't care about everywhere that he talks about the phallus, but instead where he makes an offhand reference to elevator buttons. The key is that our way of remembering the passages we are looking for is to associate them with the strange and seemingly irrelevant details.
The index feature in the back of The Atlantic Monthly approximates the effect I'm after, in that it seems to be something of a satire of an index -- but I'm contending here that a thoroughgoing satirical index that does the exact opposite of what we normally expect from an index would in fact be the best possible index if the goal of an index is to help one to find passages.
(Another possible post: how it is that the formatting of The Atlantic Monthly seems to have had a much bigger impact on my life than the content; whether this is the case for others. Everyone remembers the cool format of the David Foster Wallace article much better than they remember anything that's actually been written in the magazine in the last four years.)
