On the Political Importance of Making Lists

The list often acts as a manifesto and call to arms: divided into dialectical categories of things loved and things hated, such lists are exemplified by the early McLaren/Westwood t-shirt design entitled: 'You're gonna wake up one morning and know what side of the bed you've been lying on!'

For Malcolm, punk was a form of blackmail and a type of terrorism. It forced a generation into making a fateful choice: you were either for the Sex Pistols or against them - and if you were for them, then your commitment had to be absolute: there could be no passers-by and no part-timers in this revolution. 

Much the same type of list was drawn up by Roland Barthes. However, unlike McLaren, Barthes didn't want to bully anyone with his list or display his penchant for fanaticism and provocation. In fact, with his list of things liked and things not liked, he was attempting to provide grounds for a model of negative liberalism:

"I like, I don't like: this is of no importance to anyone; this, apparently, has no meaning. And yet all this means: my body is not the same as yours. Hence, in this anarchic foam of tastes and distastes ... gradually appears the figure of a bodily enigma, requiring complicity or irritation. Here begins the intimidation of the body, which obliges others to endure me liberally, to remain silent and polite confronted by pleasures or rejections which they do not share.
      (A fly bothers me, I kill it: you will kill what bothers you. If I had not killed the fly, it would have been out of pure liberalism: I am liberal in order not to be a killer.)"

                    - Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard.