Trash and Aesthetics in the Hoard

Abstract

This article examines two Reality television series,

Hoarders and Hoarding: Buried Alive, in terms of a variation

in the understanding of the object in relation to value

based upon an aesthetic tied to consumer capitalism.

Object collection is viewed as a spectacle of abjection

in each episode, as items that were once worthy of

purchase come to produce a garbage heap within the

home. The concept of “trash” is an evaluative category

applied to objects over time, but it also becomes part

of the therapeutic process, as hoarders are required to

dispose of their things. Object-oriented ontology, or

“thing theory,” provides an alternate semiology for the

object, ultimately illustrating how an evaluative

aesthetics of the object in these series is linked to

consumer capitalism and normative patterns of

consumption.

What is it that makes an object in one context

valuable and in another context trash? How do we

distinguish between the museum and the refuse pile?

What makes our desire for some things transform over

time into a desire to discard them, while we cannot

bear to let go of others? This article explores the

variation in our understanding of objects in relation

to value as represented in the Reality television

programs Hoarders and Hoarding: Buried Alive. Most viewers

comprehend the hoard in each episode in the context of

trash. However, this article will put pressure on the

apparent obviousness of this interpretation by

interrogating the “object aesthetics” in the series.

The requirement for hoarders to learn an evaluative

hierarchy in relation to their objects suggests that

the show, though ostensibly therapeutic in intent,

adopts principles that have long been applied to

objects in consumer culture. By resisting

contextualizing the object within normative patterns of

consumption, I will argue, hoarders release an

alternate potentiality within the object, one that

resembles the theoretical work in object-oriented

ontology and “thing” theory. This article reintroduces

but extends and develops an argument I first put

forward in “The Art of Consumption: Capitalist Excess

and Individual Psychosis in Hoarders.”

The initial episode of Hoarders aired on August 17,

2009 as part of A&E’s “lifestyle” programming. Part

docu-drama, part intervention show, and part home make-

over show, each episode focuses on two individuals who

are represented as having a psychopathology which

manifests in terms of their relationship to objects.

The show features psychologists specializing in forms

of obsessive compulsive disorder, whose therapeutic

model is to compel hoarders to recognize their disorder

through a process of evaluating and assessing their

objects, so as to come to terms with discarding the

majority of them. The psychologists situate the

hoarders’ inability to let go of objects in the context

of a prior personal tragedy, which has compelled the

hoarder to cling to material things in compensation for

a prior loss. Objects are understood as inadequate

substitutes for this loss, and they are also often

viewed as intervening in the possibility of future

loss. In many cases, the hoarder is on the brink of

losing his or her home or facing an irreparable breach

with family members. The hoarders’ “corrupt form of

object relations” (Herring 184) is thus both the

symptom of the psychopathology and the site where the

process of psychotherapy takes place. In the episodes

that conclude with a successful psychotherapeutic

process, the final scenes show viewers an object-free

home to illustrate that both home and subjectivity have

been transformed. Although the production of Hoarders

concluded in 2013, the series sparked a number of

similar shows, including Hoarding: Buried Alive, which aired

on TLC beginning March 14, 2010, and Consumed, which

premiered on HGTV in the fall of 2010.

The trash heap is a staple spectacle of each

episode of Hoarders and Hoarding: Buried Alive. From the title

sequence to all but the last few scenes, the hoarder’s

collection of objects is almost always on view. The

camera often alternates between extreme wide shots

(Figure One) to emphasize the overwhelming immensity of

the hoard, and extreme close-up shots (Figure Two), to

capture the sordid secrets hiding within it.

Figure One: Screen Capture of Nancy’s living room from

“Fuzzie and Fredd / Nancy” Hoarders Season 6, Episode

13.

Figure Two: Screen Capture of Nancy’s casserole dish

with dog feces from “Fuzzie and Fredd / Nancy” Hoarders

Season 6, Episode 13.

By alternating between the excessiveness of the pile of

objects reaching beyond the windows and feces in a

dirty casserole dish, as happens in Season 6’s Nancy’s

story (“Fuzzie and Fredd / Nancy), the collection

becomes fetishized as material waste, a garbage dump

which has found its way inside the confines of the

suburban home. Even when the camera films interpersonal

conversations between the hoarder and the psychologist

or a family member, or a sequence to illustrate the

hoarder’s typical daily life, the hoard is often the

ground against which the human figure or figures are

read. In these instances, the shots undermine the

hoarder’s discourse – often a discourse of protest

against jettisoning an object or being defined as a

hoarder – by linking them to the hoard itself as the

material evidence of the hoarder’s psychopathology and

therefore his or her méconnaissance.

By framing the hoarder’s perspective against the

fetish of the hoard, the category of “waste” is tied to

the hoarder’s subjectivity, so as to reinforce the

psychologist’s interpretation of his or her behavior as

psychopathology. The waste of the hoard becomes part of

a narrative of moral choices made in the past by the

hoarder, where his or her decision to retain objects is

configured as “wasting” economic resources and /or

threatening family relations and personal mental

health. The hoarder is also often represented as if on

the brink of becoming another object in the hoard. As

we watch Nancy from Season 6 navigate the hoard with

difficulty to microwave her dinner and return to the

living room to sit in a cramped space in the pile, the

camera close-up shots associate her food with dirt and

trash and the wide shots associate her body with the

heap of waste she has accumulated. The implicit message

is that Nancy ingests waste, surrounds herself with

waste, and is on the verge of becoming a part of the

waste itself. Seemingly incapable of acting, lacking in

affect, living in increasingly restricted cubbyholes

surrounded by things, Nancy’s very subjectivity appears

at risk. The trash aesthetic in Hoarders, then, is not

simply about describing the collection of objects:

instead, it is motivated in the service of the

characterization of the hoarder.

Figure Three: Screen Capture of Nancy eating a meal in

the midst of the hoard from “Fuzzie and Fredd / Nancy”

Hoarders Season 6, Episode 13.

“Waste” is the adjectival criteria applied to the

collection of objects and the hoarder’s past economic

and “lifestyle” choices, but it also describes a

revised relationship to objects that the hoarder must

learn, as one developmental stage in the therapeutic

process the hoarder undergoes. In order to throw

objects out, the hoarder must come to adopt an

evaluative hierarchy about those objects’ value –

worthy of retaining / needing to be trashed – which

family members, the psychologist, and most viewers

share. Sometimes, experts are brought in to appraise

objects that the hoarder claims have some value. Almost

invariably, the hoarder’s object semiology is

undermined: antiques are revealed as reproductions in

Season Four’s “Kevin/Mary;” designer handbags are shown

to be fake in Season Three’s “Theresa/Karen;” Sir

Patrick’s collector’s items have no resale value in

Season Four’s “Gordon& Gaye/Sir Patrick.”

At other times, expert advice is not required,

since the distinction between objects of value and

objects of no value appears incontrovertibly clear.

Becky from Hoarders Season Four has lost her house and

has all of her objects in storage units that she has

not paid for in months. She is about to lose all of her

possessions, and has been given a last chance to

retrieve some of the items before the units are

auctioned off. In spite of the threat of losing

everything, Becky sorts through garbage bags containing

refuse instead of paying attention to much more

valuable family antiques. Lisa, a food hoarder from

Season 4, has retained decaying and desiccated food

items in half-used and open cans, partially empty

bottles, and layers of old Styrofoam food trays. As

Matt Paxton, self-styled “extreme cleaning specialist,”

empties the kitchen, he focuses in on single objects

that magnify the abject quality of the entirety of the

hoard. While gagging and coughing, Paxton brings to the

camera’s view decaying chicken bones in a plastic

container, rat feces on a piece of Styrofoam, a half

full can of pineapple with contents that are blackened

and dried up, and even a flattened dead rat, who has

eaten unsafe food in the kitchen and then expired. The

message is clear. Even rats cannot survive in the

garbage pile in Lisa’s home.

Figure Four: Screen Capture of Matt Paxton holding a

flattened dead rat in Lisa’s kitchen from “Lisa /

Bertha” Hoarders Season 4, Episode 10.

Although many hoarders attempt to contextualize

object collection outside of an economic narrative –

they are saving, curating, or archiving objects – an

overwhelming aesthetics of abjection confirms their

psychopathology within a narrative of normative

consumption. Whether totalized as a trash heap, or

individualized as items of waste, as in Lisa’s case,

most objects are represented as long “past their due

date.” Hoarders must alter their understanding of and

attitude toward objects within categories of valuation

that support consumer culture by discarding almost all

of them, based upon the translation of objects into

their economic value. In other words, the

psychotherapists recuperate a hoarder’s disorder by

teaching him or her the difference between objects of

value and waste. If the hoarder’s problem is the need

to part with an excessive number of objects, then one

could ask what difference it makes which objects are

discarded and which are retained, since so many of them

will need to go? If we agree that there is a subjective

aspect to the desire for objects, then why must the

hoarder learn to discard and retain objects based upon

their resale value? What is at stake in the insertion

of objects back into economic circulation via their

translation into their monetary value? Is something

beyond psychotherapy informing the therapeutic process?

Theories of object-oriented ontology, where attention

is paid to the object isolated from human subjectivity,

can help us to answer these questions by providing a

different way of perceiving the objects in the hoard.

The field of object-oriented ontology or

metaphysics, also called “speculative realism,” has

emerged as a critique of the human-centeredness of

continental philosophy. As Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek,

and Graham Harman argue in “Towards a Speculative

Philosophy,” their introduction to The Speculative Turn, the

real world outside of human subjectivity “appears in

philosophy only as the correlate of human thought,” a

Kantian hold-over where objects “conform to the human

mind” (3,4). Speculative realists pursue the problem of

realism as a “mind-independent reality,” through a

speculative model that produces “something far weirder

than realists had ever guessed” (Harman “Well-Wrought”

184). Object-oriented ontologists, who participate in

the larger field of speculative realism, attempt to

understand objects’ differences positively and

affirmatively, rather than perceiving objects

epistemologically, or “from the standpoint of a

consciousness . . . [where] the differences composing

objects are taken by reference to what objects are not”

(Bryant 266). After all, as Bryant argues in “The Ontic

Principle,” “The temperature of boiling water is not

the negation of other degrees” (266).

In “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented

Literary Criticism” in the spring 2012 issue of New

Literary History, Graham Harman rethinks phenomenology’s

attempt to understand the “essence” of objects,

building on Heidegger’s radical assertion that the

object is often not present in the human mind, but

taken for granted as the mind focuses on something

beyond it. He invokes Heidegger’s infamous example of

the broken hammer to illustrate how both theory and

praxis conceive of an object’s essence as oriented

toward its human use-value. The broken hammer – an

event or performance of the object apart from human

intention – not only upsets this orientation and the

concept of an object as static and unchanging on which

it relies, but it alludes to “the inscrutable reality

of hammer-being lying behind the accessible

theoretical, practical, or perceptual qualities of the

hammer” (Harman 187), a reality the human mind cannot

access. To Harman, the broken hammer offers an

alternative representational economy in which the

object can be placed – one where the object is “mortal,

ever-changing, built from swarms of subcomponents, and

accessible only through oblique allusion” (188).

By maintaining a non-relational approach to objects

as “unified entities with specific qualities that are

autonomous from us and from each other” (Harman “On the

Undermining of Objects” 22), object-oriented ontology

proves useful when rethinking the apparent obviousness

of the hoarder’s pile of objects as trash. Like

Harman’s broken hammer, the hoard takes on qualities

beyond human intention and understanding. Not only has

each object’s value for human use been abandoned or

deferred, the collection itself exhibits what Jane

Bennett identifies as a “distributive agency” of its

own (“Preface” ix). As an assemblage of objects, the

hoard produces effects that are “distinct from the sum

of the vital force of each materiality considered

alone” (Vibrant Matter 24). In fact, hoarders often

identify the hoard itself as a non-human “actant” with

a “material agency” or life of its own: “They repeatedly

say that ‘things just took over,’ got out of hand, and

‘overwhelmed’ them; they experience the hoard as having

its own momentum or drive to persist and grow” (Bennett

“Powers of the Hoard” 244, 252).

Bennett’s reading of the hoard evinces its

transformation from an “object” collection, which

serves human purpose, to a “thing” in its own right, a

distinction Bill Brown inaugurated in “Thing Theory” in

2001. While Bennett’s argument attests to a form of

agency manifested by the totality of objects within the

collection of the hoard, the individual object can also

exhibit “thing-power” (Vibrant Matter 24) when seen from

the point of view of the hoarder, rather than the

psychologist. Although the camera focuses on individual

objects that confirm a reading of the hoard as trash,

there are moments in some shows where a hoarder hangs

on to an object, resisting abandoning it. If we

attending seriously to the perspective of the hoarder

in these moments, and oppose the imperative of the

camera through whose perspective we are trained to view

the hoard, then we may be able to glimpse the

possibility of understanding the object in a non-

relational way. In other words, if we imagine the

hoarder as a thing theorist, and not a person with a

disorder, then we may be able to shift our perspective

on objects and things.

There is a moment in Lisa’s story, where she and

the psychologist are sitting on the porch, and the

psychologist holds up an empty ginger ale can, asking

Lisa what the can means to her. Although his intention

is to draw a comparative evaluation between the empty

can and the flattened dead rat or decaying chicken

bones – Lisa is supposed to recognize and acknowledge

that the can no longer retains value – as the camera

focuses first on the can and then on Lisa’s tranquil

face, the possibility emerges that the empty can holds

something within it that is beyond human comprehension

and consciousness. As the sunlight filters through the

trees onto the porch and produces a glint against the

green of the can, Lisa responds, “I see potential in

everything.”

Figure Five: Screen Capture of psychotherapist, Mark

Pfeffer, holding an empty ginger ale can on Lisa’s

porch from “Lisa / Bertha” Hoarders Season 4, Episode

10.

Figure Six: Screen Capture of Lisa looking at the empty

ginger ale can on her porch from “Lisa / Bertha”

Hoarders Season 4, Episode 10.

This open-ended potentiality within the realm of the

“thing” is soon shut down by the prevailing narrative

of the show. First Lisa goes on to articulate the can

as having potential for art-making: “There are lots of

things you can do with tinsnips to create flowers.” And

then the psychologist returns the concept of

potentiality to the human subject: “So this can,

theoretically then, would have more potential than you

do.”

The momentary isolation of the empty ginger ale

can, though, interrupts an oscillating aesthetics of

privilege and abjection adopted by the camera. When

filming Lisa’s hoard, the camera tends to maintain a

perspective well above the collection, capitalizing on

the excess of the mass, or to focus in on items that

abject the hoard as a form of trash – the dead and

flattened rat, the decaying chicken bones, the

desiccated pineapple, insects, feces. When the hoard is

viewed from an angle well above the ground – the

perspective of God, one might argue – the hoard

resembles the garbage dump as the object’s

individuality is lost in the multitude. However, as De

Certeau reminds us in The Practice of Everyday Life, the

omniscient perspective, borrowed from Medieval and

Renaissance painters, is a fiction, creating “imaginary

totalizations” by laying claim to a viewpoint that the

eye will never attain (158). Lisa’s focus on the can

brings the viewpoint “’down below’” (158), forcing the

camera to rest on an object, so that it cannot be so

easily dismissed.

The close-up shot of the can equalizes Lisa’s

perspective with the hierarchical viewpoint of the

camera, and it attends to an object isolated from the

hoard that cannot be as easily abjected as feces or a

dead rat. It also slows down the camera’s encompassing

sweep, which tends to homogenize all of the objects

together into a spectacle of abjection. As Bennett

notes, the object has a durability that human flesh

does not, due to the “relative slowness of its rate of

change” (“Powers” 252). Lisa’s attentiveness to the

potentiality within the empty can forces the camera to

adopt a temporality closer to that of the can. In that

brief moment, if we engage seriously with Lisa’s

perspective, the empty can hovers at the point of

functioning like Heidegger’s broken hammer, alluding to

“the inscrutable reality of [object]-being lying behind

[its] accessible theoretical, practical, or perceptual

qualities” (Harman 187). Although a conventional

interpretation would view the can as trash since its

contents have already been consumed, and so its

function to deliver those contents to the consumer is

over, this momentary glimpse of something beyond in the

can helps us to think of the object outside the terms

of its human use-value. As I have argued elsewhere, in

these instances “we witness the move from ‘object’ to

‘thing,’ as the hoarder makes something out of nothing,

producing what does not even count as an object – the

non-object one might say – as having legitimate ‘thing-

power’” (Eddy 12).

It is only by attending seriously to the

perspective of the hoarder, against the imperative of

the psychologist through whose perspective the camera

trains us to view the hoard, that we may be able to

glimpse the possibility of understanding the object as

having the potential of a thing. If we imagine the

hoarder as a thing theorist, rather than a person with

a disorder, then we may be able to shift our

perspective on objects and things. Lisa’s

interpretation of potentiality in the “valueless”

ginger ale can offers a perspective that alludes to

something within the object beyond human consciousness.

By giving credence to this potentiality, viewers can

gain a glimpse into the inaccessible world of things on

the one hand, but there is also a possibility that the

evaluative aesthetics imposed on the collection might

begin to unravel. Although the psychologists in each

episode want to push the object into a relational

context, as a symptom of the psychopathology of the

human subject, the object could then speak back to an

aesthetics of waste that would define it as disposable.

We would come to see the category of waste as no longer

articulating a descriptive criteria of the object, but

as propelling both the object and the human subject

into the stream of production, consumption and waste

that motivates consumer capitalism. Although hoarders

lay claim to any number of rational alternatives to

contextualize their objects, even morally viable

philosophies in which object collection and retention

has a place – recycling, reusing, archiving, curating –

the requirement for them to discard objects symbolizes

their reintegration into proper object consumption. If

the object is employed in the service of establishing

the hoarder’s psychopathology, then perhaps one could

argue that the “thing” exposes the fact that the

trashing of the object is employed in the service of

tying the therapeutic process to consumer capitalism.

The political and theoretical implications of

rethinking the apparent “obviousness” of the hoard as

trash are the following. First, the visibility of the

“distributive agency” of the hoard exposes the fact

that consumption relies upon our coming to understand

what we have once desired as disposable and unwanted.

Second, the representational aesthetics that guides the

perception of objects and establishes a hierarchy of

value between them is not value-neutral itself, but

instead supports normative practices of consumption,

even when that aesthetics is supposedly in the service

of something other, such as psychotherapy. Third,

viewing the object as having “thing-power” inserts a

wedge into the evaluative object hierarchy that

subtends consumption, taking it beyond the terms of its

monetary equivalence in the market-place and its human

“use-value.” Object-oriented ontology helps us to

resituate the hoarder outside of a disability narrative

and the hoard beyond an aesthetics of trash. Like the

found-art assemblage of Song Dong in his 2009 MOMA

exhibit “Waste Not,” where he examines individual and

cultural memory through the artifacts his mother could

not discard, or Alison S.M. Kobayashi in her

installation for Elsewhere, “The Possessed Artifacts

and Detritus of Mrs. Florence Hazel Davis Bland,” where

she explores how objects are haunted by the traces of

the departed human subjects who once owned them, the

hoarder’s archive may be able to teach us something we

did not know, and perhaps do not want to know, about

the object and ourselves.

If we are able to see the object beyond a

relational understanding of it as a window into human

subjectivity alone – if, as Bennett postulates, “this

‘call’ from things is taken seriously” – then we have

the opportunity to reconfigure “our writing, our

bodies, our research designs, our consumption

practices, our sympathies” (Bennett “Powers” 240). It

is not an easy pathway to follow the call of things

away from the narcissism of our critical philosophies,

but, as Harman reminds us, “we pay a heavy price when

we strip individual things of all causal power and turn

them into a petrified forest at the surface of reality”

(37). By resisting homogenizing the differences of

objects in the hoard into the singularity of trash and

thereby disrupting the moral definition of consumption

on which that homogenization is based, we may be able

to begin to address some of the larger social and

environmental problems we now face as a result of the

restrictive human-centered aesthetics in which objects

have historically been placed. If we can imagine our

objects as things in their own right, we may be

persuaded to desist from assuming a hierarchy of value

between human subjectivity and other forms of animate

and inanimate life. If human consciousness is no longer

the reference point for our comprehension of objects,

if human consumption is no longer the purpose of the

life of objects, if human status is no longer

determined through a value-laden object economy, we may

begin to see human desire for the object as the way

consumer capitalism repeats the priority of the cycle

of production, consumption and waste, as it turns human

beings as well as objects into vehicles of consumption

and production.

I would like to thank Elaine Stavro, Sally Chivers,

NANO’s anonymous reviewers, and editors John De

Gregorio and David Banash for their productive

suggestions on earlier drafts of this article.

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