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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