Introduction to Hoardiculture

On the morning of March 21, 1947, New York police headquarters received a call reporting that there was a dead body in the Collyer Mansion. The caller did not need to give the address; the rundown 2078 Fifth Avenue brownstone and the eccentric brothers who lived there, Homer and Langley, were local legends. Since 1938, when the journalist Helen Worden Erskine wrote about the “Hermits of Harlem” in the New York World-Telegram, the mansion had become a neighborhood attraction. Ongoing squabbles with Consolidated Edison, the Bowery Savings Bank, city officials, and developers resulted in memorable scenes: solicitors banging on the door, Langley shouting at them from an upstairs window. Everyone seemed to have a theory about what was inside the dilapidated brownstone. Neighborhood children insisted that the place was haunted and that Langley lived there with the decomposing cadavers of his father, his mother, and his older brother, Homer, who was blind and had not been seen outside since 1936. Some said there was a car in the basement (there was a Model T that Langley had attempted to rig to generate electricity), a rowboat in the attic (it was a broken canoe), and countless grand pianos (there were fourteen). Others said there were piles of money; rumors of their vast fortunes circulated in the neighborhood, unaffected by regular sightings of Langley rummaging through garbage cans and appealing to butchers and grocers for scraps.

After the mysterious call, an emergency squad was dispatched to the Fifth Avenue address. Performing for a crowd of hundreds of gawkers, the first responders tried to get in through the front door and a basement grate. Unsteady barricades of newspapers blocked both. Eventually, they were able to enter through a second-floor window. There, they found the emaciated corpse of Homer nestled into an alcove amid piles of debris. He had become paraplegic in his final years; the autopsy determined that he had died of starvation-induced heart failure. A frenzied search began for Langley, with the Daily News and the Daily Mirror making competing bids for exclusive information leading to his discovery.[1] The tip lines rang off the hook: Langley was reportedly spotted eating frozen custard in Newark, hitchhiking in North Carolina, trout fishing in the Adirondacks, and riding the subway in Brooklyn.[2] The search continued for another two and a half weeks, expanding into nine states. Meanwhile on Fifth Avenue, the public administrator, H. Walter Skidmore, led preliminary efforts to clear out the townhouse. Cats scurried about, lured by shelter or mice or perhaps the “queer odor” whose source was discovered, on April 8, to be the decomposing, rat-gnawed corpse of Langley.[3] The younger Collyer brother had been dead for about a month; he was bringing food to Homer when he set off one of the many boobytraps he had rigged to deter intruders. He was crushed by bales of newspapers and died of asphyxiation; “a victim of fear,” Worden Erskine writes, “killed by his invention.”[4]

More than 120 tons of stuff—the bulk of which was combustible debris—were removed from the Collyer Mansion. Magazines, newspapers, wood, and other combustibles were carted off by the Department of Sanitation and burned.[5] The clean out yielded the detritus Langley scavenged when he went out walking at night, the remaining effects of the brothers’ childhood and their ancestors, an intricate potato peeler, a beaded lampshade, a toy airplane, a drugstore cologne display, and a jar containing a two-headed human fetus preserved in formaldehyde.[6] The fourteen pianos were put up for auction in the fetid, dusty parlor as bidders stumbled over “battered cartons and bottles” and covered their noses with handkerchiefs; only four sold.[7] Tattered rugs, stopped clocks, musical instruments, toys, furniture, pictures, linens, and clothing—wares described even by the auctioneer’s aide as “junk I wouldn’t pay a dime for”—were removed from the mansion and sold at auction, bringing in the disappointing sum of $1,800.[8] Max Schaffer, the impresario for Hubert’s Dime Museum and Flea Circus on 42nd Street, spent $300 on a carpet, a crib, a coffee grinder, Homer’s old school desk, two cornets, a bugle, three rusty bayonets, and some pictures. Another big spender, Jacob Lubetkin, owner of Ye Olde Treasure Shoppe in Greenwich Village, spent $310 on a 200-pound, nine-foot-tall musical clock.[9] Both men correctly recognized that however banged up or broken down their purchases may have been, relics of the legendary hoard would attract customers to their businesses.

The Collyer brothers’ reclusive lives and horrible deaths may be “the ultimate New York cautionary tale,” as Lidz writes, without specifying what that tale is about, or against what it cautions.[10] Sorting through Collyer curiosa in 1947, Skidmore discovered an unmailed letter from Langley to one of his students describing the anguish he felt when she stopped her music lessons with him. With that evidence, the public administrator imagined a love story to be at the origin of the brothers’ “frightful and puzzling end.”[11] Worden Erskine traces the source of their ills to a different love story, that between their parents, who were first cousins, and whose union she therefore considered a “diluting of the blood by inbreeding.” As an alternate hypothesis, she names the “dominant character” of their mother, speculating that her “overpowering devotion” to her sons rendered them helpless.[12] Dozens of writers have since taken up the story of the Collyer brothers—notable titles include Marcia Davenport’s My Brother’s Keeper (1954), Andrew Scott’s The Dazzle (2002), Lidz’s Ghosty Men (2003), and E. L. Doctorow’s Homer and Langley (2009)—to explore the horrifying codependence of a devoted caretaker or a deranged prison-keeper and his helpless charge, or unchecked materialism, paranoia, or misanthropy.[13] The joys and sorrows, attachments and estrangements that conducted the brothers to their crushing end will likely remain opaque despite the efforts of psychologists, playwrights, novelists, and even cultural critics.[14]

Hoarding Today

However iconic the death of the Collyer brothers may be, stories like theirs are not uncommon. In July 2010, similar events unfolded when firefighters were called to the 5400 block of Foster Street in Skokie, Illinois. There they discovered the corpse of the seventy-nine-year old Marie Davis buried under heaps of domestic debris. To remove her body, first responders had to drill into the roof and create a tunnel through the possessions that were piled up to three feet from the ceiling.[15] The cause of Davis’s death—heart failure—was not directly related to the state of her home, but it was the latter that made her death local news. Or rather, the state of her home and the time of her death: years marked by a spike in cultural interest in hoarding evidenced in literary and visual culture, medical research, and academic works of cultural criticism. In 2009, A&E aired its first episode of Hoarders, a series that has been credited with establishing narrative formulas and iconographies of the phenomenon.[16] Four years later, the American Psychiatric Association included the new diagnostic category of “hoarding disorder” in the fifth revision of its standard reference work, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5).

The DSM-5 defines hoarding as a “persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of their actual value.”[17] The emphasized qualification suggests that hoarding is rooted in conflicting perspectives about value. Hoarding thus resembles fetishism, a concept that figures prominently in the fields of anthropology, economics, and psychology; naming, in each discipline, a misrecognition of value—religious, commercial, or sexual.[18] Unlike Freudian fetishism, which is generally experienced by the afflicted as a welcome expedient to erotic life, the contemporary psychiatric diagnosis of hoarding requires that the difficulty discarding results in “clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.”[19]

The wording of this specification is generic; it is used to designate the threshold of disorder in multiple entries of the DSM-5. The authors explain that without “clear biological markers” or “clinically useful measurements of severity,” “it has not been possible to completely separate normal and pathological symptom expressions contained in diagnostic criteria.”[20] The formulation “clinically significant distress” thus replaces a gap in information, a representational lacuna: the absence of a measurable difference between normal and pathological symptom expressions. A substitute for something that is not there is also Freud’s basic formula for the fetish: “To put it more plainly: the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and—for reasons familiar to us—does not want to give up.”[21] Hoarding amplifies and multiplies fetishism, not only because both are predicated on clashing perspectives about value, but also because both the diagnostic category of hoarding disorder and the hoard itself are structured like the fetish. The disorder and the hoard are substitutes for something that cannot be seen: a measurable difference between normal and pathological conditions. This doubleness infects hoarding discourse, raising its ambivalences to the third power.

Among disorders included in the DSM-5, hoarding is unique because its diagnosis requires the existence of a material entity external to the patient’s psychic reality: the hoard.[22] However fatal its magnitude, the hoard is an aesthetic object produced by a clash in perspectives about the meaning or value of objects; it is caught between phenomenology, aesthetics, and ontology. This bears a significant implication: the hoarder resembles an artist or an artisan whose identity as such is a function of the (composite) artifact he produces—facit artem. Diagnosis is, in part, an aesthetic problem. Hoarding experts Randy Frost and Gail Steketee have even developed aesthetic standards with which to evaluate a hoard, an assessment tool they named the Clutter Image Rating (CIR). The CIR is composed of three series of nine photographs of increasingly cluttered staged domestic spaces—a kitchen, a bedroom, and a living room (see figure 0.1).[23] Intended to address the absence of a clinically useful measurement of severity, the assessment tool makes the reality of the diagnosis of hoarding disorder derive from an index (a photograph) of a realist representation (a mise-en-scène) of an analogy (a hypothesized likeness to the hoarder’s dwelling). Hoarding disorder, diagnosed as such, is a malady in which “objective reality” is both essential to the diagnosis and incredibly elusive.

Figure 0.1: Clutter Image Rating, Living Room

The CIR is useful not only as a measure of the severity of hoarding but also as a document of what makes and unmakes sense in living spaces. At what point do room assemblages denote not bad housekeeping or bad taste but something pathological, and accordingly, irrational and inexplicable? What supplementary narratives or economic rationales could redomesticate the images to the realm of sense? Economic theories of hoarding focus on those who accumulate bullion, money, or necessity goods to manipulate market conditions and enhance their wealth, whereas the accumulations that define hoarding in clinical psychology are of no direct economic consequence outside the hoarded home. That contemporary capitalist culture makes a mental disorder of irrational economic choices is consonant with the broader encroachments of a present characterized by “the non-state sphere of economy permeating everything” [24] or “the commodification of everything.”[24] The pathologization of irrational decisions about the allocation of limited resources may be the most extreme form of this permeation, demonstrating that “all conduct is economic conduct” and corroborating Gary Becker’s claim that “the economic approach provides a useful framework for understanding all human behavior.”[25]

The relationship between economic elaborations of hoarding and free market capitalism, however, is more nuanced and more essential. Drawing on mid-eighteenth-century writings by the French physiocrat Louis Paul Abeille, Michel Foucault assigns hoarding a critical role in the development of the governing rationality or “governmentality” of the liberal state. Reflecting on grain markets, Abeille argues that by allowing hoarding, the state entrusts the regulation of supply and demand to the free market, thus rendering scarcity a chimera.[26] True, Abeille concedes, some without means may die of hunger, but these are “people,” distinguished from the “population,” composed of rational economic actors who produce, buy, store, or sell in profitable syncopation with the market.[27] Instead of administrative fiat, the liberal state abandons to a hungry fate the people without the means to benefit from the market’s freedoms. It is through this abandonment that a caesura is drawn between the “population” and those excluded, the “people.” By allowing hoarding, the liberal state transfers the burden of grain storage to the population, performing the ideological work of spinning the failure of the free market to nourish all as a failure of those who lack nourishment. Hoarding, as such, is the limit case of classical liberalism: a test of the idea that individuals acting rationally in their own best interest constitute a beneficent “invisible hand.” The increasingly skewed distribution of wealth but one testament to the treacherous iniquity of this idea.

In Marx’s account, the clashing perspectives about value that define hoarding manifest in Sisyphean immobility that stills even the most motile matter: exchange value.[28] He focuses on bullion and money rather than grain, presenting the hoarder as a miser and a “martyr [to] exchange-value” who forgoes use in a practice defined through an impressive concatenation of contradictions: “He dreams of exchange-value and he therefore does not exchange. The [liquid] form of wealth and its petrification, the elixir of life and [the philosopher’s stone] madly haunt each other in alchemic fashion.”[29] Marx frames these contradictions as a tension between the infinite potential of money and the finitude of any actual sum. “This contradiction between the quantitative limitation and the qualitative lack of limitation of money keeps driving the hoarder [Schatzbildner] back to his Sisyphean task: accumulation.”[30] The stasis-producing tension between quantitative limitation and qualitative boundlessness is also one between petrified and liquid value, and between materiality and immateriality.

Though histories of capitalism tend to distinguish between three stages (market, monopoly, late), its story can be retold as one of an ongoing dematerialization of value that begins when an “ordinary, sensuous thing”—a table, say—is transformed into a commodity.[31] Value performs an acrobatic feat, leaping from the ligneous form of the table-in-use to the general equivalent, where it can be exchanged and stored. This leap is a dematerialization, whether value lands in gold or representative moneys, or in the more manifestly intangible form of digital currencies.

The ubiquity of hoarding in the twenty-first century is due in some part to the unprecedented availability of cheap consumer goods, but the tensions between petrification and liquidity and between materiality and immateriality that Marx isolates are also decisive. Deregulation has enabled further alienation of value from material forms by stimulating investment in derivative financial markets. The bursting of the housing bubble inflated by the bundling of subprime mortgages into mortgage-backed financial products in 2007–8 was a testament to the precarity of these markets.[32] The securitized subprime mortgages that triggered the global financial crisis demonstrated that even the most material of possessions—the home—was as if made of air and could burst like a bubble. The same years saw the permeation of network technologies into everyday life through smartphone use. These were years in which the meanings of materiality and immateriality were particularly unstable, years in which it became clear, for example, that a lifetime of photographs could disappear with the click of a mouse, a tilt of a teapot, or update of an operating system. Though these fraught and fickle notions of materiality and immateriality have galvanized hoarding discourse in the twenty-first century, the essential features of the praxis develop concomitantly with the market economy and more broadly, modernity.

In addition to the upsurge in hoarding discourse, the first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen a spate of scholarly interventions in new materialism, thing theory, object-oriented ontology, and vital materialism. Although this cultural history engages sporadically with these theories, new materialist thought is neither my focus nor my doctrine; more important theoretical interlocutors are pillars of modern thought: Marx, Freud, and Walter Benjamin. The literary and visual texts I discuss include those that are frequently named in studies of hoarding: Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual,” Song Dong’s Waste Not, and E. L. Doctorow’s Homer and Langley.[33] To this corpus, I add Italian texts that have been neglected outside of Italy and excluded from this developing canon of precursors to contemporary hoarding discourse. I devote particular attention to the work of sui generis modernist Carlo Emilio Gadda, a self-declared archiviomane (archiveaholic). Gadda’s biography is cluttered with the stuff of hoarding, and his personal, poetic, and political sympathies and enmities are often expressed through judgments about functionality and resource allocation.

Hoarding is too ubiquitous and entrenched to be dismembered by the boundaries of national tradition or discipline. A study of hoardiculture must take a hoardicritical approach, registering anachronic presences and unlikely resonances.[34] The examples of hoarding in this cultural history come primarily from Italian, French, British, Russian, and American texts from the late eighteenth century to 2020, from the age of reason to the Anthropocene. I initially set out to trace the transformation of hoarding across disciplines—between its psychiatric and economic elaborations—but soon realized that to do so would be to obscure the essential ways in which hoarding entangles the disciplines. Instead, Possessed is loosely organized around sites where value is particularly unstable, and where clashing perspectives about the meaning and value of things abound: the personal library, the flea market, the crime scene, the dustheap, and the digital archive. Charting conceptual entanglements of hoarding in key sites of praxis, Possessed shows how hoarding entangles psychic and political economies and troubles the boundaries between material and immaterial, rational and irrational, individual and aggregate, present and future. The hoarder emerges from my readings as a personification of the psychic, economic, epistemological, and ecological conditions of modernity and an agent of their undoing.