The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture by Scott Herring (review)

In May 2013, hoarders began to see themselves in a new light. With the American Psychiatric Association’s release of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), individuals who cluttered their homes with yard-sale finds or refused to part with accumulating boxes of family memorabilia or stockpiled their living rooms with towering bundles of newspapers discovered they had Hoarding Disorder (HD). For many, including the band of clinicians who had long been working to legitimize the behavior as a mental illness, this was a moment to celebrate. Scott Herring, author of The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture, hardly shares their enthusiasm. For Herring, whose methodological approach incorporates aspects of material culture studies, queer theory, and disability studies, hoarding is “less an inherent disease in the head and more a decades-spanning concatenation of medico-legal expertise and popular lore” (3). His study offers a defamiliarizing genealogy that attempts to understand the historical and cultural conditions that have made the recent psychopathology of hoarding possible. In effect, he complicates the official record on hoarding by shifting the critical focus from the diagnosed to the diagnosticians.

Before reviewing the merits of The Hoarders, of which there are many, I would like to first offer an object lesson from one of the book’s main players: Gail Steketee, a Boston-based social worker who, along with psychologist Randy Frost, has probably done more than any other researcher to standardize excessive accumulating into HD. On Marathon Monday 2010, Steketee braved a series of traffic detours, bottlenecks, and snarl-ups to meet with me in her office at Boston University’s School of Social Work. In the course of our conversation, I posed several questions related to my own writing on hoarding—many of the same questions that Herring takes up in his book, such as, “What counts as an acceptable material life? Who decides? Why is one material life commended while another is reviled? Who calls these shots? Under what historical circumstances?” (17). This Foucauldian line of inquiry reminded Steketee of a one-minute commercial clip that a former patient (whom we’ll rename Jill) had forwarded to her. She pulled it up on her computer, and together we watched as a young woman unplugs a reading lamp from her living room and abandons it alongside other household garbage near the curb of her building. The director of the commercial, Spike Jonze, who is best known for his surreal lyricism and economy of effects, employs a series of shots that foreground the point of view of the lamp, as well as a knowingly clichéd use of tonal elements like a blustery rainstorm and a maudlin score that crescendos with high violins. The result is a narrative in which the viewer invariably anthropomorphizes and pities the rejected lamp as it stares longingly up at the glowing window where its former owner caresses a newer IKEA model. Our willingness to sympathize with the inanimate object is betrayed in the final shot as the camera pans out from the lamp and upward to a bedraggled, stern-faced man. He has walked into the frame only to reprimand the infantilized audience in a heavily labored Scandinavian accent: “Many of you feel bad for this lamp. That is because you crazy. It has no feelings, and the new one is much better.”¹ Steketee explained that this commercial roused Jill to write in her accompanying e-mail: “Now maybe other people will know how we feel.” Jill’s response re-entrenches the binary of non-hoarder and hoarder, normal and abnormal, while simultaneously collapsing these distinctions by suggesting a shared susceptibility to form strong, even irrational, attachments to objects.

The implicit point behind Jill’s response is not that non-hoarders might learn something about how hoarders feel by watching Jonze’s commercial, but rather that they already know a version of it. Is one crazy...