Uncontained accumulation: Hidden heterotopias of storage and spillage

Domestic storage spaces are containers for the concealment of things whose value is inarticulate. Unlike the curation of collections, material accumulations grow of their own accord, accruing mass and animacy and inserting their affective hooks into the tissue of our sociality. Those who fail to contain accumulations are labelled hoarders.

Hoarding; concealment; space; disorder; material possessions

In the process of moving to a smaller home, Toni, a sardonic Illinois resident in her eighties told me, ‘the first thing to know about attics is that they are filled up because they are there’. Perhaps it is the space that comes first, an architectural category that seems to be in a dangerous process of collective expansion, as walk-in closets become de rigueur and rental storage units have been the fastest growing category of real estate for decades. Could it be our increased capacity for storage that is enabling the collective amassment of useless stuff?

In a rented house I shared with roommates in college, the first drawer to the left as one walked into the kitchen became known amongst us as the ‘random drawer’. It had no specific purpose, apart from the default containment – and concealment – of things that otherwise resisted placement. No one ever decided that this was a space to be used in this way. Its function was discovered in the process of labelling it, long after it had taken on life. It was a space into which one could throw anything at hand that did not have an appropriate place, effectively rendering it out of mind. The effect was an unthoughtful accumulation, a jumbled assortment of debris that held such treasures as used up batteries, candles, cards from our mothers, kitschy thrift store finds too kitschy to display, seeds for a future garden that might never encounter sunlight, adaptors, and wires whose devices had been misplaced or lost functionality. It was an accumulation with a kind of inertia – once its gravitational field was activated, the larger it got, the more powerful its attraction for roaming objects in its field of influence – similar to Mauss’ discussion of Kwakiutl coppers that attracted other coppers to them ([1925] 1990, 44). Accumulations are creatures that breed in the darkness.

Bachelard wrote: ‘An empty drawer is unimaginable. It can only be thought of’ ([1958] 1969, xxxiii). To put it otherwise, in the imagination concealed space is always full, but emptiness requires empirical verification. Until the very moment the door swings open, the chest unlocks, the tape on the box ripped along its seam, the mind brims with possibilities.

Concealment has the intentional effect of producing socially normative order within the public space of the house, which is itself a kind of exterior skin folded into private interior space (a container); hiding things holds back the entropy of things piling up in unwanted, unforeseen ways. One young mother in North Carolina told me that when guests came to visit their 800 square foot home with almost no storage space, they sometimes stuffed everything that they could not find a place for (including unopened mail) into the attic crawlspace accessed through a hole in the ceiling. At the same time, these concealed spaces seem to open up a space of the imaginary that is exterior to normal sociality, where normative categorical orderings no longer apply and the affective contents of possessions roam untethered (Newell forthcoming).

Anthropologists of masking, sorcery, and secret societies delineate the efficacy of displaying concealment: it is precisely by exposing the opaque surface of concealment that unknown potentialities of the invisible are activated, the public knowing that there is something to know which one cannot know. Recall this Yoruba description of the concept of awo (which means both 'secret' and 'spiritual power') cited by Barber:

If something we call 'awo' has nothing in it to frighten the uninitiated, let's stop calling it 'awo', but if we put a stone in a gourd and make a couple of taboos to stop people looking into it, it's become an 'awo'. The face of a denizen of heaven is 'awo' for the very reason that if you removed its costume you might find nothing there. (Barber 1981, 740)

Spiritual power is produced, Barber writes, by concealing it, transforming its absent interior with the fertile presence of possibility, and I suggest concealment produces such an effect even when unintended. To verify, to see inside, is a release of potential (Simmel compares the telling of a secret to spending money), at once a culmination of desire and the loss of possibility. There is more power in the mystery, and Taussig counter-intuitively argues that temporarily revealing the backstage only reinforces the structure of sacred concealment, since social actors are often performing an illusion of 'not knowing' all along (1999).

Even in the private and 'profane' domestic architecture of the home, spaces of concealment that are cut off from ordinary social life also introduce heterotopias where normal rationalist logics cease to function and fixed cultural categories melt into air. Perla Korosec-Serfaty writes: 'the visible spaces of dwelling draw their qualities, status, and meaning from their relationship with the cupboards, closets, drawers, balconies, garages, attics, and cellars which comprise the hidden spaces of the home' (1984, 304). Unlike the curation of collections, prominently displayed around the public space of the home, material accumulations seem to happen of their own accord, in darkened corners and dusty hideaways, gradually accruing mass and animacy and inserting their affective hooks into the tissue of their possessor's sociality (Newell 2014).

While the home is a container for dwelling, a container that protects and shelters and masks, the home's storage space often acts to confine unwanted accumulation. No matter how much you believe you care about what you have stored, you do not want or need it enough to make it part of your active life. So long as accumulation can be hidden away, the social self can still be presented as ordered and curated, as seamlessly performed. But like a Facebook page whose privacy settings have gone awry, accumulations spill out of the closet and make uninvited public appearances. They resist containment.

Accumulations are the flotsam and jetsam of the flows of people and things through the space of the home. Clutter accumulates on the dining room table or the side table

by the door as people enter and exit dropping detritus as they go. Cleaning up, residents remove it and seek less visible spaces to put things they do not know what to do with: 'As people and things move through the home and fabricate its multiple temporalities and spatialities, gaps are opened into which stuff falls, and surfaces are cleared onto which things are placed' (Cwerner and Metcalfe 2003, 236). By the time we become aware such heaps exist, jumbling unwanted treasures, undiscordable refuse, and unused utilitarian things kept just in case, they have often already burst forth into visible space in ways that threaten the order of the home and the socially accepted structure of value.

Storage works as a kind of contained non-space, a world apart, allowing the contradictory desires to keep and jettison to coexist. Every home has some form of storage (at least shoeboxes under the bed), and most set aside vast reserves of such private space, sometimes equal to the inhabitable square footage of the home, space never meant to be seen by guests and much of it outside the purview of the inhabitants' daily patterns of movement in the home. As such it becomes an invisible ghostly double to the home, a space of liminal misrule. It is the spatial nature of storage as liminality that makes Foucault's heterotopia useful here, the idea of built spaces that are conceived of in opposition to normal social space, as a form of the outside that has been condoned off and protected. Of great importance is that Foucault refrains from attaching a valence of evaluation to the heterotopia – it has the potential to be pure or polluted, deviant or divine – it is defined primarily by being set apart. Within the world of the home, public spaces come to represent the social skin of the family, playing a role equivalent to clothing in Terry Turner's analysis, such that the interior walls become the exterior of the self, and this social space has actually expanded in contemporary architecture to include the kitchen as a primary site of ostentation. Even the bedrooms remain sites of self-expression, albeit for more intimate guests. It is storage space (almost never revealed to guests) that objectifies the hidden inner life of the person, including, in boxes that often go years unopened, reserves concealed from self-awareness.

True to the transformative potential of the limen, spaces of concealment are sites of value transformation, where our stored possessions transmogrify into heirlooms and collectibles, or alternatively through spatial rites of separation allow for divestment and eventual removal (Hirschman, Ruvio, and Belk 2012; Miller and Parrot 2009; Thompson 1979).

It is this betwixt and between quality that attracts children's fantasy and teenage reclusivity. Attics and basements and closets are the staples of indoor childhood exploration, hide and seek, dress up games, and ghost stories, and later they are often converted into subversive hangouts where teenagers secrete themselves from adult eyes.

This is a space set apart from conscious semiotic determination, a space where representational meaning is temporarily suspended, allowing for the emergence of paradoxical and nonsensical combinations of things normally kept apart and in binary tension. These kinds of things make their social and semiotic associations at an affective level of Levi-Bruhlian participation, where rationalist taxonomies break down, obfuscating processes of ordering and divestment. Turner (1967) writes of the monsters that populate ritual and provide models for critical thinking about fixed cultural oppositions, and indeed quite often we populate storage space with Latourian monsters, entities that defy categorization in terms of our basic dichotomies between nature and culture, matter and spirit, object and subject. In the space of concealed disorder, all sorts of

unrelated detritus come together into a unified animate entity. Once these disconnected things are associated, their semiotic entanglement makes them difficult to separate again.

We might rethink the problem of hoarding as less one of compulsive keeping than of the unsuccessful containment of possessions. Hoarders are set apart neither by the particular things they keep (most people keep some useless and used up things), nor even by their lack of organization, since junk drawers are ubiquitous. The things hoarders store exceed their hidden containers and visibly encroach upon public living space. To see other people's stored things is often perceived as polluting, distasteful, or an overshare of intimacy. It is well known that even the neatest houses often contain much more than meets the eye, but it is when one is accosted by clutter and dust out in public spaces of the house that an uneasiness ensues, not unlike trying to ignore someone who is inappropriately sweating in public, an interior liquid seeping to the outside and all too intimately revealing the inner turmoil of the body.

As with masking and secrecy generally, the concealment of storage is often combined with partial revelation: armoires and hutches and other furniture intended for storage may be prominently displayed, objects are taken out surreptitiously only to be locked up again, a sampling of private souvenirs is scattered about the house tastefully, suggesting deeper threads that burrow beneath the surface. The surface of the container is at once a display and a device to obscure interiority and thereby grant it the potentiality of the unknown, a gap that invites semiotic proliferation. Hoarders violate this principle and so are themselves reclassified as belonging to the 'outside' of deviancy, as someone incapable of maintaining themselves, as someone we whisper about behind closed doors (Herring 2014).

Like Russian dolls, storage spaces are filled with containers of more containers, ('She has bags full of bags' one daughter complained of her mother) inside of which we find traces of personhood so intimate that their owners find them hard to face directly, and so excise them from their surroundings if not truly from their minds. Each level of containment would seem to distance them further from the very subject they constitute. Within the home we find insides and outsides folding into one another, as objects seemingly exterior to the person are embodiments of their most intimate interiorities, placed deeply internal to the dwelling's architectural space and yet symbolically 'outside' of codified social space. Concealing these exteriorized interiorities at once activates their animacy as social creatures that haunt from behind closed doors and allows us to perform our rational Cartesianism to ourselves rather than acknowledge our affective ensnarement in possessive accumulations. Accumulations are monsters lurking just beneath the surface of everyday life, but as our collective entanglement with materiality irreversibly proliferates at a global level (Hodder 2014), everywhere they are breaking free from containment.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Sasha Newell http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3517-8629

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