Hoarding and New Materialism: Jane Bennet at the Vera List Center

Jane Bennett. Powers of the Hoard: Artistry and Agency in a World of Vibrant Matter from Vera List Center on Vimeo.

Jane Bennet, author of Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, is part of what she calls a New Materialist movement. This New Materialism would presumably include Latour's Actor-Network Theory, writers on Material Agency like Knappett & Malafouris, and the Speculative Realism blogosphere.

In some sense at least, this work seems linked to anthropologist Alfred Gell's 1998 work Art and Agency on the 'secondary agency' of objects, which he sees as partaking of the social agency of their users or owners. Gell uses the notion of a distributed or partible self, with objects being key aspects of the individual, very much like prosthetic body parts. (Of course using the word 'individual' here becomes rather oxymoronic, as this thesis results from the proposition that people are divisible.)

Jane Bennett expresses this point very vividly in her discussion of the hoarder's bodily relationship with their hoard, such that they form a 'working whole':

"The hoarded object is like one's arm; not a 'tool' but an organ, a vital member. When a therapist has to leave the kitchen of another hoarder named Karen because the smell was too strong, too revolting, Karen becomes upset and insulted. When the therapist explains, 'This is not a personal refection of you,' Karen is adamant in a way that is both ashamed and proud, 'Of course it is.' And the therapist soothingly replies, 'Oh, no, but this isn't you,' and Karen repeats with annoyance, 'Of course it is.' 

"Now I speculated above with reference to Bergson's model of perception as subtraction, that the hoarder might have a relatively non-action-selective perceptual style compared to the non-hoarder, which might allow hoarders to take pleasure in what non-hoarders see as filthy junk. Now this same distinctive sensibility might also account for why hoarders experience the bodies of their junk and their own biological bodies as fused, as sort of forming a working whole.

"A therapeutic discourse might say that hoarders have lost the ability to distinguish between person and thing, but a vibrant or aleatory materialist might say something like this: 'Hoarders have an exceptional awareness of the extent to which all bodies can intertwine, infuse, ally, undermine, or compete with those in its vicinity.'"