By: Mina Basmaci
At its best, the conflation between identity, fulfillment, and consumption produces a generation that consumes mindlessly for the sake of doing so. This is “good capitalism”—living not by the paycheck but for it. Getting an education, working towards a career, and homebuilding are seen as necessary plot points that make consumption possible. These social performances culminate in “the good life,” or in retirement, which is defined on the basis of getting to a point in which one can consume without having to work. Indeed, those that are retired do not have to think about making money, only about how to spend it; consumption is their leisure. At its worst, however, the conflation between identity, fulfillment, and consumption produces a generation of hoarders. Hoarding is characterized both by the obsessive accumulation of things and the refusal to get rid of them. Broadly speaking, material possessions are so ingrained into the identity of hoarders that getting rid of them logically means getting rid of certain facets of their personality as well. On the one hand, hoarding disorder is a logical conclusion of the capitalist mentality, on the other, it is an oddity subject to contempt and sensationalized reality television shows. The dismissal of hoarding as “bad capitalism” is too simple and hence too irresponsible, and it is something I hope to think past in this article. Indeed, the impulse of modernity sublimizes the glasshouse—pure, utopian, streamlined—and yet everywhere it produces dumps. By considering documentaries and novels that deal thematically with issues of use and abuse—specifically David and Albert Maysles’ Grey Gardens, Matt D'Avella’s Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things, and Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting—I intend to explore the implications of hoarding disorder on the modern psyche further, ultimately arguing that it relates deeply to the plastification of meaning and experience in hyper capitalist cultures.
Hoarding disorder is just that: a disorder. It is the disorganization of excess, meaning excess consumption and then the retention of that consumption. Hoarders keep most everything so that their homes and living spaces become cluttered and over cluttered, ultimately rendering their space unlivable. This definition of hoarding presupposes that the inorganic (material things) takes over the organic (human beings) instead of the other way around. It is an ironic departure from the rhetoric of fully realized capitalism, which assumes the exceptionalism of human beings in their capacity to control, shape, and dominate for the purposes of profit and pleasure. In A Discourse on Thinking, Heidigger accordingly proclaims that “Nature becomes a gigantic gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology and industry” (50). In this conception 1 nature is valued only to the extent that its resources can be utilized into generating capital for consumption. Likewise, people are only valued to the extent that they can either work the means of producing capital or own it. Everything about living in the world that can be exploited for the purposes of profit necessarily will be—in the Americas, the debate over whether or not water is a fundamental right that ought to be free is a legitimate one; in Europe, essential bowel functions have already been monetized. Such emphasis on utility and profitability breaks down in hoarding culture, a culture that is demarcated on the basis of the inability to distinguish between valuable and invaluable, useful and useless, object and trash. This is the most essential pathology of the hoarder, and presents an interesting opportunity to critique popular understandings of these categories and how they relate to capitalism in the first place.
Again, the fundamental logic of hoarding disrupts and deviates from such an economic system and yet is simultaneously engendered by it. This paradoxical relationship is of interest in Grey Gardens, a documentary about a mother and daughter, both named Edith Beale, who are hoarders. There is no domesticity, no “life” in their once “lively” mansion—it is now cluttered with things out of sentiment, nostalgia, or simply for the sake of it. The mother and daughter both formerly belonged to the upper class, a class defined on the basis of their accumulation of capital. Now they live in poverty in that same mansion, unable to move about their home and stake a claim to space or agency in it. Yet their capital has remained present: again, they are overflowing with material excess, which is oddly the reason why they are living in impoverished conditions in the first place. In exerting their capacity to consume they themselves have been consumed.
In this regard, “good capitalism” is not only about acquiring capital but being able to dispose of the capital that has lost value or is/has become waste. Again, by their nature hoarders do not distinguish between essential and nonessential, trash and nontrash. This is why the image of hoarding—despite its implication that one owns a lot of things—can never match the chic, tidy image of the upper class, where one owns and maintains a lot of nice things in proportion to the bad things they get rid of. Capitalism both depends on and facilitates between different binaries: it is only through rendering something as valuable that it can render another thing as obsolete. Perhaps this speaks to the way in which we understand ourselves relationally, namely through negation; only through being able to point at that which we are not can we determine that which we are. In this regard, we can only demarcate “good capitalism” through knowing what “bad capitalism” looks like. We need both.
The binary between valuable and obsolete does not exist only between and among objects, but within themselves, too. Not everything is “timeless”—the linear march of time often obscures that which was once valuable and makes it obsolete. This is purposeful; in “Never Was Trash So Beautiful,” Luis Pardo locates “the nightmare of the consumer” as being the knowledge that “everything he or she buys starts losing value from the precise moment it is purchased, it starts losing its currency, becoming unfashionable and demanding a rapid substitution for a new purchase that will start going down the hill of obsolescence the minute it goes from the window to his or her hands...” Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things, likewise reflects that “We spend so much time on the hunt, but nothing ever quite does it for us.” By virtue of our economic system, material things are not meant to last and are advertised to us in such a way that purchasing one thing is never enough; it needs to be continually upgraded and replaced with newer models. Opting in once means opting in indefinitely. We find the same note in social performances: “If only I had that job!” quickly turns into “If only I had that promotion!” once it’s actualized.
Minimalism as a lifestyle advocates for a break in this kind of debilitating thinking, offering a solution to questions of healthy consumption and indulgence based on renunciation. Instead of being on the hunt, Minimalism tries to return us spatially and temporally to the “here” and the “now.” It interprets that while our perpetual craving and restlessness for meaning-making is an innate part of our biology, it has been hijacked but what modernity considers meaningful. Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting echoes this diagnosis: “Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth (168). There is something about the trajectory here that is interesting, as “life” is located in a fixed point away from us, meaning that in the “here” and the “now,” we are not actually living. So what are we doing? Under this logic, there is a more polished version of ourselves waiting somewhere that we have to work towards. First we work; then we live. And living means enjoying the television and the car.
Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things hence suggests that the problem of over consumption is a problem of priority: "Our economy is based on the lost meaning in our lives." After the title card, which is laid over a cityscape, it cuts immediately to a picturesque shot of mountains and trees—if one locates happiness and fulfillment as being not in the future but possible in the grounded present, then we “return” to embodiment and can fully enjoy the moment. This is done through not engaging with the economy unless one absolutely has to. Minimalism in this regard is presented as the antithesis of over consumption and hoarding, as it requires one to go from excess to nearly nothing. However, it is ironic that in trying to reject and move past the culture of capitalism, the Minimalist movement appropriates it. The documentary specifically follows proponents of Minimalism who sell self-help books, go on speaking tours, and promote organizational products like shelves and cubbies. Even further, Kyle Chyka’s “Minimalism Is A Luxury Good” suggests that the austere, selectively curated life of a Minimalist is quite expensive; “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap,” Dolly Parton tells us.
Of course, renegotiating our relationship with material things fails if it does not consider in some meaningful way our relationship to our phones and computers, singularly physical objects that within themselves contain worlds. The digital age is ushering in a new kind of materialism and commodity culture altogether. Life is happening in a different kind of space; our assets are beginning to look different in response to it. We may not be buying and hoarding DVDs anymore, perhaps a triumph of minimalist ideologies, but it is because we are subscribing to services that make our DVD libraries digital instead. There is still a transaction between money and capital, and there is still a (digital) space that these libraries exist in, but it looks necessarily different as the transaction and the product do not exist physically. That we can even monetize and aestheticize ourselves through Instagram, YouTube, and the blogging community continues to speak to capitalism’s impulse towards optimization and commodification, even if that means of the self.
Though an answer to coping with consumer culture is beyond the scope of this paper, it is important to note the hypocrisy with which hoarding is scorned and dismissed as “bad capitalism,” despite being a logical conclusion of it, all while Minimalism is embraced by the system that it is protesting. This for me throws doubt over whether or not “good capitalism” was actually based on sincere ideas of identity and fulfillment, or whether it is sold to us that way when convenient.