Paper short abstract:

what can multisensory analysis bring to understandings of hoarding? If we abandon the poles of order/disorder as the paradigmatic mode of enquiry, and pursue multisensory analytic avenues, new insights might be made of hoarding practice. in this paper I focus especially on the violence of touch.

Paper long abstract:

A range of analytic themes have been applied to the practice of hoarding, all of which privilege notions of order/disorder to systems and (intimate) spaces. Hoarding disorders space and its relations: inappropriate or too many material things move beyond their parameters to get in the way of the mundane domestic revolutions occasioned by receiving guests, dining, engaging in the cycles of sleep and wakefulness, in ablutions, in the lounge room, the dining room, the bedroom, the bathroom. Hoarding is disobedient: as Emily Martin observed of bipolar disorder, hoarding might be symptomatic of a collectively appreciated anxiety about out of control relations with the material manifestations of late capitalism. Hoarding materialises the self, alerting us to the inalienability of things from person. All of these takes on hoarding speak to its disordering capacity and disorderly manifestation in the world of the person and the larger space and structures to which she belongs, and they all speak to temporalities and ordinary rhythms gone out of whack. But arraying hoarding around poles of order and disorder takes us only so far. In this paper, I want to abandon those poles and instead turn to a multisensory analysis for its capacity to bring us to new understandings of hoarding practice, and in particular to its temporal patternings and qualities.