All across the rich world there has been a mania for throwing things away.
Levi-Strauss would go so far as to say that this is because our whole culture is emetic: we vomit up and shit all over the world, analogous to the way our cultural ancestors would use the vomitarium after the orgy. We fly in planes and shit in planes, and travel to places where we dump our money and shit and rubbish, then go home.
Nowadays, this emesis takes a more austere aesthetic, undertaken in the safety of our homes; our city is full of nooks to go and get your hole filled, but these days I wouldn’t be able to tell you where you can go and throw it all up in the company of the likeminded. We vomit from our homes; we vomit out our homes. From Japan, we have Marie Kondo; from Scandinavia, we have the craze for death cleaning; at op shops, all around the O(E)CD, one can now also find copies of The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (2014) The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter (2017).
Usually however, it’s only when people die that we’re left with what is, in objective terms, the greatest thing(s) we will have ever produced: the plague of objects we leave to our loved ones to sift and sort through, and mostly throw away. The things we could not let go of, the clutter we hoard that sits in strange tension to the emesis in the culture. Sifting through dead hoards of clutter has become a banal practice of our culture, that mostly sits below ritual, yet that nearly everyone I know has reckoned with at one time.
Last year, my loved one cleaned out the house of their loved one. And after sixty years in the same dwelling, there were several generations of objects: some resonant and precious (a Seiko mechanical watch, including its purchase slips from Orchard Road in 1972, that still keeps time), some surprising and old, that meant a lot to someone, but is now useless, but that it still feels very bad to put in landfill (a tennis racket from Tasmania in the 1920s). Most of the skips full of our flotsam and jetsam, however, speak to our personal repetition compulsions and our cultural inability to deal with externalities: drawers full of at least 30 pairs of the same panty hose, 20 variations of basically the same jacket and shoes; the several broken Nespresso machines living in the dugout with the redbacks and 1950s bank stationery; the ragpicking carnies who disappeared before the dawn rain with 1/3 of the objects left in hard rubbish.
In the middle class swathes of Australia, suburban affluence means most of us never have to reckon with our own overconsumption during our own lifetimes; most of us, – whether in denial of our own death, out of procrastination, or just in some kind of stubborn inability to truly face up to and really deal with our own clutter – will leave it to our children and grandchildren to sift through the letters and photos, the bugles and crystal sets, the medals and cutlery, the underwear, medicines, and laundry products, the cheap ugly art and clapped out mattresses and lounge chairs, the crooked lumber, rusty shovels, brittle garden hose. Marx’ beautiful phrase applies just as easily to the domestic sphere of the departed: “[t]he tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”.
After experiencing the several months of Sundays it took for my loved one to clean out their loved one’s house, it was impossible not to feel almost overwhelmed and paralysed by the plague of objects. Vicariously overwhelmed and paralysed; it was not even my house, not even my loved ones. The paradox of the plague of objects is that taking them away takes it out of you. The experience of so much is actually more deeply one of loss and grief, suddenly having to process the meaning of a person’s absence and the cryptic meaning of a photograph you’re not in or a note in which you’re mentioned, but do not recognise yourself.
In death we leave the cleaning to others. But in life, we continue to imbue dead objects with animate resonances and affections. But as for my five or so bicycles, I love each of them deeply; and for me, each one is an object that collects a set of memories and experiences, that holds the unity of past selves to their trajectories, and brings them back to me. Letting go of them would be like giving a way parts of my life. We ‘civilised’ humans are not only Freud’s “prosthetic Gods”, we’re also wanty creatures bound by objects that speak to us; even after the death of God, we never left totemism and animism. I have begun to wonder if our own – my own – commodity fetishism is not at least as potent an obstacle to real and meaningful change – personal and political – as exploitation and alienation.
We’re drowning in our own objects, and the sea level is rising, but we do not free ourselves of them, we keep driving and getting and bringing objects across the threshold, and into our lives; the fraught micropolitics of everyone on my street’s nearly overflowing ‘recycling’ bin speaks to how pandemic reflections have not resulted in any kind of declining consumption. In countries like Australia, suburban houses and garages, and dodgy tips out the back of Toowoomba, can absorb this excess, for a time; but eventually there has to be some kind of reckoning with the plague of objects. I see this every Sunday on the urban periphery, where fly tippers dump building detritus (too lazy and too cheap to take it 5km further to the proper place), and where three points along the edge of one strip of the road are stained black and sprinkled with car glass, final solutions to personal problems of car ownership. ‘I just handed the keys to my cousin, and he promised to take care of it for me’.
Maybe this drowning is older and deeper than now; maybe this pervasion animates the very alienation of modernity.
By 1755, Rousseau wrote that “as soon as it was found to be useful for one to have provisions for two, equality disappeared, property appeared, work became necessary, and the vast forests changed into smiling Fields that had to be watered with the sweat of men, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to sprout and grow together with the harvests” (Second Discourse, Part II, 167). All Western political theory since Rousseau (and perhaps since the second book of Plato’s Republic) have been grappling with this: since, still.
But on dealing with the plague of objects sitting in the peripheral vision of my own life, I feel the thing less remarked is how much it also messes with love, how much our interpersonal and intrapersonal relations have been alienated by our willful interposition of this punctuation. The following passage from Marcuse’s reading of Hegel’s early work – in no small measure responding to Rousseau – gets at this beautifully.
“Hegel’s efforts to comprehend the universal laws governing this process led him inevitably to an analysis of the role of the social institutions in the progress of history. One of his historical fragments, written after 1797, opens with the sweeping declaration that ‘security of property is the pivot on which the whole of modern legislation turns,’ and in the first draft to his pamphlet on Die Verfassung Deutschlands (1798-9), he states that the historical form of ‘bourgeois property’ (bürgerliches Eigentum) is responsible for the prevailing political disintegration. Moreover, Hegel maintained that the social institutions had distorted even the most private and personal relations between men. There is a significant fragment in the Theologische Jugendschriften, called Die Liebe, in which Hegel states that ultimate harmony and union between individuals in love is prevented because of the ‘acquisition and possession of property as well as rights.’ The lover, he explains, ‘who must look upon his or her beloved as the owner of property must also come to feel his or her particularity’ militating against the community of their life – a particularity that consists in his or her being bound up with ‘dead things’ that do not belong to the other and remain of outside of their necessity unity.
The institution of property Hegel here related to the fact that man had come to live in a world that, though molded by his own knowledge and labor, was no longer his, but rather stood opposed to his inner needs a strange world governed by inexorable laws, a ‘dead’ world in which human life is frustrated” (Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, 34).