Life Itemised: Lists, Loss, Unexpected Significance, and the Enduring Geographies of Discard

Abstract

This paper focuses on practices and spaces of acquisition, possession, and destruction in order to understand object value. It is framed around the list, or inventory, as one way in which we attempt to organise and order consumption. Exploring three different categories of list (the abandoned shopping list, Michael Landy's inventory of personal possessions, and the ‘ Pieces of Me’ listings of individuals' fifteen most-valued possessions), I argue that lists act as systems of labelling and ordering—scripting devices that help us to manage the mundanity and weighty materiality of consumption. But in ordering objects, such taxonomies also materialise our wishes, dreams, hopes, fears, and failures. They reveal too the ambiguities of value that are attributed to different categories of good and the impossibilities of erasure. Things linger and haunt materially and in our memory. The paper makes two broad conceptual points. It reveals that value and significance can reside in the most unlikely of places, and may emerge through practices of discard, loss, and remembering as well as through more conventional processes of production and purchase. It attests to the enduring power of the absent presence and the difficulties of erasure: objects die but do not disappear; things are dismantled, destroyed, and disposed of but remain in countless material and immaterial forms—traces, remnants, fragments, and memories. Objects have immaterial lives that continue long beyond their material presence in the world. It reveals the ways in which our possessions accrue meaning-value through biogeography. Things come to matter through our intimate relations with them, object and subject combined and entwined, inseparable in mind and memory. Our relations to our things are sensory, bodily, evocative, and profound. They are also enduring, potent, powerful, inarticulate, and at times unbearably evocative.