The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture by Scott Herring

Abstract

THE HOARDERS: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture. By Scott Herring. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 2014.Scott Herring's The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture is a provocative book that interrogates contemporary psychology's treatment of hoarding as a mental illness. Herring demonstrates that hoarder is not a transhistorical reality resulting from defective DNA or deteriorating neurons, but a cultural construct embodying and enforcing powerful norms about appropriate attitudes and behaviors toward objects. People who flagrantly violate these norms face medico-juridical consequences, and the spectacles made of hoarders function as visible reminders of how we should not engage with (8). Without discounting that many people who hoard suffer and cause harm, Herring questions whether hoarding invariably leads to or results from mental anguish or trauma; when it doesn't, Herring calls upon readers to [l]et objects and owners have their quiet, in their peace. It would be nice if these things somehow became less important, more immaterial, not quite so much cause for concern (141).Herring's critique is informed by culture studies, queer studies, and disability studies, though his genealogical method is most indebted to the work of Michel Foucault. Herring limits the scholarly apparatus throughout, relegating most of it to a brief Note on Method and to endnotes. Instead, he devotes his efforts to the explication, contextualization, and analysis of four fascinating genealogies that illuminate some of the steps by which the formation and pathologization of hoarder became imaginable. Chapter 1 discusses the wealthy, elderly Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, who be- came sensational news in 1947 after their corpses were found in their Harlem brownstone, which contained over one hundred tons of ranging from several grand pianos to scads of pinup posters (19) as well as stacks of bundled newspapers that had collapsed on Langley, burying him alive. Herring argues that the brothers came to be seen not only as embodiments of the perceived social disorganization of Harlem, but also as material and mental deviant[s] (43) whose strangest curios turned out to be their own bodies. Chapter 2 describes the furor surrounding the estate sale of Andy Warhol, whose massive, eclectic collection of personal belongings ranged from paintings and sketches by famous artists to chewing gum and a plaster lobster. Herring contends that Warhol's desire seemingly to save everything ran afoul of efforts to rationalize, legitimize, and standardize the collectibles market, separating objects worth saving, selling, or buying from ephemera and junk. …