Option 1: In very different ways, Herring and Bennett shift the focus to the “lives” of objects and what happens when we treat material objects as though they possessing a social/political meaning. Discuss the positive or negative repercussions of this in Herring, Bennett, or both texts.
Option 2: Ngai discusses the poetics of disgust and claims that it goes mostly undiscussed in prevailing literary and psychoanalytic theories (bear in mind that this article is 14 years old). Do you agree with her? Do the many theoretical (and literary) texts we’ve read thus far support or dispute Ngai’s argument?
Option 3: Ngai describes disgust as “turning away” from an object in repulsion rather than moving toward it in desire. Yet as we saw with Herring, a collector’s excessive desire for an object (or over-attachment to a category of objects) can be perceived by outsiders as disgusting. Is there a contradiction in this? Explore some of the tensions between positive and negative affect (e.g., desire versus disgust) in Herring or some other text we’ve read thus far in the course.
Option 1
I find the social meaning of Herring very negative, in the way Harlem is depicted. Harlem and its people are described as an “itis” like a disease an ailment, something to catch.
In 1947 journalists became aware of the death of the Collyer brothers. The brothers lived in a mansion on Fifth Avenue in Harlem, NYC, Journalists speculated that the mansion was packed with great wealth. The emphasis was that “an immoral stockpile of money”(p32) was hoarded by the brothers. The newspapers of he day published reports of antiques, crystals, and rare oddities were to be found in the mansions. Public curiosity drew large crowds to the site. People wanted to see the treasures, that one can only dream of.
The big question through was why would two old white men be living in Harlem? (p24) The answer to the question can be found in the term ” the juxtapositions “Harlem” , and the suffix “itis”. The term “Harlemitis” was used to legitimazize the brothers as white bodies living in Harlem in an “entropic urban wasteland”(p24). The media described Harlem ” has always been known as a breeding place for vice, crime, and demoralization of all kinds.” The poor brothers left behind after white flight to the suburbs, with all their riches in the crime, immoral, filthy Harlem.
Journalists described their hoarding as a means of the brothers hiding their riches, and devising booby – traps to safeguard them from the people of Harlem. Once it was revealed that there were no riches, no vast fortunes or rare oddities. The mansion was just full of junk and had to be destroyed in the end.
The emphasis was put on things, what was two white bodies doing in an entropic urban wasteland, known as Harlemitis. The terms and wording in the article was used to keep the brothers separate and above the people of Harlem, even though they lived in filth and garbage.
Throughout “Vibrant Matter”, Jane Bennett talks about vitality which she defines as “the capacity of things- edibles, commodities, storms, metals- not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans, but also to act as quasi-agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (Page IX). Bennett then combines this idea with many political theorists and philosophical thinkers to show that politics or social meanings are not something that are purely human conditions. What kept crossing my mind as I tried to prepare my book review was exactly how does Bennett (and now in a sense Herring) propose to change decades of thinking that is acknowledged in the book despite a heavy background of case studies, sources and people (the theorists/philosophers)? Bennett’s viewpoint seems like a recommendation or a sensibility and I think that is where a negative affect can be found. I also question as to how Bennett might work with “green philosophy” which has come up in other readings? I see a distinction in Bennett and her writings (perhaps because of her focus on politics or on “things” which is as broad a distinction as can be) and others whose sole focus is on habitat preservation or protecting natural resources and endangered species. Bennett is drawing attention to issues but making one aware of how to fix them is a different matter. This line of thinking can border on the abstract for those that are unfamiliar with it such as myself, so why are the new political meanings that come from shifting the focus onto the lives of objects never spelled out or questioned if they are made achievable? Despite this initial misgiving, Bennett’s work does seem to be a thought experiment of which I think there is value in. Perhaps it’s up to someone else to read the work and find something they can take a step further. I also find it interesting how I experience these sentiments well after reading and writing about “Vibrant Matter” for the first time. As I skimmed the preface looking for what could be a positive or negative affect, I found myself finding more questions than explanations in Bennett’s writing.
I found the excerpts from Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter so captivating that I will probably read more of the book this summer. Bennett’s aim “to highlight what is typically cast in the shadow: the material agency or effectivity of nonhuman or not-quite-human things” is far more vital than it sounds a first glance (ix). At stake, for Bennett, is the detrimental effects of a human-centric mindset, a “hubris” that allows humans to destroy the earth through “fantasies of conquest and consumption” (ix). The idea that non-human matter is not alive, not important, not capable of action is, for Bennett, utterly incorrect and dangerous (her example of how marking matter in this way allows humans to see waste as “away” is particularly relevant to previous class readings and discussions). With Vibrant Matter, then, Bennett hopes to disrupt and demystify the way we see matter, to make us see outside of ourselves and accept “the agent contributions of nonhuman forces” (xvi). Bennett succinctly communicates this reason for writing in the final lines of Chapter 8: “I believe that encounters with lively matter can chasten my fantasies of human mastery, highlight the common materiality of all that is, expose a wider distribution of agency, and reshape the self and its interests” (122).
I could see this being relevant to a variety of disciplines. This first step, seeing all matter – ‘living’ or ‘nonliving’, human or nonhuman – as agentic, as important, could be invaluable for opening minds to a number of power imbalances. I am excited to read more.
Herring articulates a tension between the positive affect of so-called “hoarders” towards their possessions and the negative affect of a society that has “pathologized those who hold on to their stuff for too long, who clutter their homes too much, who do not clean that often, and who harbor too many things” (1). This tension emerges not only as a question of personal perspective, but of morality: “the hoarder’s material deviance is best viewed as a moral panic over stuff” (7). He offers as an example the television show Hoarders, and one episode in particular: Jill, who brings home pumpkins ostensibly to bake pies only to let them rot, is immune to the disgust it provokes in her family and the show’s cleaning crew. Jill is described as “pretty sick” and her house as “scary,” but she herself is grateful to the rotting pumpkin, thanking it as it is carried out of her house and even halting its removal so that she can scour it for seeds (10).
A similar “moral panic over stuff” can be seen in Joshua Reno’s “Your Trash is Someone’s Treasure,” but here we can also observe the gray areas between negative and positive affect, and even a transition from one to the other within an individual subject. Some of the garbage workers Reno interviews start off with an aversion to the trash they collect and process every day, but gradually come to see value in certain elements of it through the practice of scavenging. Reno describes rubbish as “an ongoing social process,” but it also enacts an ongoing subjectival process in those who work with it, one that allows for the possibility of transforming negative affect into positive.
In the excerpts from “Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture”, Herring talks about hoarding being a psychological disorder and discusses factors that lead to the beginning of hoarding. In his view, depression may be one of the reasons of hoarding, but the real beginning can be traced back to history when the city started expanding. Urban changes brought fear to different racial groups, and Herring uses the case of Collyer brothers to depict a negative outcome of assigning material objects political meaning. The story of famous Collyer brothers focuses on two wealthy individuals moving to Harlem before the neighborhood experienced influx of new group of residents. The continual arrival of working-class blacks in the 1920s until 1940s, created “disturbed social relationships” (24) in a neighborhood that was “originally a haven for middle-class and upper-class whites such as the Collyer family” (24). As a consequence of this urban change, Collyers protested against disorganized slum that was once “a beautiful neighborhood” (26). Even though brothers resembled organized white elite, in the surrounding of black disorganization, they wanted to use self-presentation to correspond to the environment in fear for their life. However, their clothing that represented “the decay of the personal life” (27), and their house that looked “as if no one lived in it” (27), show how they treated material objects as if they had political meaning. As a result, they died of hoarding all valuable objects that mattered to them because they couldn’t express their true identities. Another example Herring mentions is the story of Jill, a hoarder participating in the show Hoarders. Besides keeping “the eggs, the jars of green olives, the ground buffalo meat, and other semi-refrigerated goods whose expiration dates have long since passed” (10), Jill gets emotional when asked to throw rotten things away. At that moment, worthless material objects get social meaning as they are turned “into personal treasures” (11). Nevertheless, not only is hoarding harmful for Jill’s well-being, but also for her son’s life. He is likely to experience a difficult time dealing with objects later on in life and may even resist relationship with his parents once he has his own family. Therefore, hoarding as a mental illness is not only destructive for individuals possessing it, but also for their surroundings. In my opinion, hoarding involves more negatives repercussions than positive.
I decided to highlight how Jane Benette describes the dangers of treating material objects as if they possessed a social/political meaning although she argues for the importance of recognizing material objects as living things that contribute to shaping society as a vital materialist.
Benette is aware that by treating things on the same ground with people, one allows for “the treatment of people as mere things” (12). This is one of the important side effects of attaching a meaning to material objects. If we were to compare a gun or an atomic bomb to a person in terms of killing power, a person would be clearly inferior and possess less value. Benette argues for “promoting healthy and enabling instrumentalization, rather than of treating people as ends-in-themselves, because to face up to the compound nature of the human self is to find it difficult even to make sense of the notion of a single end-in-itself” (12). It is easy to dismiss moralism and favor physiology. However, moral questions almost always follow when meanings are attached to non-human objects. In modern society, humans are often treated as mere objects by governments. How can we explain the logic behind human experiments the laws preventing people from ending their lives? Maybe I am thinking too much about Foucault, but the idea of treating objects just like humans scares me.
I decided to highlight how Jane Benette describes the dangers of treating material objects as if they possessed a social/political meaning although she argues for the importance of recognizing material objects as living things that contribute to shaping society as a vital materialist.
Benette is aware that by treating things on the same ground with people, one allows for “the treatment of people as mere things” (12). This is one of the important side effects of attaching a meaning to material objects. If we were to compare a gun or an atomic bomb to a person in terms of killing power, a person would be clearly inferior and possess less value. Benette argues for “promoting healthy and enabling instrumentalization, rather than of treating people as ends-in-themselves, because to face up to the compound nature of the human self is to find it difficult even to make sense of the notion of a single end-in-itself” (12). It is easy to dismiss moralism and favor physiology. However, moral questions almost always follow when meanings are attached to non-human objects. In modern society, humans are often treated as mere objects by governments. How can we explain the logic behind human experiments the laws preventing people from ending their lives? Maybe I am thinking too much about Foucault, but the idea of treating objects just like humans scares me.
Prompt 1
When talking about the political and social meaning of objects, Herring states that “there is no natural relation to our objects” (17). Based on this claim, he goes into the problematic of city’s disorganization. He uses the story of brothers Collyer to describe how self-representation depends on the circumstances in which the person is. Self-representation of Collyer brothers is an outcome of the events that happened in Harlem between 1920s and 1940s, when the neighborhood received a great number of Negro immigrants that changed the culture of the environment. A deviant disorganization and hoarding was an answer to the growing anxiety over “racial pollution” (27), neighborhood’s disorder and the “decay of the personal life” (27). Even though Collyer brothers suffered mental inability to let go of their stuff, after their death the collection of their material objects was regarded as “fascinating” (35). Traditional oddities failed under the new wave of curiosity that was later well accepted by bourgeois collectors. Herring mentions that hoarding produced “a perfect and completed picture of the world” (37) and gave an opportunity to notice exotic things. Further on, he refers to curiosa as a popular psychopathology that became “the buzz of many cities” (46). After their death, Collyer’s story is used as a portrait of a mental place in which New York citizens were found in the early to mid-twentieth century due to the fear of immigration. This story shows that hoarding although hazardous for the individuals ever since its creation also brought a new form of art and lifestyle. Even though Herring talk about hoarding as a type of mental illness, artists use it as an inspiration for their pieces.