This paper attempts to emphasize the interminable labor that goes into domestic
organization. In this, clutter is not seen as a failure of domestic performance, a
categorical hemorrhage, a place of laziness, or the inability to deaccession. Instead,
clutter is the site of categorical negotiation at its most “condensed” and “concentrated,” in
the words of the DJ and the Magpie Sculptor, respectively. Clutter is considered a point
of uncertainty, where the destabilization of household flows allows for new systems to be
forged with unique, tacit logics. Scholars have referred to this as the “thrown-
togetherness” (Luzia, 2011) of a household—a sense of domestic identity grounded not in rigid, stable categories but in the residual categories of otherness. While self-help texts
urge the eradication of clutter, this study acknowledges that an integral component of a
home is found within clutter and that sociological and organizational lessons may be
gleaned from these tacit strategies.
The clutter discussed in this study enacted aspects of Mary Douglas’ notions of
symbolic contamination, as discussed within Purity and Danger. While participants
executed cleansing rituals operationalized as organizational systems, some participants
explicitly thrived in disorder—running contrary to Douglas’ theories. Most participants
shared an ambivalent appreciation for their objects, framing them not as contaminating or
polluting but instead an unwieldy comingling of aspects of their identity, the convergence
production. In these examples clutter is not simply clean or dirty but a hybrid of the two,
a quasi-dirt wavering in and out of redemption. Affording the time to appreciate
accumulated objects was enough of a sanitizing ritual for some, such as the Magpie
Sculptor’s wicker ring; attention reversed the production of kipple, revivifying treasured objects.
Individual household strategies for dealing with clutter provide grounded insight
into the non-linear and discontinuous nature of object relevance. An oscillation between
object appreciation and invisibility within the morass of clutter was present in all
participants’ households, with each presenting individual logic for retention and deaccession. Deaccession policies, present in libraries and households alike, are
complicated by this uncertainty of value—especially under the pressurized circumstances
of financial instability common for artists and young people. While taxonomy design
traditionally frowns upon the inclusion of an “other” category, household ecologies do not have the freedom to forbid its existence. Instead, the presence of otherness signaled a
just-in-case retention (such as the Zinemaker’s emergency axe), or a sublime
accumulation of objects taken out of circulation because of their preciousness (the
Musician’s mugs or the Magpie Sculptor’s transcendent objects).
Keeping the inevitability of otherness in mind, the affordances of clutter are worth
exploring and operationalizing. Within the domestic sphere, these areas operated as
signatures of identity; they allowed a comingling of both sacred and profane objects in
tide pools of precious tokens and almost-trash; they deferred the burden of categorization
and holistic assessments of value by providing murky, ambiguous places for emergent
opportunities for serendipitous information encounters or the emergence of new
categories, elided by culturally-restricted perspectives. “Widespread consent to specific
opacities is the most straightforward equivalent of nonbarbarism,” writes postcolonial theorist Éduard Glissant (p.194), “We clamor for the right to opacity for everyone.”
While transparency allows for efficient categorization, what might be gained from
information and library science consenting to specific opacities of indeterminacy? Is a
form of shelter provided in the eaves of residual categories, a home for the inchoate or
syncretic? If nothing else, what can information and library science learn from
information resistant to classification, acting as a mirror to our own disciplinary
syncopations and rituals? While the proposition of a “cluttered library” is a difficult sell
to information professionals, connotations of magic continue to accompany cultural
representations of overfilled, dusty, and labyrinthine reservoirs of books. There is a
lurking reverence for lacunae of taxonomic specificity; can information systems
participate in the appreciation of this magic?
Breaking from bourgeois notions of domestic propriety, participants’ homes were
sites of trauma, responsibility, aspirations, and relationships—all messes that constitute a
life. In his 1961 interview with Tom Driver, Samuel Beckett states, “To find a form that
accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now." In addition to forms, this study
encourages artists and homemakers alike to continue developing systems that
accommodate their mundane and sublime messes: the places we call home.
While studies of domestic clutter have developed lush narratives of personal
experience, further research must be done to understand it on a quantitative level. The
were in their late 20s to mid 30s and living in close geographical proximity. Future
studies with an even more granular demographic would offer greater specificity, while a
broadened demographic focus would offer a wider, more encompassing general