ABSTRACT
In contemporary capitalist societies, disorganization is a shameful state of affairs. Nowhere is its threat epitomized so vividly as in hoarding—the act of amassing an excess of material things with little or no apparent value. This chapter works across three available narratives of hoarding to build a novel alternative, which holds that addressing hoarding is a communicative practice that enacts and circulates the affective boundary between human and nonhuman bodies. This fourth narrative casts the hoarder as “organizational killjoy”, a short circuit that interrupts the normative flow of affect through object circulation. I demonstrate the proposed approach with a performative encounter that seeks to know/enact hoarding through multiple modes of address. Ultimately, I contend that 1) the eternal threat of disorganization is a fear of difference gone wild, and 2) the attendant quest for organization is a mandate to produce and control difference through the regulation of affect. The argument suggests that relations of difference are even more, and differently, constitutive of capitalist organizing than previously considered.
