The Time of Clutter: Anti-Kairos and Storage Space in North American Domestic Life

ABSTRACT:Clutter fragments the temporality of the home and storage space offers a technology of containment with which to keep these portals to the past and future open, but not openly visible. Storage space is not a spatial but a temporal solution, secreting objects that do not belong to this time until such time as they might be more appropriate. Possessors of such objects speak of being transported to specific moments of their past, or in Benjaminian fashion, of historical objects that provide a sensorial window into worlds otherwise unlived. Other future-oriented things provide access to dormant or merely imagined selves projected into Borgesian forking futures, alternate paths that owners refuse to relinquish even when their possibility is lost. Clutter, by definition out of place, is thus also extra-temporal, and untold acreage is occupied in wait for a near future when "there will be more time" to sort the debris. Storage, thus, offers a haven for "anti-kairos"—things of an inappropriate time. Indeed, the accumulation of clutter is itself an image of time, a means of understanding Bergson's durée as an unfolding expansion of heterogenous unity that envelops us. Finally, the paper considers the relationship between these spatiotemporal trajectories of objects and the expanded spacetime of households as a kind of social value in itself, but one that must be kept balanced with the more kula-like value of circulation.