Compulsive Hoarding: Psychopathologies of Print,Phenomenologies of Text

Abstract

Over the past two decades, compulsive hoarding – that seemingly-new psychopathology – has quickly progressed from academic departments of psychology to mass-media portrayals of consumption that rely on spectacles of the grotesque. What these pop-culture portrayals of the phenomenon gloss over is that those labeled ‘hoarders’ are very often specifically concerned with the hoarding of books, newspapers, and other textual objects. Even non-textual items are saved for quasi-textual purposes, as repositories of information that do not deserve to be destroyed. After comparison with forms of textual hoarding evident in early print culture (specifically, in early-modern Britain), this essay argues that contemporary hoarding phenomena should be understood in light of the ongoing digitisation of textuality, and that a full accounting of textual hoarding must move from the psychological to the phenomenological. While there is a spectrum of hoarding behaviors that should not be oversimplified, physical textual hoarding seems to constitute a hedge against the etherealisation of text. On the contrary, by the functionalist leanings of contemporary behavioral psychology, the emerging pattern of hoarding digital texts allows for the imperfectly-realised possibility of a hoard without impairment. An implication for elite critical practice is that in the growth of the digital hoard, and the growing reliance on the search function to navigate it, the critic may be liberated from the traditional aspiration to an absolute mastery which grows ever-more untenable, but at the cost of self-imposed limitations that are needed so to enable speech.