The weight of things: Object-oriented mania, citational hoarding and critical-mess literature

This creativecritical essay investigates the author’s object-oriented mania and her anticipatory relationship to “happy objects” (Ahmed, 2010) through the lens of her obsessive-compulsive disorder, shadowed by memories around inheritance, a family propensity toward hoarding and the empty promise of capitalism under a “regime of crisis ordinariness” (Berlant, 2011). The chaos of the hoard, in which objects congeal rather than circulate, suspends the hoard in a time outside of time, similar to Kristeva’s (1982) chora (Lepselter, 2011). While the hoarder as artist manifests a “poetics of accumulation” (Falkoff, 2021), a writer as hoarder amasses a citational hoard via reference manager. This essay applies Zinman and Reese’s “critical-mess theory” (qtd. in Singer, 2001) to creative writing, arguing that critical mess literature demands a collaged form where one might draw conclusions from patterns made evident by the accumulated, intertextual, polyvocal hoard. It poses citations managers as a modern tool of Lévi-Strauss’s (2021) bricoleur. In “stringing up a narrative” of things (Juckes, 2017), the author puts word-things into place through object recollection, curation and citation, forming an interweb of narrative objects to demonstrate the application of critical mess theory with and through life writing.