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Clutter and place

Potts, Tracey

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Authors



Contributors

Tim Edensor
Editor

Ares Kalandides
Editor

Uma Kothari
Editor

Abstract

This chapter explores the complex relationship between stuff and place as a way of interrogating the contemporary media obsession with decluttering. While the very idea of place connotes order (as in the maxim ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’), place is also made via material means, made inhabitable with stuff. Things might get in the way, becoming clutter, but, equally, there is no getting way from things. By critically examining the five common steps to a decluttered life, the chapter shows how the wildness of things is drastically underestimated in bestselling self-help guides. More, the magic of decluttering and of remaining clutter-free for life can be critically reframed as the operations of what Michel Foucault terms ‘technologies of the self’. Doreen Massey, with her notion of ‘throwntogetherness’, is, further, brought in to offer an object lesson to the likes of Kondo, showing how a messier encounter between people and things might help to allow clutter to speak back to, rather than simply unsettle, place.

Citation

Potts, T. (2020). Clutter and place. In T. Edensor, A. Kalandides, & U. Kothari (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Place. London: Taylor & Francis (Routledge)

Acceptance Date May 1, 2020
Publication Date Jun 7, 2020
Deposit Date Oct 7, 2020
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Publisher Taylor & Francis (Routledge)
Book Title The Routledge Handbook of Place
Chapter Number 43
ISBN 9781138320499
Public URL https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/4944880
Publisher URL https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429453267/chapters/10.4324/9780429453267-43
Related Public URLs https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Place/Edensor-Kalandides-Kothari/p/book/9781138320499

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