Neither Use Nor Ornament

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Neither use nor ornament is a book about personal productivity, narrated from the perspective of its obstacles: clutter and procrastination. It offers a challenge to the self-help fantasy of a life lived in a permanent state of efficiency and flow. There is now a vast industry dedicated to solving the 'problems' of clutter and procrastination. But the recommendations of storage gurus, house doctors, life coaches, lifehackers, and productivity bloggers invariably fail to recognise the social and historical context of mess and exhaustion. Neither use nor ornament seeks to deepen our understanding of the wider forces that shape our attitudes to storage and attention. It traces the historical emergence of personal productivity culture over the last hundred years, revealing how it made the jump from the factory floor into the home - from Henry Ford to Marie Kondo. Contemporary projections of the good, productive life rely on images of failure. This book seeks to open up the state of being neither use nor ornament - a phrase applied both to redundant things and people - in order to unravel the moral narratives that hold individuals to account for their inefficiencies and muddles.