Live methods and live things: Cultivating attentiveness to dormant things to develop a vital sociology of the everyday

Abstract

This article focuses upon unnoticed objects in the home, such as those stuffed in a junk drawer, to explore how we can be attentive to the everyday in cultivating a ‘live sociology’ which illuminates the close at hand, locating the shared, public and moral in the everyday. I argue that attentiveness to the vibrancy of everyday things can expand the possibilities of a vital sociology. Attentiveness is a way to retrain the ‘sociological gaze’ away from the unusual to the unnoticed elements of everyday lives and objects. I consider here both what we are attentive to – affects, connections, potentials, materiality – as well as how we can cultivate attentiveness – through ‘being-with’ data and forms of slow scholarship. I do this by drawing on fieldwork in the UK on objects that are kept but not currently being used. Forgotten things covered with dust on a shelf may seem ‘dead’ or inert, yet framing these as ‘dormant’ exposes their histories, hauntings as well as imagined futures. The article takes case studies of junk drawers, bags of old cables, and other unnoticed objects to explore what happens when we are attentive to dormant things and how a seemingly personal and private collection allows the possibilities for connection and can materialise people’s hopes, and expose social inequities. Finally, I develop the ethics of attentiveness as both a practical engagement in research as well as a core value of a vital sociology in how we tell people’s stories.

Foreign currency; plastic name-badges; batteries (which may not work); several dice; a collection of Allen keys; unused headphones; a child’s old hair clip; a fraying dog lead; a camera flash; a couple of electrical cables. These are all items I encountered in someone’s ‘junk drawer’ as part of research into the things people keep in the home but are not currently using. A similar arrangement of items was found in a drawer in most participants’ homes. The junk drawer is certainly very familiar, but it is rarely the focus of sociological or any academic attention. It is a combination of seemingly meaningless things (a camera flash from a camera no longer owned) and those which resonate with histories and connections to others (the lead of a deceased dog, a daughter’s hair clip). In this article I take up the challenge of how to be attentive to these unnoticed materials of everyday life, and to argue that attentiveness allows us to develop a vital sociology. These items in the junk drawer are diverse – in terms of their materiality as well as their meanings and histories – yet in this article I argue that what they have in common is that they are currently ‘dormant’, an important phase in the lives of things. Being attentive involves not only noticing these things but also actively tuning in to their material vibrancies, how things are alive, how they resonate with pasts, potentials and how they affect people.

The article is inspired by the possibilities and challenges of a vital sociology of the everyday, which Back and Wright (2022) suggest should illuminate and re-enchant the close at hand, locating the shared, public and moral in the everyday. Back and Puwar’s (2012a) monograph Live Methods was in part a response to the potential crisis which Savage and Burrows (2007) argued was facing empirical sociology due to expansions in commercially and digitally produced data. In Live Methods, Back and Puwar (2012a) proposed an alternative possibility: to develop a vital sociology through live methods. I build on this possibility here and seek to expand how we think about ‘live’ to include its material dimensions and the methodological challenges and possibilities this poses. The first challenge I take up is how to notice and understand the unseen everyday, and to move beyond common-sense interpretations as well as to see its importance. This is in part a methodological task, and in this article I focus specifically upon attentiveness. Attentiveness is present – albeit in different forms – in Stewart’s (2007) discussion of ordinary affects, Mason’s (2018) ways of attuning to connections and charges and Bennett’s (2010) attentiveness to matter. However, there has not yet been a focused exploration of what is meant by attentiveness, how we can be attentive and its potential. In this article I centre this as a route into a vital sociology of the everyday, as it allows us to think about the unseen and unnoticed. Attentiveness is something we ‘do’ (as a method), as an orientation (a theoretical approach) – both of which come together through what we are attentive to (the empirical).

The second challenge I address is how to tune in to the vibrancies of everyday life and in doing so to critically engage with how we understand ‘life’ and the vital. I do this by focusing attention on everyday things and their material potency, which invite us to expand how we think about everyday life. I develop the idea of dormancy to argue that attentiveness to the vibrancy and potency of everyday things (Bennett, 2010) is key to theorising and developing a vital sociology. Thinking about the vibrancy of things in ways that may not be verbalised lies beyond our usual modes of understandings. By developing an ‘attentiveness’ (Stewart, 2007) to things, their affects and potencies through a series of material methods (Woodward, 2019), I develop approaches which do not just focus on what things symbolise, but their resonances, potencies and possibilities. If we are able to be attentive then we can develop a more expansive vital sociology and way of thinking about how people feel connected to each other and the world they live in. It allows us to think about the importance of potential in how people understand their lives and relationships.

The article starts with an outline of what a vital sociology is, using literature on the everyday to think through the challenges and possibilities of the unnoticed everyday. I develop this by bringing in the theoretical literature on material vibrancy (Bennett, 2010; Ingold, 2010) to explore how these theories can enhance our understanding of the vital and introduce the concept of dormancy. I outline how attentiveness can help us tune in to the vibrancies of everyday lives, and explore how we can develop attentiveness through focusing on what we are being attentive to. I have used particular methods to support this attentiveness, with a particular emphasis on ‘being with’ the data; however, this is not a conventional ‘empirical’ article nor a methods one, as attentiveness is always theoretically informed (in my case how I orient myself to ‘things’) and empirically specific (things that are unused, junk drawers). The relationship between theory and the empirical is iterative, as I think through ‘attentiveness’ in the space and relationships between the empirical and the theories of vibrant things. The article is written through examples of people’s junk drawers and other unused things to think specifically about how to be attentive to unnoticed objects, and how they are ‘vital’ through the idea of dormancy. The article expands three key dimensions from the data to illustrate the potentials of attentiveness to vibrant things. First, how attention to the background and unnoticed can be uncomfortable but this discomfort shows how everyday objects are vital; second, how shared attentiveness can be a form of bearing witness as everyday things materialise connections to others; and finally, the implications of attention to the unnoticed objects in the home to think through how these private things are also public. Running through these themes is a discussion of the ethics of attentiveness, which I argue is at the heart of a vital sociology.

Vital sociology: How to notice the unnoticed

A vital sociology is concerned with life and is committed to attending to and amplifying life in a way that goes beyond common-sense understanding or explanations. Back and Wright (2022) make a case for a vital sociology that centres everyday life which seeks to understand that which ‘we recognise, that we partially comprehend, but not fully, their meaning, their significance, their history and to make a different kind of sense of the world’ (p. 201). Everyday life is what people do most of the time and a vital sociology is attentive to facets of life that resonate with people and that matter sociologically. Whilst there is an established literature on everyday life, there is still far more sociological attention on the ‘marked’ (the unusual or special) rather than the unmarked which is ‘unremarked on’ (Back & Wright, 2022, p. 201) and taken for granted (Scott, 2019). Notable social theorists such as Goffman (1959) or Morgan (2009) show how the ‘unnoticed’ is significant, through careful attention and observations of behaviours, relationships and practices. These practices are core to social life and understanding the world – the ordinary and everyday may not be glamorous but it is what we live most of the time. In noticing the unnoticed, the challenge is to go beyond common-sense answers as to why we keep things we are not using and why these things matter.

In saying that ‘culture is ordinary’ (Williams, 1958/1989), Williams positions culture as something routinely inhabited, not an elevated separate entity; so too, we can understand social relations and the societies we live in through attending to everyday life. Indeed, Back (2007) argues that the everyday is where people live the consequences of the modern world and find their humanity in a world that often dehumanises them. Even if facets of the unnoticed everyday may be lived in the home, they are not just private or individual, but also where the public is situated. The challenge of a vital sociology is to find these public, social shared concerns in the seemingly most ordinary and mundane details (Back, 2015): to produce a sociology that matters. The connections between the private and public, personal and social have always been at the heart of sociology, as effectively conceived in Wright Mills’ (1959) sociological imagination, which allows a connection to be made between our everyday troubles and broader social changes which are historically emergent and particular. The sociological imagination involves making connections between how people think and experience and broader social structures. It allows us to see ‘personal troubles’ as framed by social structures and that everyday troubles are a ‘public’ concern (Wright Mills, 1959). In this article I develop the argument that how we do this is through attentiveness and critical reflections – it is more than just representing people’s stories, as stories of everyday life resonate with people that live it, but goes beyond this to critically engage with what this means.

At the heart of this article is how we might pay attention to the everyday and ordinary as part of a vital sociology (see Holmes & Hall, 2020 for methodological discussions of approaching the everyday). It may involve thinking differently about what the everyday is and where it is located. Stewart (2007) explores ‘ordinary affects’ through sites we do not always give sociological attention to, such as impulses, sensations and daydreams. How we understand affects does not involve necessarily asking what these mean to people but rather consider how they may be ‘felt’. This is rather different to thinking about what things mean and raises questions then about dimensions of everyday life that are particularly hard to think about (see Gunaratnam, 2013 on death for example). The material dimensions of life can be similarly hard to think about and invite and challenge us to ‘tune in’ to the stuff itself, as well as its potencies and ‘charges’ (Mason, 2018).

What is the vital of vital sociology? The vibrancy of things

Savage and Burrows (2007) propose that the proliferation of commercially and digitally generated data presents profound challenges for empirical sociologists. This is in part a methodological challenge, and Back and Puwar (2012b) reorient the challenge to an engagement with how ‘live methods’ can allow us to develop a live sociology. Fitzgerald (2019) reframes the crisis Savage and Burrows (2007) outline as instead being a challenge in how we think about sociology’s relationship to life. What is meant by the ‘vital’ in vital sociology? Something is vital if it matters to us, as well as being a shorthand for ‘life’. Life is often taken as a counterpart to death and by implication when we describe things as ‘live’ they often carry positive connotations. Indeed Back (2012) talks about carrying out an ‘an autopsy on dead sociology’ (p. 20); the dead is something we want to move away from, and the live an aspiration. This is a potent image but, as Fitzgerald (2019) notes, binary: life or death. Instead, Fitzgerald (2019) thinks about what the edges of life are and tries to ‘push at the edges of what biologists think is possible for sustaining vitality’ (p. 128). This means trying to expand what our account of life it, as well as interrogating what we mean by life. Thinking about the edges of life resonates with Lambert’s (2018) discussion of ‘brinks’ (p. 191) between what we already know and what is possible to know as some things are ‘barely intelligible and lie beyond usual mechanisms of representation’ (p. 191).

Everyday objects stored in an attic or junk drawer certainly elude conventional methods or frames of understanding and representation. They would probably usually be considered outside of the realms of the vital, and far closer to the dead in terms of being unmoved and unused. But I would like to explore how we can bring to bear ideas of the vibrancy of materials and things on a sociology of everyday life. Objects are an entangled part of everyday lives and thinking about how these things are part of life is a route into thinking about the everyday. Whilst there is an extensive literature on how things are vibrant, this has not been so far used to develop a vital sociology, and here I position the life of unnoticed things as a ‘brink’ or ‘edge’ of what is currently understood. Things are part of life, and their vibrancy is a key part of understanding the everyday. Understanding things as vibrant is, Bennett (2010) argues, an ethical and political task as she explores how political and policy responses would be different if we understood the vitality of non-humans; such as the implications for how we understand consumption or waste if we think about lively matter that is potentially toxic as it accumulates. This is also a sociological and ethical task, where considering the vitality of things allows us to think differently about the unseen unnoticed everyday as key to how we think about social relations and publics.

Theories of the vibrancy of material things allows us to think about what we are attentive to and how. Bennett (2010) understands the vitality of matter as their capacity to act in the world as ‘quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own’ (Bennett, 2010, p. viii). Things or ‘matter’ have effects through what Bennett (2004) terms thing-power, which is how a thing ‘commands attention, exudes a kind of dignity, provokes poetry, or inspires fear’ (p. 350). People experience the effects of things/materials as joy, happiness, comfort or conversely as guilt, regret or a sense of loss. Material things can provoke us, challenge us, make us feel connected or even alone. These things don’t exist in isolation and are in relation to wider environments and ecologies; as Ingold (2010) argues, a ‘thing’ is a ‘gathering together of the threads of life’ (p. 10) as part of broader life ecologies. Ingold (2010) gives the example of the kite which had ‘lain lifeless on the table indoors’ (p. 8) when taken outside is a dancing around ‘kite-in-the-air’. The environment gives things life, and the kite unused in the home is lifeless. Although taking a very different theoretical position, Bennet also concurs with this idea that when objects are resting they are lifeless; Bennett (2004) argues that things are potent in their ability to ‘vibrate between different states of being, to go from trash/inanimate/resting to treasure/animate/alert’ (p. 354). In this article I make a case for the potency of things even when they are in a cupboard or attic. Life is more than the wind and environment, and a thing stashed away on a shelf still can be potent as it still has, in Stewart’s sense, ordinary affects. These affects start to point to the relations between people and things, and whilst Ingold writes very little about people, his idea of how things ‘invite us in’ points towards a way of thinking about these relations.

Writers such as Bennett write of ‘matter’ and Ingold reject terms such as objects, as both – albeit in very different ways – emphasise either the flows (Ingold, 2010) or the heterogenous and changing world of matter (Bennett, 2010). This however does not leave much space to consider things as autonomous; a chair is not just a gathering of the ‘threads of life’ but has a meaningful part of its life as a chair. Witmore (2021) argues that things ‘redefine their component parts in such a way that they are irreducible to them’ (p. 319) as a way think to about the relationship between matter as well as arguing that things have some autonomy. In this article I would like to consider things as they change (become dusty, rusted, or break) but are still experienced by people as autonomous things; this is true in everyday life as well as in the research encounter where we look at, touch and respond to an item such as clothing or a picture. Things are vibrant then in multiple ways; in ways which are material as well as how they intersect with the lives of people, and also broader social and cultural meanings (see Bartolini, 2015 on Mussolini’s bunker).

I would like to build here on the concept of material dormancy as a way to think about vibrancy, an idea previously introduced in my work on women’s wardrobes (Woodward, 2007) to account for clothing in the wardrobes that was not currently being worn but had not been discarded. Dormancy is a term that seemed to speak to what was happening to these items. Within the life sciences, dormancy is a feature of life – seeds, bulbs, even volcanoes – although it manifests differently; it is a necessary phase of life where diseases, animals or plants are present – not dead – but not active with normal functions suspended. For some plants and seeds this is a response to harsh environmental conditions over winter and is something that is manipulated in the freezing of eggs for example as part of fertility treatments; cryobiologists refer to this as latency or suspended animation (Radin, 2013). I argue this is instructive for thinking about things, and how we might understand their vitality.

It also has implications for how and what we are attentive to: it may mean being attentive to how things are vibrant in terms of their histories as well as potential futures, tuning in to how the things that are resting have potency. As a part of vital materiality that is largely ignored and poorly understood, understanding it has the potential to unlock their potencies. Thing power (Bennett, 2004) cannot be reducible to people’s subjectivity and their stories; whilst this means we pay heed to the things themselves, to understand their power and effects in this article I argue we also need to be attentive to people in order to be attentive to the humanity that Back suggests is so central to a vital sociology. Some accounts of the vibrancy of matter centre matter at the cost of people. I am interested in how we are attentive to people through things; how the vibrancy of matter can be brought to play in understanding people’s lives.

How do we develop a vital sociology of the everyday? Attentiveness

How we develop this vital sociology involves attentiveness and openness to the unnoticed and the potencies of things. To return to Wright Mills, the sociological imagination involves open-mindedness and playfulness in how we think critically about the world. This playfulness can involve approaching a topic from a different perspective. A vital sociology cultivates and develops the sociological imagination to be attentive to people’s lives but also critical about what this means. What Back and Puwar (2012b) call the ‘sociological craft’ requires imagination, to depict the vitalities of people’s lives in a way that is not just giving voice to people but thinking past what is self-evident, as well as providing an alternative story to public assumptions and perceptions. This craft is certainly concerned with methods but can also involve thinking in a different way about existing methods, of reading across the grain – such as visual methods being a route to the multi-sensory (Deger, 2016) and not just visual dimensions of life.

At the heart of this sociological craft is attentiveness. Zerubavel (2018) notes that the unmarked is not only unremarkable but also ‘unarticulated’ and I argue that we need to retrain our attention to the unmarked which is often forgotten about. I will here outline what being sociologically attentive means, thinking through honing our capacity to be affected, to understand the charges and potencies of things or connections. I will consider ways we do this through: being-with, slowness, noticing the quietness as well as the evidently potent, and to tune in to the vitalities of things. How to be attentive to things that are not usually noticed involves a conscious cultivation and an openness and readiness to notice. We need to ‘tune in’ to what we are trying to understand. As we are accustomed to centring people’s spoken accounts and their stories, tuning into things is a ‘countercultural kind of perceiving’ (Bennett, 2010, p. xiv). Thing-power is a theoretical frame as well as a route and way of understanding, a way to attend to the thing. Bennett starts from one example of some stuff that has accumulated in a storm drain: including a dead rat, a plastic cap. These are things we usually ignore and also ‘stuff that commanded attention’ and provoked affects in Bennett, how they shimmered in the sun. Ordinarily these would be unnoticed but being open to noticing then, these things commanded her attention.

We need to be open and prepared to let things affect us, and to understand in turn how these things affect the people that live with them. Looking at the contents of the junk drawer I opened this article with, the participant and I are paying attention to objects usually only looked at when being thrown out. This shared attention can make people feel embarrassed or tell stories that are not usually told as noticing the unnoticed is a route into thinking differently about people’s lives. Being attentive to things and their affects is in part noting their feel, colours, textures, through looking at, touching and also talking about (or not); it is also tuning in to how things affect people and also us. In her work on affinities, Mason (2018) discusses the need to be attuned to ‘potent connective charges and energies’ (p. 3). Thinking about charges and energies in how people encounter things is a potential route into going beyond things and their sensory relations. This involves not just noticing things or people, but also thinking about the whole encounter and what is said as well; this can help us to be open about how everyday things are vibrant. Tomlinson (2024) writes about critical attentiveness in her work on human–animal relations, which centres the ‘felt senses’ to understand the lively presence of animals.

This is challenging, as things are not always easily intelligible. Fraser (2012) developed attentiveness through long-term immersion, to be responsive to what matters (see also Gunaratnam, 2013 on being attentive to a situation of total pain). Slowing down and long-term immersion seems to be at odds with the ‘liveness’ of methods, such as in relation to the digital or responding to the current moment. Attentiveness can however necessitate a slowing down, a taking time to understand and think about what we are being attentive to and how we do it. The need to slow down emerges for Fraser (2012) from her encounter with an archive which she did not know how to enter into relations with, as it took her a long time to understand what mattered about the archive, this involved ‘living there for a while without knowing what it will yield’ (in the archive). This connects to Tolia-Kelly’s (2013) critique of approaches that are ‘looking-onto’ rather than ‘being-with’ where ‘looking into’ produces sterile and benign politics/encounters, rather than being ‘felt’ (p. 157). This dovetails with my earlier discussion of being attentive to the affects of things. In order to move beyond common sense or taken for granted understandings of things and how they are vital, means being open to being affected ourselves, as well as to how research participants are also being affected. The challenges of this means that there is a need to slow down and live with what we are trying to understand; this poses challenges when researching with people, and I will now move on to how this is possible.

Methodological routes into being attentive

Although this article is not providing a toolkit of methods, I here outline the methods used in my fieldwork to show how I developed an attentiveness through material methods (Woodward, 2019), which are part of a broader orientation to centre things, their relations and potencies and histories. In line with this, the project involves sampling participants through their spaces and capacity to store things. The sample includes 30 houses – 15 old Victorian houses (with extensive storage space – cellars and attics), 5 modern houses (with less built-in storage space, although often garages were the main space for storing), 10 flats (old and modern). Within this I sought a range of different living arrangements – couples, families, people living alone or flat-shares and the participants were a mixture of home owners, those who rented from private landlords as well as housing association properties. The methods were ethnographically informed; I did repeat visits within people’s homes using multiple methods and was able to generate an ethnographic sense of people, their lives and their homes. The methods involved a participant-led household tour where they showed and talked me through all of their spaces of dormant things, including focusing on some specific ones; I took photographs and drew maps of things and their spaces. I also carried out follow-up interviews about people’s broader attitudes to things and things they didn’t have anymore, as well as interviews around one specific space (such as a cupboard under the stairs, or a garage) and specific dormant things. This involved an ethical commitment to listen to people’s lives and treat them with respect as well as to respect the silences, and what people do not want to talk about and this ethical commitment extends to how I tell people’s stories and the analysis of data, as I sought to reflect on how I felt moved by people’s stories and lives.

The slowing down (Fraser, 2012) and ‘being-with’ (Tolia-Kelly, 2013) can be a methodological approach, but in my research, it was something I mainly did in my analysis. It was not possible to hang out in people’s attics for weeks on end in a way one might in an archive; I did have some longer interviews around individual spaces and objects and repeat visits allowed time to think and process. Attentiveness for me was possible through ‘being-with’ the data; the ‘vitality’ of data to affect us (Lupton, 2020) comes from both the materiality of different forms of data as well as the way that the data acted as a medium through which I could tune in to the vitality of stuff and people in the research encounters. This research was unfunded, which meant that I was able to take time thinking about the data, listening again to what people said, looking at the images, and the sketches. This slowing down matters when we are working with everyday unnoticed objects as whilst some items affect people very powerfully, others have much more subtle affects, and I needed time to tune in to these quiet charges and potencies. Elsewhere (Woodward, 2019) I have formulated attentiveness as noticing things that are not immediately evident, unspoken or not foregrounded, listening to what is said and noticing silences, the material features of things and where they are kept.

Bringing the background objects into the foreground

I opened the article with an example of a junk drawer, which raises some of the challenges of being attentive to unnoticed and often unseen things. Here I take the example of old electrical cables to see how we can be attentive to these, as well as what insights this provides. People themselves dismiss cables as unimportant when we look around their homes. These are not ‘special’ in the sense that there are rarely any personal memories attached nor are they held in any high regard, and yet they are still kept. All of my participants kept old electrical cables, but people rarely had elaborate narratives as to why they kept them, or about the cables themselves. More often than not people were unsure what appliance they came with, and the bag/drawer/box tended to be dismissed as ‘just old cables’. And so, we could easily dismiss them as unimportant. They are examples of what Stewart (2007) calls ‘shared banalities’ (p. 38); as my participants often asked me if other people kept these too, there was an evident relief people felt when reassured others had them too. Moreover, I would argue they are important because people have little to say about them. This can be illustrated further by one participant who says when I ask to look in their bag of cables ‘I really should get rid of them shouldn’t I’, as often people were embarrassed or awkward about what they had kept. When these unnoticed things are noticed and become the focus of attention people feel uncomfortable. Attentiveness shows their ‘background’ status, but also highlights broader moral discourses around items that we ‘should’ keep that are special; attention to a junk drawer makes people conscious of the number of items they have that are neither special nor used, as they feel exposed to negative moral associations of excessive materialism. The word ‘junk’ is used often as a shorthand for rubbish, with associations of being useless, and valueless. Declutterers would suggest we should get rid of these things (Meissner, 2019; Woodward, 2021); indeed the huge proliferation of decluttering programmes and books in the last decade and also the espousing of the aesthetics of minimalism makes old cables that people keep particularly interesting and notable. Whilst my participants may talk of potential use, in practice these cables will probably never be used, as new appliances come with new cables. The old cables are kept not just because people have failed to declutter but also as they materialise usefulness; they were so essential to the functioning of TVs, phones, computers, even if the attendant objects are gone or broken, they still evoke those uses. These old cables that amass in people’s junk drawers and attics bear testament to both an economy of wastefulness that produces new technologies which renders old cables obsolete and also to the care and respect that people have for things.

These are cables that have often survived the appliance they were connected to, which may have broken or been replaced. I have written elsewhere (Woodward, 2021) about how even seemingly meaningless things are expected to have a life in the home. In the main, this was not reflected on by my participants, but the following example is one where the interviewee articulates why she keeps one ordinary and unnoticed object. Tanya, a woman in her early 30s who lives with her partner and baby in a modern house, used to live in a flat which 9 years ago had a significant fire. Many things were destroyed, but some things survived – including her old Mac computer (which is an all-in-one unit). It is now nearly 20 years old and stored in the upstairs of her house. It can still be turned on, and works, such as to play music. The computer is 20 years old, it survived a fire and also ‘a tree fell on the house and it still worked. . . So I suppose it’s a little bit like – well, it’s lasted this long. Why would I chuck it out. . .’. She doesn’t go back to the computer but feels like she could, and part of its potency comes from its ability to survive. Like the cables, people respect the things that survive. Capitalist logics of growth (Meissner, 2019) determine that people need to keep buying more stuff; things are made to break or to go out of fashion as built-in obsolescence is part of this capitalist model. We need to get rid of things for the new things to come in, and the wastefulness inherent in this model is also found in decluttering, which presumes the disposal of unloved or unused things (Sandlin & Wallin, 2022). But when we pay attention to junk drawers it is apparent that people do not want to be wasteful even if they feel guilty for the amounts of things they own. People resist the short cycles of acquisition and disposal by having a junk drawer or bag of cables. Attention to junk drawers reveals this as well as the contradictory feelings of guilt and embarrassment that these junk drawers engender. It is also about the stuff itself. How cables and other technology work is often unknown as these objects are opaque; people do not often know what things are made of or indeed how they work. Their potency is also from their mystery as it looks useful, but people are unsure how it works or could be fixed.

Connecting to others: Bearing witness through shared attentiveness

Ordinary objects such as cables are kept for potential usefulness – even if that will never be realised – and often things are kept in case another person might want them. They are kept for reasons beyond just use or because they are special – as decluttering discourses presume. Daniel, who is in his late 60s and lives alone in a Victorian terrace, has a home full of things he keeps as they offer potential future connections to others. These are, in the main, very ordinary but potentially ‘useful’ things, like, for example, old banners that say ‘happy birthday’, which he keeps ‘just in case’ someone else wanted one, he could give it to them ‘and they say, “Good God, I never thought anyone still had one of those. I’m so lucky I found you. Are you sure I can have it?”’ The banners speak to hoped-for and imagined connections with people. He has some items that speak to specific relationships, such as a Jewish memorial candle he has in his kitchen ‘junk drawer’, even though he no longer practises any religion. His niece is a Rabbi and he rarely sees her, he but keeps the candle. ‘I don’t celebrate the festivals, but there are times when you light a candle in memory of a parent. . . So I could impress her with having a candle.’ Like the cables, these things may never be used, but they are kept for their potential. These seemingly ordinary things speak to his hopes for connections to other people, and indeed his loneliness.

This is most apparent in the example of his alcohol shelf. He doesn’t drink but likes ‘to be ready as a host. . . And I started storing beer as well, but I got horrified when I saw all the beer I had was out of date’; he does not have visitors very often and so now only keeps spirits which keep longer. The bottles are displayed on a high shelf in his kitchen and he evidently takes good care of them. The bottles are organised alphabetically: aniseed at one end and whisky and white rum at the other. The alcohol is unused but these are still objects that he cares for. Out of date bottles are disposed of. Having the bottles allows him to be a host, even if he may never have the visitors or be a host in practice. I would not have noticed these items, and they would not draw comment, but as we looked at them together and he told me about them, these things had such an affective charge as they materialised his hopeful connections to others but also the loneliness of his life and the realisation these connections may never happen. Stewart (2007) discusses domestic objects as having ‘traces of a past still resonant in things’ (p. 67) and that this still has the capacity to affect people. Such traces are evident in the previous example of the computer; although perhaps Daniel’s alcohol shelf is better understood through Scott’s (2019) emphasis on ghostly and unlived experiences – which may be present in things – as the guests he has not had are materialised in the unused alcohol collection. These bottles are hoped for futures as well as haunted by the absence of previous hosting or drinking companions.

I introduced the idea of thing-power earlier and this seems particularly pertinent here, as things ‘command attention’ (Bennett, 2004, p. 350). Here this speaks to the effects the bottles had on me; hearing the story and looking at the carefully curated collection, I felt I was witnessing something, and that my viewing of them mattered. In being attentive, unlike the cables where people feel embarrassed, here this shared attention from Daniel and I gave the objects a purpose. It may be that no one else would notice them, or have a drink from them otherwise, and us looking at them together allowed the things to be beautiful and to have power over us. He wanted me to be attentive, to look at them but also to hear his stories about them, and to witness the care he had taken. His care for the collection is manifest in the lack of dust and clear ordering; a cursory glance would evidence a well-used alcohol shelf; but his stories and our attention to the collection of full alcohol bottles tell another story. The care he takes matters as the bottles have to look like something that could be used, in order for him to feel he could be a host.

Hopes and living in face of adversity

These stories of unnoticed everyday objects tell of the ways in which people use things to connect to others, even if these connections are imagined. In making a case for a vital sociology, Back talks about the need to pay attention to the ordinary, to tell the stories of people’s lives, and how they live in the modern world and to understand and convey their humanity in a world that often dehumanises them. In the previous example, someone who finds themselves alone uses the objects to feel he could be connected to others, as a way to try and find a place for himself. People themselves – through the objects in their personal spaces – are using them to make connections to a wider social world, and so too a sociological attentiveness tunes in to these connections. In being attentive to everyday unnoticed things, we also need to tune into the power these things have and how this can offer insights into people’s lives. How people experience thing-power (Bennett, 2004) may be as a comfort or indeed as regret and loss. Things can allow people to live through difficult and challenging circumstances; this is exemplified in the case of Evelyn’s dress. She is in her 40s and lives with her partner and child in a small modern rented flat, having lost her previous home in a recession where she also lost her job. She keeps a dress and a jacket that she no longer wears in a plastic garment bag to preserve it in her wardrobe. The dress was expensive, and she bought it before she had children, and she lost her house and job. The dress made her feel amazing,

And I don’t want to throw that moment away because I think you get ground down in life and you compromise, compromise, compromise and forget who you are. And there’s an outfit in there that reminds me that I am not that, I could be this, I put it on, looked and felt gorgeous.

She goes on to tell me that as a mother, her son ‘doesn’t know who I am, she cleans a lot, she feeds me, and I’m thinking actually this woman wanted to be a racing driver. . . they never see that. And so that stays in there and reminds me of the little girl who grew up wanting to do all of that stuff. . .’

This example is rather different to earlier ones in that it may be hidden and dormant but it is one with clear memories and a powerful narrative around it. It is not about a future use for the object, but it is still about potential. The dress does not symbolise hope or possibility but as clothing the dress materialises the promises, the dreams, the hopes she had and still has. It speaks of her life, but not as a sad haunting, instead the potentials of who she is; as she talks or I listen back to the interview, I can pick up on the ‘charges’ (Mason, 2018) that spark in her account, in the dress itself. Things have power as they provoke responses and feelings, it can be positive and make us joyful, but also sad, guilty or feel a sense of loss. As it is materialised, these contradictory responses can coexist.

The final example speaks to these contradictions; Dave, a man in his early 50s, lives alone in a one-bed housing association flat, having got divorced and lost his house in the process. He keeps some tools, an (unfixed and loose) sink, two (unattached) worktops and a broken TV in his bedroom, stuffed at the end of the bed. He works as a handyman and acquired the sink from a former job where they were getting rid of some sample sinks. ‘It’s a stainless steel one, not a bad make.’ He keeps hold of it as the housing association keep promising him a ‘new kitchen and bathroom, but it might be a year down the line yet’. We laugh together, slightly awkwardly. He feels he has to keep the sink in case they fail to re-do his kitchen. As the flat has no storage space, he keeps it in his bedroom, where it is large and looks out of place. Although he is single now he jokes he couldn’t bring a girlfriend back here. The sink evokes the precariousness of his position, it is large and visibly out of place and as such it cannot be ignored but rather asserts its presence. It is the first thing he sees when he gets up in the morning and materialises the lack of faith in, and potential for disappointment from, the housing association failing to act and redo his kitchen. It is kept for its potential like the other examples discussed in this article, but here it is experienced as a burden.

Unlike the junk drawer which is rarely looked at or requires attentiveness, here it is hard to avoid the sink as it is a thing ‘out of place’ (Douglas, 1966) as it asserts its presence. I sensed a feeling of awkwardness and didn’t take any photographs of the sink when I stood in the bedroom doorway. I also waited until we sat down for a more reflexive interview to talk about it. Being attentive to things also then has ethical implications when it is time to step back, not take photos and instead afterwards spend time thinking about the sink and the contradictory feelings it generates. This is one of many examples in my fieldwork where attention to the unnoticed can lead to people feeling embarrassed, which we have an ethical commitment to not exacerbate. This is also something to think with as these feelings can help us understand the challenges people face when they have things that have broken prematurely or things they do not know what to do with. These ethical implications are ones which are at the heart of an attentiveness to the unnoticed and how we can think about a vital sociology. These ethics are practical (how we listen and give people time) as well being at the heart of what a vital sociology is and should be. Thinking about the vibrancy of things, and how they are an entangled part of the lives people live includes thinking about embarrassment, awkwardness and loneliness. It is an ethical and sociological task as thinking about the unnoticed things in a way that is attentive to the powers they have allows us to think differently about people’s lives.

Concluding comments: Towards a vital, ethical sociology of unnoticed things

This article contributes to developing a vital sociology by firstly arguing we need to expand our ideas of the ‘vital’ of vital sociology to consider the vibrancy of everyday things. What is meant by ‘vital’ is often assumed, and I have argued that we need to think about this in relation to the vitality of everyday things and their role in people’s lives. Secondly, I explored how this helps us develop a vital sociology as well as the methodological challenges and possibilities this poses by thinking through attentiveness. Back and Wright (2022) talk of a vital sociology of the everyday where we locate the public and moral in the unnoticed everyday. In this article I have shown how through the small stuff – bottles, banners and cables – we can understand larger societal challenges as people experience and negotiate them: how not to be wasteful, the capitalist production of excess and things that break too soon. I opened the article with an example of ‘junk’ drawer; junk is a very revealing category as it is dismissed by people as ‘just junk’. And yet people keep it. Attentiveness reveals that people are embarrassed or awkward about these things, and it is in this space that we can understand the anxieties and guilt from not decluttering, from keeping this detritus of capitalist accumulation as well as trying to find a space for these things to last longer, or to find human connections to others or to their pasts. These small objects can allow people to have hope and to live their lives in a world that makes these difficult as well as reminding them of the challenges they face. Looking at the unnoticed things in the home has allowed me to tell stories that otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to tell and these stories matter. They show us about how people find a way to live in a world in which people may feel alienated or alone as well as the everyday resistances people have to fast consumption. These everyday things, such as a sink, are the ways in which people live the inequalities of lacking space and a housing association that does insufficient home maintenance. But these things can also give people humanity, as a dress allows someone to hold onto their hopes of who they could be. Developing attentiveness to the unseen everyday things and how they affect people can allow us to produce a kind of vital sociology and tell us how people feel connected to the world around them, or embarrassed by having things they are not using.

I developed the approach of attentiveness in research into the unnoticed material culture of the home and framed the period of un-use as ‘dormant’ as a way to attend to and amplify everyday lives. The ordinary unnoticed may in some ways seem at odds with discussions of potency, vibrancy and affect in the literature; they are not ‘special’ or often even replete with personal meanings (even if some are), but they have a potency that means people don’t want to get rid of them or keep them until they lose their resonances. Being attentive to these can tell us of how people feel detached from the social world and relations around them but through things try to reattach themselves, even if this is through imagined connections. I have suggested that ‘being-with’ people and data, slowness – spending time with stuff and data – are key to attentiveness as well as tuning in to things themselves and their potencies. To understand this potency is not just a question of the ‘right’ analysis, but rather of taking time with the data, thinking with the silences as well as what is said, moments of awkwardness, as well as how people are moved by things and allowing myself to be affected by the objects, and people’s stories and lives. It means tuning into things themselves, and the connections and feelings these things evoke. Attentiveness is challenging, and involves us thinking about what we are attentive to: in this case to think through how things matter in a way that goes beyond people giving a story of what things mean. We can be tuning in to things, affects, but also feelings of loneliness or connection. Attentiveness has potential to open up sociological approaches to areas that are challenging to understand, as well as to offer a different perspective on everyday life, as this article has done via dormant objects.