The psychobabble of Feng Shui steps sprightly along with the rest of the New Age mythos: With intention, and with clutter out of your way, you can alter the universe.
Intuitive Feng Shui relies on the psychic sensitivity of a practitioner (an unknown quantity at best, unless your practitioner has undergone some sort of testing to determine their receptivity) and a perceptual skill William Spear called first impressions that detects so-called "energy patterns" in a home or office.
Unfortunately First Impressions has some conceptual flaws. If it is the foundation of Feng Shui analysis, then all our mothers were born Feng Shui consultants.
It is a fact of life that some time in your life your mother will walk into your home and complain about your inadequate housekeeping and announce it as the reason you can't get your dream job or find a mate. Some of us think so little of ourselves that we fall for this, which is why sensitive New Age types pay complete strangers good money to hear the same verbal abuse their Mom provides for free.
In America, clutter isn't a nice thing to say about how someone lives. In the New Age mind, clutter refers to an arrangement of living and working space that indicates a person's mental state and, by primitive concepts of association, what is happening in their life.
As Terah Kathryn Collins claims in The Western Guide to Feng Shui(p. vii), clutter in a house she was assessing "blocked smooth passage through the house" and therefore explained why the occupants' lives had problems.
If they'd kept their mouths shut, would the living conditions have been an issue?
Karen Kingston defines clutter as "stuck energy" in her book Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui. And the concept progresses to Maxine M. Shapiro's Clutter! It's Not My Fault! Fix It with Feng Shui.
Wait a minute!
Despite what you've been told, the amount of so-called clutter in your house has nothing to do with Feng Shui.
"Clutter," says Dee Vance, owner of Professional House, a business supplying professional home management and advice, "is just the accumulation of postponed decisions." You haven't taken the time to decide whether to keep something or throw it out, so there it sits until you do.
There is no esoteric symbolism influencing your housekeeping — for Dee Vance it is mere procrastination. As we all know, procrastination can have significant effects on many areas of life. Behavior modification, not a rearrangement of furniture, is what is needed to address the issue.
In Cheryl Mendelsohn's outstanding book Home Comforts (which everyone should read, because it would stop a lot of needless suffering over this "clutter" nonsense), she says
Health, safety, and comfort matter more than appearances, clutter, organization, and entertainment. A jumbled closet may distract you, but it is much less urgent than clean sheets, laundry, or meals. (p. 18)
Who dreamed up the concept of clutter?
In European folklore, the blessings of the peasantry's folk-deity (variously Diana, Holda, Perchta, etc.) and visits by the honored dead were bestowed only on "clean places and clean houses" because these supernatural guests "do not like to enter sordid places or filthy houses." (Ginzburg, 1991:101)
That's all well and good, but how many of us today are sitting around waiting for the ghost of Grandma or for some peripatetic chthonic goddess to bless our apartments and condos? And, considering the verbal abuse you suffer from Mom regarding your housekeeping, how do you feel about having Grandma's ghost inspecting the place?
Come to think of it, how many of those peasants actually received blessings of riches and abundance? If you look at the dismal history of the peasantry in continental Europe, the blessings seem to have been of two kinds: Slim and None.
Calvinist theology drew upon these ideas to instill the notion that if you were clean in more ways than one, God would provide prosperity (this probably explains why Karen Kingston loves enemas and insists they are part of Feng Shui).
The Puritans, being God-fearing Calvinists, brought this "Cleanliness is next to Godliness" concept to the New World.
People who dislike clutter tacitly assume everyone should share their Puritan obsessions. The controversy about clutter conveniently ignores the fact that human cultures have wildly varying opinions about it.
When we talk clutter, we're really talking about esthetics. We're talking about someone's personal biases. Clutter is subjective, and a good Feng Shui consultant knows it.
The faux Feng Shui concept of First Impressions is nothing more than the aesthetic prejudice of an American subculture. Your mother's personal bias, exhibited in her appraisal of your housekeeping and decorating tastes, doesn't make her — or anyone else — an authentic Feng Shui practitioner.
"Clutter" can be measured with statistics. Observe the room of a teenage boy a number of times and record how many possible arrangements it has with its current occupant. Repeated visits are the only way to tell if there is a pattern of arrangement and whether the occupant is trying to preserve it —in which case it isn't "cluttered."