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You know what, fuck it. I spent a good portion of my philosophical career working on the metaphysical underpinnings that allow Kondo to speak of objects sparking joy. In my view, the responses to her method, and "sparking joy" specifically, are grounded in piles of orientalism.
To be clear, the rejection of "sparking joy" is grounded in a western rejection of any metaphysic that privileges the affective connection with the world over reducing the world to objects of knowledge. Specifically, objects of scientific (or discursive) knowledge.
In other words, the rejection of Kondo isn't just a rejection of her system, it is a rejection of a way of viewing the world as organized primarily around our affective relations to objects in the world and how those relations orient us in specific ways.
This rejection ultimately privileges a "rational" explanation for possessing an object over an affective one, regardless of the fact that we primarily experience the world as affective, rather than as an object of scientific understanding. We speak of things "feeling right."
We speak of things as "feeling true," or "feeling out of place." We speak of spaces as "feeling white," or "feeling masculine" or "feeling good," and we have an immediate understanding of the experience being described. What Kondo is talking about is no different.
EXCEPT that she takes seriously the need to attend to the affective in organizing the spaces that we occupy. If a thing does not "spark joy," and realistically, a thing can "spark sadness," "melancholy," "anger," or any other affect, then we should get rid of it.
Hell, I'm willing to go so far as to say that we should cut individuals out of our lives who do not "spark joy," whereby "sparking joy" means that they bring an affective relationship to our lives such that our lives are enriched. People who do not do this, we call "toxic."
In fact, "toxicity" in terms of persons and environments is an affective quality of how we (or they) interact or transact with us. So why shouldn't OBJECTS IN OUR LIVING SPACE also interact and transact with us in terms of affective relationships. Oh, right: western metaphysics.
To conclude: "sparking joy," isn't simply in reference to whether or not the thing makes us happy, but how the thing inspires an affect in us and what that affect is. To "spark joy," I argue, simply means "does the object move us in a way that enriches our space."
Moreover, in the context of PERSONS, to "spark joy," is to ask what kind of affective relations we have with the individuals in the space of our lives. Not everyone "sparks joy" in the same way, and some people actively don't. And we call those people toxic.
Thus, we've all been using the language of "sparks joy," but we haven't attended seriously to how that language actually functions. And, as a result, all of these shit-takes on Kondo smack of hypocrisy and orientalism.
