Buying Time Daniel Miller
Introduction
One of the most curious aspects of the relationship between time and consumption is the circumstances under which we are able to, in some sense or other, buy time. When the busy rhythms and routines of our contemporary lives are such that we feel we don’t have the time available to actually live out certain things we wish for, and decide instead to buy pre-packed time spent by somebody else, doing this living on our behalf, in the form of a commodity, off the shelf. This chapter examines two examples of this phenomenon of buying time, that of distressed jeans and the trade in antiques and flea markets. These case studies bring out a central paradox of the process of buying time which is the inherent tension between personalization and the impersonal. I conclude by attempting to explain this paradox through reference to Lévi-Strauss’s image of rituals such as rhythms and routines as machines for the suppression of time.
Buying Denim Blue Jeans
Distressed blue jeans are an extraordinary phenomenon. The point about these jeans is that, in effect, someone somewhere is spending their time simulating the wearing out of your clothing, replicating the effect of you spending months or years wearing them. It is as though, on analogy with that common expression ‘get a life’, you could buy a period of your own lifetime off the shelf as represented by these apparently pre-worn jeans. Where once upon a time you had to be involved in heavy labour, or constant wearing, before the jeans reached a certain look, today you can buy all these effects ready-made. Indeed you can simulate life-styles, such as one based in manual work, or a highly adventurous life that might have resulted in these patterns of tearing and fraying, even if you never will or never have lived that kind of life.
It does seem rather bizarre that a textile should be sold as though it had already been worn, almost to death, before we even buy it. That workers in Turkey or Mexico should spend their time simulating these pre-worn effects as an integral part of what is sold to the consumer (on labour in the industry, see Bair and Gereffi 2001; Bair and Peters 2006; Tokatli 2007). Not surprisingly they don’t actually wear these jeans to have this effect. Indeed the paradoxical nature of this process starts to open up as soon as we consider the reaction of a London consumer to the idea that a labourer in Mexico might have actual worked, sweated, ate, danced and lived years wearing this same pair of jeans. The consumer seems to want the illusion of themselves having worn the jeans. They clearly don’t want a consciousness of vicarious wearing of those jeans by an actual other.
10
157