{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title":"Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","uuid":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title":"Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture","normalized_title":"timeconsumptionandeverydaylifepracticematerialityandculture","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":236,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Time%2C%20Consumption%20and%20Everyday%20Life%20Practice%2C%20Materiality%20and%20Culture","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/search"},"page":{"printed_page":166,"pdf_page":165,"physical_index":165,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"9287c22c1bc825e90485969a5f9f90623c22641adb12df35f81172870b48f316"},"chapter":"List of Tables and Figures","content":"This perspective lends itself to the second example of why an elderly segment of our population become increasingly involved in the purchase and sale of antiques and junk that is resonant of actual previous users. It explains why they should do so through markets that are frequented in regular and repetitive rhythm. As people age, the attraction of life as the narrative time of oneself leading inexorably to death may lose its attraction, while a more generic sense of material culture as an objectification of endless humanity in circulation becomes increasingly attractive. For this reason, some people become increasingly involved in an apparently commercial activity, but one that has little to do with making or spending money. Rather it is an activity devoted to the resurrection of objects that stand for particular lives and circulates them as generic lives. The result is to keep these fragments of past lives in ritualized circulation and increasingly to place oneself within this process. It is almost as though prior to one’s own death, one gives oneself to a representation of immortality here enshrined by the endless circulation of junk and bits and pieces of lives. There is a new custom amongst environmentalists and also humanists to represent death itself as a kind of return of the disaggregated body to the endless circulation of atomic particles that make up the universe. I was recently at a humanist funeral which was full of such ideals. The junk market has rather pre-empted this conceptualization of a return to endless recirculation, but through an exploitation of mundane material culture.\n\nThis is why people who deal with antiques dislike the market in reproduction furniture, as not just fake, but something cold, anonymous and inhuman. Since there are no ‘actual’ past persons represented by reproduction objects, they simply don’t work as an exemplification of this form of transformed temporality. Reproduction is not mythic, it doesn’t act to suppress linear time. By contrast, in junk, actual lives are re-woven as fabric, which anonymizes but manages to make a comforting textile from the warp and weft of the threads of the dead.\n\nIf it accepted that this argument applies to the elderly and the circulation of antique junk, how does it apply to distressed blue jeans? After all, a clear pattern has already emerged in my current ethnography with Woodward, suggesting the dislike of older people for the wearing of distressed jeans, which they single out for disparagement. This should not surprise us if we reflect that distressed jeans are not actually used jeans. They are made to look like used jeans. They are really better viewed as reproduction jeans, veneer not patina. This makes them equivalent to the reproduction furniture these dealers define themselves in opposition to. If anything, they are worse than reproduction furniture, as the exemplification of dishonesty and inauthenticity. At least with reproduction furniture the owner is not claiming to have antiqued items that were actually used by someone else. Distressed jeans are doubly dishonest. Firstly they pretend to be used, when they are not, and worse still the purchaser lays claims to being responsible for wear, when the effect was actually achieved by someone else. Finally in the case of antiques or retro clothing, we do not assume that prior people deliberately spent their time living with objects in order to somehow ‘add value’ through this association with the person, as a result of which the objects could then be sold on. Most things become antique or retro by default rather than by design. Most people who bought things with the intention that they would one day become collector’s items, such as first day of release stamps, are generally going to live to regret this investment, which rarely succeeds.\n\n166\n\n• Daniel Miller","previous_page":165,"next_page":167}