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# Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture

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Some habits are like old friends. I stroke and tug on my beard unconsciously when I am preoccupied or absorbed in a film. I know some people find that driving is relaxing because the habits and routines occupy enough of their mind to free their imagination, but driving does not work for me. The shower is where I can put my body on automatic: the soaping and lathering and wiping and drying create a bubble of inattention which works a kind of magic on my creative imagination. The ideas for this chapter emerged in the shower while my body was ‘on automatic’. The rhythm of manual labour, digging in the garden, chopping weeds with a machete, has a similar meditative quality, far different from the ‘flow’ of total absorption in a task or meditation where the inner voice of consciousness is stilled and absorbed in the moment (Csíkszentmihályi 1996).

I do not doubt that others experience routine and habit very differently. In particular, many people report feeling less control and feel more at the mercy of the patterns of their lives. Yet in my research on food tastes and preferences I have not run into anyone who did not report at least a few instances where they were able to ‘learn’ to like something, to make something new into a taken-for-granted part of their daily life. Though most people seem much less aware of the process, most can also find an instance where they abandoned a habit and ‘moved on’ to something else.

An Analytical Approach

In an earlier paper I tried to develop a terminology for the way people turn desires into needs, making the things they want into essential aspects of their daily life, and then basic needs, requirements and expectations (Wilk 2001). Elizabeth Shove (2003) takes up a similar project in her investigation of the origin of daily bathing as a bodily practice in the UK, once a dangerous folly, then a luxury, and finally a necessity (see also Highmore 2004).

In my analytical approach, I divided the process of absorbing a new form of consumption into daily life into two parts: cultivation and naturalization. Cultivation refers to the processes which bring unconscious habits and routines forward into consciousness, reflection and discourse. To use Bourdieu’s terminology (1977), cultivation brings things out of the habitus and into the realm of praxis. Cultivation can be active or passive, because we can actively initiate new routines, or we can have changes forced upon us. Conflicts between routines, for example, may push them forward because we have to figure out what gets priority.

Because so much of consumer society is a fine balancing act between fitting in and standing out, most people are exquisitely sensitive to the possibility that some of their personal routines or habits may be inadequate or offensive to others. ‘Alarms’ can easily be tripped that lead us reflexively to examine our grooming, eating, our dressing, walking, driving or other daily routines and habits to see if they have faltered, slacked or fallen out of fashion. We all need many moments when we pause to assess, ‘Did we forget something today?’ ‘Did we fail to complete some routine?’

The Edge of Agency

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Cultivation is an essential part of any form of training or education, and it is also a component of many kinds of competitions and public displays that bring habitual forms of consumption forward into the public eye for examination and reflection. Advertising often challenges us to cultivate some habit or routine, to look at ourselves in the mirror or check the smell of our armpits, just like our parents and friends do when we are growing up.

And it is easy to see how a completely cultivated life would be impossible to live, because it would be entirely self-conscious and reflective, like being a celebrity on display all the time (without the resources of a professional celebrity). This is the kind of bewildering task faced by the ‘burnout’ victims studied by Löfgren and Palm (2005, also Löfgren 2006 and Ehn and Löfgren in this volume), people who have suddenly lost the ability to do things habitually. We have many defences which simply filter out and silence cultivating messages, keep them from impinging on our existing routines. What is the nature of these defences, and how do they work?

Naturalization describes the processes which push conscious practices back into the habitus, or keeps them from surfacing into consciousness in the first place. Many of our habits of life are so totally naturalized that we never even think of them: getting hungry and thirsty are seen as entirely natural processes which have no social component at all. Similarly, most people never think of comfort, cleanliness, beauty and other sensations as anything more than direct physical experiences, and engineers are quite willing to back them up with a whole raft of seemingly objective standards which tell us that whatever practices our culture has adopted are ‘necessary’ for our daily health, though historical analysis shows that these standards are constantly changing (Cooper 1998; Shove 2003).

People use many kinds of methods and tactics to make things routine or allow them to become so. I have made an initial distinction between the kind of naturalization which Bourdieu calls hexis, where alternatives never rise to consciousness, and that which he calls orthodoxy, where alternatives are actively repressed. I called the first submersive naturalization, meaning that the routine remains thoroughly submersed in the habitus. We cannot think of any alternative, for example, to washing our body in the shower with a bar of soap and a washcloth. That is what washing ‘means’. It took a concerted effort on the part of the marketing industry to introduce an alternative liquid soap ‘body wash’.

Repressive naturalization, on the other hand, includes the methods we use to force things into the background, both to keep a practice as a habit or routine after alternatives have challenged it, and to make something new into something routine and normal. An example of the first would be when I stay in a hotel and find that instead of soap, they have given me a tube of body wash for my shower. I quickly grab the face soap from the sink and take it to the shower, naturalizing my routine use of soap and rejecting the alternative of body wash. (See Figure 9.1 for a schematization of these processes.)

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Every day we are faced with opportunities to naturalize something new. Children and pets are experts at this when they try to make an event into a precedent. Say we give a sweet as a reward for behaving well at dinner. The next evening the child says, ‘Where is my after-dinner sweet?’ A good deal of daily life is a struggle over what is going to enter the repertoire of routine, and there are tacit rules of repetition which govern how often things must be discussed before they can be done without discussion, how often things have to be repeated by agreement or with supervision before they can become an accepted part of shared daily routine.

Concluding Thoughts

My whole life I have had a deep aversion to hypodermic needles and injections, to the point of nausea, and I fell to the floor unconscious when I had to watch a doctor put a large needle into my wife’s stomach for an amniocentesis. Three years ago I was prescribed a medicine which I have to inject twice a week. The very thought of doing so made me physically sick. The nurse who taught me how to give the injections broke the process down into a series of individual steps. First you squeeze air out of the syringe, then you open the alcohol swab, and so on. Turning the unimaginable act into a series of mundane easily learned activities broke down my resistance. Decomposing the routine in this way turns out to be an ancient technique of training, adapted well to complex technological operations like flying an aeroplane, where one begins with a ‘checklist’. Once learned in bits and pieces, the whole routine is easy to assimilate, and after four or five injections, my phobia was gone.

The Edge of Agency

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There are some habits I resent terribly. When I was working for the US Embassy in Belize I had to get up every morning at 6 a.m. and dress especially for work in clothes much more formal than my usual; after six months my body was habituated to the routine so that even on the weekend I woke up at 6 a.m., and blue jeans and T shirts no longer felt like my normal clothes. There was a part of me that was happy to be awake and alert early in the day, in contrast to my slothful student days. But it felt like liberation when I finally quit and went back to the university, where I could sleep later and dress as I wanted. It took less than a week to lose the early waking habit. If I had enjoyed my routine and uniform, like long-time soldiers who love their jobs, would it have been much harder to return to my old clothes and late rising?

I have tried unsuccessfully to cultivate the habit of eating breakfast for many years. I know it would be better for my health if I could just get used to eating in the morning, but the idea of eating when I wake up usually makes me nauseated. Lefebvre and Régulier say it takes ten years to train your body to get hungry at regular mealtimes (1985: 191), and I have never had any external schedule or routine which forced me to eat breakfast at any particular time, in a hotel or an archaeological camp, for more than a few months at a stretch. I can get myself started eating breakfast, but the slightest interruption and I lose the habit almost immediately. But other habits are frighteningly easy to cultivate and extremely difficult to lose, like smoking cigarettes. And it is remarkable the degree to which the human body can get habituated to routines which are painful and unpleasant.

Can you have a habit of having habits? My college roommate Steven woke up at the same time every morning, ate the same thing for breakfast every day, went home for spaghetti dinner every Friday night, kept his desk meticulously organized and had his career carefully planned. My half of the room was a messy pile of clothes, and I had no schedule, no organization, no plan and no system. We managed to survive a year in a single room together only by drawing a diagonal line on the floor. He resisted my attempts to teach him to ‘loosen up’, and I subverted all of his efforts to organize my life. As far as I can tell from the last time I saw him, these have remained lifetime commitments, and he is happy as a very meticulous dentist.

This grey area between active and passive is complex and fascinating, for it is the space where we shift from being in control to being controlled. Repetition has a compelling power which we do not fully control; it relieves us of the burden of making the thousands of micro-decisions which would otherwise overwhelm us. We need to set priorities in the normal pace of life, and habits are our autonomous agents to handle trivia. They are also the chains which bind us and blind us. The rhythms of life both liberate us from constant worry, and keep us in constant bondage. These are not two separate kinds of experience, two kinds of time, as Lefebvre would have it. Instead they are two sides of the very same phenomenon.

Uncertainty about the degree to which we are in control of our own rituals, routines, rhythms and habits is itself a vital social resource, an instrument which enables human interaction. The structuring power of time gives us plausible deniability, allows us to step in and take responsibility, blame others for our own failings, give up all hope and wield invisible power.

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On a larger scale, the grey area between structure and agency gives cultural change its paradoxical nature. On one hand, it seems to be the result of decisions and choices made by individuals; on the other hand, people seem to be following the dictates of fashion, patterns of habit common to society, and a kind of mentality which requires thorough precedent and familiarity before any action is taken.

I would suggest that the spaces between structure and agency also define a zone of comfort. The one extreme, where every moment is mapped out in advance and all of life becomes an endlessly repeated series of cycles of routines, defines what life in a prison or another total institution is all about. At the other extreme, life without any routines or regularity would be a chaotic mess of endless trivial choice. In between we can find some sort of compromise where we can engage with both consciousness and familiarity with ourselves, our companions and intimate others, our material surroundings and their various pressures and demands.

References

The Edge of Agency

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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.

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Instead industry has developed a wide range of techniques to simulate the effects of jeans having been worn. The very first distressed jeans were sold as stone-washed. The method of washing them with a large pile of pumice stones is still common today, though it is increasingly supplemented by cellulase enzymes, which are natural proteins that may used to obtain a stone-washed look. Apart from stone wash, one can opt for acid wash, moon wash, monkey wash, show wash, white wash and mud wash. Chemicals such as potassium permanganate are applied to shift the tinting. Resins may be used to set creases at particular places in the jeans. There is ozone fading or water jet fading. There are various forms of sandblasting, or handsanding, either on a flat surface or on dummies. Typical special effects including whiskering, that is, crease lines around the crotch, which can be produced with lasers, or by sandblasting, handsanding or abrasive rods. If one wants really fancy results, there are more elaborate methods. For example a laser beam can be passed through a shaped mask that comprises an aperture of the desired shape and is then deflected by a mirror to strike the textile substrate (Denim Academy n.d.; ExpressTextile, 20 March 2003)

One of the main effects that all of these methods are trying to copy is actually a fortuitous result of the nature of denim. Denim is a twill textile in which indigo-dyed warp threads are woven with white weft threads. The warp dominates the surface, which is why jeans appear blue on the outside and mainly white on the inside. As jeans are worn through, the underlying weft threads become more prominent, giving the characteristic worn effect. Clearly other forms of trousers might become well worn, but this would not be as evident because the warp and weft are of the same colour. So blue jeans lend themselves to the conspicuous display of being worn. But this would only account for one element, not the fraying, tearing and embroidering, and would not explain why we would want them to look worn in the first place.

As already noted, we do not wish to imagine an actual labourer wearing these jeans. We probably have no more desire to know about lasers, sandblasting and whiskering the crotch either. The clear preference is for all such processing to take place at some point entirely removed from our consciousness. To be conscious of how these effects were achieved would detract from the illusion that the effects are to be attributed to us, the wearer. This lack of consciousness and distancing from method is most acute when we confront evidence that this idea of other people living their lives for us sometimes becomes literally the case. One of the standard methods of distressing jeans is sandblasting. It is a technique that appears to remain quite common in small unregulated workshops in places such as Istanbul. Recently it has been found that young men who work in these conditions have been contracting silicosis (Akgun et al. 2005; Cimrin et al. 2006). In such cases someone really has given his life so that we are able to purchase our denim jeans with the illusion of spending some of our life in their wearing out. At a more general level, distressing of jeans is associated with high levels of pollution. For example, a report in the Guardian (17 August 2007, p. 25) called ‘Distressed Denim Trend Costs Mexican Farmers the Earth’ tells of the area of Tehuacan in Mexico, a place once famous for natural springs and health water but now heavily polluted.

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‘Jeans were born to be used by workers,’ said a local activist, Martin Barrios, ‘now they can cost thousands of dollars and are produced on the backs of exploitation and environmental destruction.’ … Nearby factories were the problem – dozens of them, which are dedicated to doing to jeans in hours what used to take years of wear . . . The clean garments are left ready for sale, while in many factories the chemicals used to treat them are left to flow away in bright indigo waste.

Why is any of this happening? At least until recently, when some other genres of clothes seem to be getting in on the act, there were no other items of clothing that we would find in our retail stores which appear to have been speckled with bleach, torn at the knee, stained with rust, worn out with rubbing, ripped and frayed at several places and subject to a whole series of other destructive processes. If we saw signs of such abuse on any other clothing we possess, let alone intended to buy, we would ourselves become pretty distressed. The nature of the twill helps create the effect but does not of itself explain why jeans, which for a hundred years were sold without distressing, developed this unique other market.

One clue is that distressing goes alongside other forms of transformation. Blue jeans were a garment that at the same time that distressing processes were being developed also become subject to other forms of embroidered embellishments, ranging from sequins to flowers. These effects, too, have been commodified on analogy with distressing. If one goes to the main Levi’s shop in San Francisco, one can order machine-made embroidery, adding sequins and other similar effects simply by conveying the style and form required. But standing in a Levi’s shop in San Francisco, in particular, looking at embroidered flowers is an ideal circumstance to evoke a particular moment in the past, the time of the hippie.

The story can be told personally, in that I was of the generation whose behaviour is being copied by commercial distressing of pre-sold jeans. As a teenager I hitchhiked around rock concerts, wearing flares and flowered shirts (purple and adorned with beads, if you must know). I had blue denim jeans that were worn so much, in such rough conditions, and with so little attention to washing and care that after a while they became naturally abraded and frayed in just the manner that is simulated by commerce today. It was not that there was any fashion in the earliest stages for such extreme abuse of one’s own clothes. The holes, the beer stains, the rips, the fraying, were the natural outcome of a specific life-style, combining lack of money to buy new clothes, independence from home and parental care, a sense of freedom, travel and general hippie personal irresponsibility where one just didn’t care about such things. Stone washing of jeans followed rather naturally from the stoned state of the people who had been wearing them.

Buying Time

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Campbell (1987) has noted the considerable significance of the hippie in the evolution of modern consumption. Although in retrospect we appear as of a particular style to which we conformed, for us as participants we believed that the 1960s and 1970s were the vanguard of an unprecedented feeling of personal freedom and experimentation that was a direct repudiation of the conformity of the 1950s and all previous periods. So although the deterioration of my jeans was merely a product of neglect, there was a strong sense that I was free to neglect them, that I didn’t any more have to cut my hair, iron my trousers and reproduce in younger version the image of an older generation. This sense of the individual connected with the other major effect of this wearing through of fabric as it pertained to blue denim jeans. It was not simply that they were worn though, it was that in doing so they became intensely personal. A sense of the personal manifested itself in various ways. One is the quality of cotton to become extremely soft and comfortable after intense wearing. Another is that the jeans were wearing themselves to a very particular body – that they seemed over time to mould themselves to the way one walked, and lay down and carried oneself in the world. I can recall first learning about manufacturers suggesting that the first thing you should do when you purchased their jeans was to take a bath while still wearing them. This ideal of a shrink-to-fit processes enacted by the consumer was the intermediary stage before the development of commercial distressing. This individuality of fit was accentuated by the subsequent long periods of wearing, as you felt the creases, the pattern of wear, related to you as the specific wearer of the specific pair of jeans.

So denim jeans became the most personal, the most intimate item of clothing that anyone had yet experienced. The degree to which this could be the case was wonderfully exemplified in Hauser’s paper (2004) on how the FBI could solve a robbery by identifying an individual through focusing upon the identifiable pattern of that person’s interaction with a specific pair of denim jeans. Denim can also become a kind of embodied record of the particular movements and contours of the particular body, as noted by Candy (2005) using visual interviews and photography to locate characteristic patterns of wearing denim. Today there is a new equivalent to this sense of the self and the body in the growing (shrinking?) phenomenon of women and their skinny jeans. Many women have in their wardrobe the memento of the thinnest that their body ever became, as judged by the jeans size they were able to wear at that time. This image, popularized in an episode of Sex and the City, was found ethnographically by both myself and Sophie Woodward in our respective researches in London.

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