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

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How do intimate relations develop? Novelties such as new cars are subject to aesthetic judgements of look and feel, and, as Campbell (1987) suggests, sensory relationships with objects may involve elaborate dreaming, often strongest when not (yet) possessing the objects in question. One could thus argue that practices like wooden boating recruit practitioners by means of particularly vivid and tempting images. However, once captured, practising is self-reinforcing. Intimacy may not be a result of a sensory encounter, but might rather stem from continuous engagement. For example, Ilmonen (2004) suggests that we gradually develop attachment towards our possessions. This may take place through increasing personalization of the object, or as the marks and memories of past occasions (and uses) accumulate (McCracken 1988). Equally, it may be the result of acquiring relevant skills.

Objects that bear marks of social history and human engagement can be significant in other ways as well. For example, Ahuvia (2005) describes a category of ‘loved objects’ which includes collections, gifts and inherited family objects. Family belongings appear important to us because they remind us of other important people, establish links between people and bring together senses of community. On the other hand, the patina of objects represents continued human effort on the part of other, often more distant actors. One can push these ideas further and identify situations in which objects come to be valuable, unique and special in their own right, as the persons involved become more distant and less particular.

Obligations, Duties and the Stewardship of Wooden Boats

Solidarity with and dutifulness towards objects implies a particular kind of emotional and moral link between the object-world and human practitioners. Boats provide a vivid illustration of such co-determination. Wooden boating includes processes through which boats enter the category of heritage. Once established as such, they are able to argue for rights and call for human stewards. This is one example of how objects in general manage to convey and place requirements on human practitioners. There are others. If boats are regarded as family members, pets or even persons, they may also have rights regardless of whether they are registered as national heritage or not. In all such cases, the humans involved identify duties and moral obligations to boats. In considering these relations I start by commenting on the more objective qualities of uniqueness and right-claiming, and then return to the mystic and spiritual ways that boats are made alive.

Some sections and tons of the material of wooden boating are regarded as unique parts of common maritime heritage due to their rarity or status as being representative of a wider class of objects, and are protected like nationally important buildings. In 1994 in Finland, the National Board of Antiquities established a register of existing large historical vessels and a fund for their restoration. These national efforts paralleled an international focus on maritime history. The first European Maritime Heritage Conference was held in 1992 and the fourth congress issued the so-called ‘Barcelona Charter’ in 2002, which ‘set out a Code of Good Practice for owners and operators of traditional vessels along the lines of the Athens Charter drafted by architects and museum technicians in 1931 (as amended in Venice in 1964) to give guidance on the restoration of historic monuments’ (http://www. heritageafloat.org.uk/Barcelona.htm). Even if the scope of the charter is limited, and the text hardly known among boat-owners, popular magazines and books on wooden boating rephrase and broaden the overall argument: the owners of wooden boats are in the trusted position of taking care of a unique and priceless fleet of boats and of reproducing a pool of related skills.

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Kopytoff (1986) argues for a cultural biographical approach in which appreciation of material objects depends upon knowledge of their history and lifecourse. The owners of wooden boats reflect and exemplify this argument in their efforts to collect various facts about the history of the boat: the names of previous owners and where they lived. They also weave in more emotional details of hazards at sea, war-time destinies or periods of forgotten glory. Once such a history has been told, each object becomes singular regardless of its official heritage value or the number of celebrities involved.

These person-like qualities of uniqueness are further supported by mysticism and animism. Experienced builders are celebrated as specially gifted master craftsmen who create, carve and force boats out of difficult, living material. They are, typically, men who (are claimed to) have a deep understanding of wood material, trees and nature as a whole, often handed down from father to son. It is not only that they posses such skills. The frequent use of emotional language – boats are reported to have been built with love – suggests that designers, builders and dedicated owners convey their life forces to the boats they make.

It comes, then, as no surprise that boats are often thought to be alive. Ownership is described as a relationship or form of companionship; like pets, boats are thought to deserve good and constant maintenance and, at point of sale, dedicated new owners. Boats are described as carrying the features of their designers (Whynott 1999) and owners. And to take such animism further, boats are thought to be able to sense their environment, to tell if a big or a small wave is about to hit, and to murmur to each other during long dark winters in the boatshed (Whynott 1999). On her website, Silene, a 6-metre yacht, bursts into being:

Independent of any race success my old hull has always been taken good care of. A few years ago I had all my keel bolts checked and re-zinced, my wooden keel was inspected, found healthy and impregnated, and I got a new rudder, lighter than before. Four boards on each side of my under-water planking were replaced and a number of spars were also repaired. Every year my bilge has been impregnated with a sweetest natural linseed oil and all varnished parts have been looked after, not forgetting my dear rig and sails. Sometimes I truly feel that I am getting younger year after year. I hope, however, that I can keep my classic beauty. (http:/www.6mr.fi/DAS/yachts/981119-125927.html)

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Such screenplays written for the drama of wooden boating bring boats to the fore and stage owners in the background as responsible care-takers of boats which are both unique and personified. The owners of Silene thus construct a duty for themselves, a moral location, as well as a location in the material world. However, it is not only the boat as an assembly of boards, bolts and spars which is capable of playing the role of Silene and of placing compelling demands on the owners. In addition, takenfor-granted ways of appreciating boats and maintaining them properly – the shared practice of wooden boating – constitute an essential scenery and a stage on which this drama unfolds.

Scripting the Times of Wooden Boating

In this chapter I argue that human understandings of time, that is, temporalities, depend on, reflect and partly stem from the material world. Such notions of mutual constitution or co-determination bear on the tradition of science and technology studies. In this tradition Law (1992, cited in Ilmonen 2004), for example, points out that humans have preferences in how to use and interact with goods, but that this is reciprocal. Goods, too, have preferences, in the form of inscribed modes of use. Goods thus tell us how to approach them and what to do with them. Accordingly, temporalities can be regarded as particular scripts. However, the notion of reciprocal object relations implies that scripting is an ongoing process. Scripts are not located solely in goods or in the material infrastructure. In the case of wooden boats this is very obvious. Racing boats that were initially designed to be short-lived experiments and tool-like vernacular boats are now being restored and renovated in ways never anticipated, let alone scripted, by their designers or builders.

As we have seen, the accumulation of skills is one dynamic feature of material interaction. Accumulations of skill can result in an ever-closer relationship to (or unity with) specific objects. Equally, inscribed ways of practising may be so demanding as to exclude novices. On both counts, the skilled practitioner understands the object and has attuned his/her body-mind to it in the course of learning the trade.

Considering the skilled actions of a co-determined practitioner provides one way to think about the autotelic time of human action (Szerszynski 2002). For the sake of simplicity, one can contrast two extremes: ‘economic man’, who has the will and the ability to constantly optimize time use, and the skilled human being, or a body-mind (Reckwitz 2002), who is accustomed to use particular tools for pre-given purposes with an ‘objectively’ and materially given rhythm. In the latter case, the particular context of, for example, wooden boating establishes tasks such as ‘the impregnation of the hull with linen oil’, which is to be done at fifteen year intervals and to last for at least twenty-four hours per each treatment. In this case time is strongly configured by the practice and precludes ongoing efforts to optimize and economize one’s use of time.

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Intimate and aesthetic relations with boats appear to constitute slightly different time, the legitimacy of which stems from the sensory aspects of wooden boating. Might such time be called slow? Or is it rather a playful coexistence with the neat material of wooden boating? As a third understanding, I would suggest a bodyaesthetics of wooden boating in which the proper rhythm and pace of sanding, sawing, masking and painting reflects the human body, in contrast to the rhythms of external pace-keepers such as curing and fixing times.

Finally, the time of the dedicated and dutiful stewards of wooden boats is quite specifically but also rather differently organized. In this context, boats are not material for aesthetic play but figure instead as part of a common heritage entitled to receive good care and maintenance. Hence, they call for disciplined and skilled actors. Committed stewards may be well informed about the history of a particular boat, and understand it emotionally as well as in terms of a more objective language of heritage. Providing such practitioners have relevant skills, they face a growing list of things-to-do. In identifying this temporality I offer a partial explanation for one especially puzzling phenomenon: the practitioners of wooden boating experience extreme stress and pressure in pursuing the cherished goals of replicating an unhurried past or of materializing and realizing specific forms of aesthetic play. This is a temporality that I have previously called localized busyness (Jalas 2006b).

Discussion: Reflections on Object Relations

In this chapter I have maintained and substantiated the argument that the physical world, including materials and objects, is intertwined with human temporalities. Such temporalities can be thought of as scripts that guide human action, establish particular rights and ways of acting and preclude others. However, the case of wooden boating clearly shows that scripts are not inherent in the physical material but are, rather, continuously rewritten on that material. For example boats built as short-lived tools or racing experiments are now treated as priceless parts of common heritage. Rather than carrying pre-given scripts, objects such as wooden boats represent physical matter with which humans can play, on which they can demonstrate skills and by which they can be carried away.

This description of boat-relations and boating moments positions them as a form of addiction, involving compulsive behaviour and loss of control and agency on the part of the human participant. However, one can also argue that such processes are much better controlled than this account suggests. Allowing, imagining, cultivating and communicating romantic sensibilities regarding the agency and spirit of objects serves obvious purposes of social distinction and, on the other hand, it seems to provide a means of resisting a dominantly instrumental orientation.

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Firstly, practices like wooden boating provide an arena in which social distinctions are reproduced and enacted. As a reflexive novice notices: ‘After sailing a week with a wooden boat, I understood wooden boating. Just because of the boat, everyone was looking at us when we entered harbours. We didn’t have to have a big and fancy boat to attract attention’ (U, female). Instead of mere possession, this distinctive display and identity construction revolves around skills and understandings of ways of using and being with the objects. On the other hand, wooden boaters seek to articulate identities and mutual relationships with objects in ways that counter forms of capitalistic power. For committed practitioners of wooden boating in Finland, the skilled performances, the tactile object relations and the roles of stewardship compensate for many of the ills of their working life. Equally, ‘strong’ objects that are placed high in the moral order of things contribute to understandings of ‘community and sense of a location in an increasingly global world. Yet the stress, the rolling demands and the lengthy lists of things-to-do that the boat-owners encounter reveal that the relatively powerful position of the wooden boat is a double-edged sword. While dedicated practitioners may be able to establish a sense of a community and tackle existential questions, they most often fail in trying to resist harriedness as a phenomenon of modern capitalist society.

To conclude, the temporalities that arise from reciprocal relations and actions around physical objects involve uncertainty and emergent qualities; they are not something that humans write with a firm hand and clear mind. Social distinction may be an unintended result of enthusiastic history-writing on a particular boat; the traditions evoked through replication may reflect modern anxieties on a preconscious bodily level; really working with your hands really does feel different compared to merely pushing paper around, and the smell of tar is inviting. What is also evident is that if wooden boats indeed play their role so well that practitioners and the publics around them are captured, convinced and moved, it important to recognize that boats themselves rewrite the temporalities of human action and that they make time.

References

Making Time •

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The Ethics of Routine Consciousness, Tedium and Value Don Slater

Introduction

This chapter opens up a slightly different analytical level: the ‘ethical framing of routine’. We need to look not only at empirically occurring routines, but also at the normative or ethical framing of the very notion of ‘routine’, ‘the routine’ (or the mundane, the habitual, the taken-for-granted), ‘being routine’, ‘routinization’. Notions like ‘routine’ and its cognates are labels that accord particular social status and value to forms of action and practice, and that strategically stabilize them in specific ways. This is true in two senses. Firstly, to label a structure of action ‘routine’ is always already a value judgement or ethical framing. As we will explore in a first example (the hobby), the idea of ‘routines’ occupies a conventional role in many Western moral cosmologies: routine distinguishes unthinking conformist ‘behaviour’ from critically conscious and ruptural ‘action’.

But beyond the question of moral judgement, I want to press a second, stronger claim, that the ethical framing of ‘routine’ is central to the different ways in which routines are themselves constructed and then related to other practices. In this sense, discourses on routine should be considered as performative, and processes of routinization (whether successful or resisted) centrally involve participants in taking an attitude to routinization itself: that is to say, the notion of ‘routine’ is topicalized by actors themselves, and this is consequential in the production (or the flouting) of routine. The way people frame the very notion of ‘routine’ becomes, in these circumstances, ‘ethical’ in the old Foucauldian sense – it is part of that orientation to the self by which we organize our subjectivity through the conduct of conduct; it is part of how we take a strategic position on self and other.

I’d like to explore this ethical framing of routine through some examples, any or all of which might be deemed eccentric: they were chosen simply to invoke this particular level of analysis and to argue that it might add something to the study of routines. No particular typology is being suggested. However, the contrast between the three examples is very sharp, and suggests a central issue that might be germane to this kind of analysis: actions are being framed and evaluated – very differently in each case – in terms of their potential for expanding or contracting social agency, reflexivity and critical consciousness. What is ethically at stake in invoking the very idea of routine is the question of whether participants are reflexively in control of the flow of events. We therefore start with Western Marxism, in which ‘routine’ indexes the systemic reification or colonization of everyday life, and always constitutes a diminution of agency or increase of alienation. This is of course only one Western tradition, but it provides a very strong statement of a common modern rejection of everyday life as routinized and therefore debased. The idea of a hobby provides an example: to label and organize a practice in the form of a hobby came to symbolize the illusion of freedom and social significance experienced within a reality of constricted and routinized private obsession.

–14–

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A second example is offered by ‘Eastern practices’ as assimilated in Western contexts – specifically Tai Chi and Buddhist meditation. These are practices based on a phenomenological engagement with routine: the endless but conscious repetition of the same few movements or breaths. In contrast to the first example, the aim is non-judgemental – neither to reject nor to embrace routines, but to enter into them with constant attention and consciousness. Routine is constituted as a technology aimed at increasing the ‘skilfulness’ with which one deals with the everyday, the inculcation of a kind of non-routinized response to the routine. The subject to emerge from this training is ‘skilful’ in that s/he is able to respond creatively to events rather than be overwhelmed by them or by habitual adaptations.

A final example – technology use in Ghana – contrasts with the first two in that unreflexive routine is highly valued. Routine and unthinking use of the internet in the North is treated as clear evidence of Northern superiority over Africa. Moreover, already-routinized Northern technology uses are stabilized and transmitted by official ICT (information and communication technologies) policies. By contrast, local technology use – however stably routinized – is negatively valorized as irrational and traditional.

Routine as Alienation

In critical theory, routine is part of a characterization of everyday life as reified and alienated. Particularly in the tradition that runs from Hegel through Marx, Lukács, Lefebvre and then Situationism and Baudrillard, the routinization of everyday life derives from a systematization of the world, which is experienced as natural and lawlike rather than historical and resulting from human agency (see, for example, Gardiner 2000; Lefebvre 1971, 1991 [1947]; Vaneigem 1979 [1963–1965]). Routine is therefore not just a subsumption under system constraints but also a loss of critical consciousness of the grounds of our own subordination. Routine constitutes a double loss of agency: we are caught up in a programmed flow of events; and we are unable to see that it is indeed a programme, and one we could change. In several variants, particularly in the work of Agnes Heller (e.g. 1984), the routine, the normal and the everyday are synonymous: it’s all bleakly mechanized and devoid of critical consciousness. Any practices conducted on this terrain are in principle complicit with the system, as in Adorno’s (1991) notion of the recuperative function of all consumption of culture industry products.

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The opposite of routine, in this framing, involves radical and conscious rupture: revolutionary praxis, ‘situations’, Marcusian libidinal hedonism and Adornian autonomy – all forms of intransigent and reflexive non-complicity. There’s also a strong dash of ‘authenticity’ running through this tradition: routine as alienation diverts the evolution of human species-being in directions that are warped and subordinated to systemic needs (as in Leo Lowenthal’s famous characterization of mass culture as ‘psychoanalysis in reverse’ [cited in Jay 1996 [1973]: 173], as increasingly neurotic adaptations); whereas a radical rupture with everyday life presages human evolution pursued according to its own intrinsic logic. The romanticism at the root of this ethical vision is fairly clear, and comes to its full flowering in the 1960s, in often highly gendered ways. The hero of the ‘revolution in everyday life’, like the hero of artistic romanticism from the 1780s onwards, allows himself to be directed by forces – libido, history, spontaneity – that fracture routine and fracture his routine/routinized self. At the limits, this way of thinking and acting is not only anti-bureaucratic but contests the very notion of structure itself, of stabilization or normality – all of which are intrinsically oppressive (because they are stable structures). Poststructuralisms, particularly of the Deleuzian sort, persist in all this.

This ethical framing of everyday routine has consequentially framed consumption studies for many generations: consumption long appeared as the exemplary site of routinized alienation and oppressive normality, in which the appearance of constant change, variety, desire and satisfaction is unveiled, through critique, to be in reality the routine and eternal recurrence of the ever-same – a conveyor belt of programmed choices that is the very opposite of free choice. The move against older theories of consumption really starts with cultural studies, which was driven specifically by its desire to find radical political agency located in those spectacular sub-cultures that turned the everyday inside out. And yet, sub-cultures appeared as ruptural interventions, thus allowing the cultural studies analyst to persist in regarding normal, everyday life as dead, unconscious, conservative and without agency – in a word, routinized. By contrast, the emergence of contemporary consumption studies has been conditional on rejecting this problematic, and re-valorizing the everyday as a site of agency, negotiation, creativity and cognition.

Obviously, the tradition of alienation is only one route by which to arrive at this critical framing of routine. Crucially for this volume’s attempt to open up routine as an object of social research, ‘interpretative’ (largely phenomenologically based) challenges to structuralist sociology have long relied on a view of everyday routine as taken-for-granted, unthinking, ‘bracketed’, and only brought to light – reflection, critique, change – in extra-ordinary moments of rupture. Truth lies in those moments when we briefly awake; and this includes sociological truth, as exemplified in Garfinkel’s famous routine-breaking experiments. Similarly, Latour – in this respect entirely true to his own ethnomethodological origins – defines his ‘sociology of associations’ as the tracing of associations in the process of their assemblage; he allows that a ‘sociology of the social’ is entirely appropriate for the already-assembled, ‘to designate a stabilized state of affairs’ (2005: 1). Only the not (yet) routine is sociologically or politically interesting.

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Historically, the idea of a ‘hobby’ has often served as a symbol of everything the critical theorist takes joy in hating about routinized everyday life. Adorno’s outraged response when asked by an interviewer about his hobbies tells pretty much the whole story:

I have no hobby. Not that I am the kind of workaholic who is incapable of doing anything with his time but applying himself industriously to the required task. But, as far as my activities are concerned, I take them all, without exception, very seriously. So much so, that I should be horrified by the very idea that they had anything to do with hobbies – preoccupations with which I had become mindlessly infatuated merely in order to kill time – had I not become hardened by experience to such examples of this now wide-spread, barbarous mentality. Making music, listening to music, reading with all my attention, these activities are part and parcel of my life; to call them hobbies would make a mockery of them. On the other hand, I have been fortunate enough that my job … cannot be defined in terms of that strict opposition of free time, which is demanded by the current razor-sharp division of the two . . . (Adorno 1991: 163)

Adorno’s patrician distaste rests on two interrelated sins of routinization, both conventional for critical thought. Firstly, the hobby can only be defined in relation to the banal routinization of everyday life in the modern world. Everyday life is constructed within a larger routine division between public and private domains; in the case of the hobby, this is manifested in the structure of work versus leisure. Under capitalism, both sides of this structure are largely organized into routine practices, alienated and non-agentic. However, leisure carries an extra ideological burden, and critical animus, because it appears as a domain of freedom (free time, free choice, autonomous relationships) and yet it is entirely determined by the needs of capitalist reproduction: leisure is structured into consumerist choices required for the reproduction of markets; and into domestic chores required for the reproduction of workforces. Hence, Adorno’s view of everyday life as a sphere of recuperation, in which all forms of ostensibly autonomous pleasure are in fact deeply functional to systemic operation. What seems an expression of self-determination really immerses us deeper into neurotic and habitual adaptations to existing structures rather than producing an enhanced domain of consciousness and agency. At the same time, what critical theory finds most tragic about private activities, like hobbies and leisure, is their sheer insignificance: however important they are to actors experientially, they are socially inconsequential. We are therefore all trapped within private activities in which we seek our true meaning but which are trivial and socially marginal. Cohen and Taylor’s (1976) book Escape Attempts (its title itself states the case) is a wonderful exploration of this paradox of meaning and meaningless. The inconsequential and the routine character of the everyday are strongly connected in authors like Heller (1984): the problem with everyday life is that it is particularistic, it does not transcend one’s immediate environment in order to develop generic or species-specific human powers and capacities; rather, it is reified and habitual because of the structure of modern social conditions. In fact, Heller argues, everyday life does contain imaginative and creative practices, but these cannot be fully utilized within essentially repetitive and habitual mundane activities; this produces what she calls an unrealized ‘cultural surplus’.

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