Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture

Challenges

In taking this approach the chapters collected here challenge familiar formulations of the time ‘problem’, including those that place the blame on consumer society, on spiralling ‘consumerist’ pressures to work and spend (Offer 2006; Schor 2000), on individualization, and on the irresistible pull of material culture or ‘luxury fever’ (Frank 1999). They also take issue with interpretations in which infrastructures and artefacts script the duration and timing of events, episodes and long-term projects. They do so in three related ways.

1. Multiple Temporalities

Following Gell (1992), contributors to this volume question the implicit historical direction of time from ordered tradition to anarchic modernity, an assumption that rests on romantic but unfounded notions of timeless tradition. Many commentators who are worried about ‘time poverty’ presume an historic shift from a more balanced and healthier ‘traditional’ era to a more frantic ‘modern’ regime. Peasants were hardworking but jolly, following steady seasonal rhythms with bursts of collective festivities and pleasures; workers then were disciplined and regimented by industrial time (Thompson 1967; cf. Glennie and Thrift 2009); most recently, consumers are struggling to coordinate and multi-task an ever-expanding set of practices and choices driven by the material temptations on offer in a 24-hour society.

Rather than taking this thesis as a fact, we treat it with a scepticism informed by comparative ethnography and historical analysis. Instead of assuming a sequential shift from one temporal order to another, contributors to this volume reveal the coexistence of multiple periodicities, and by implication a lack of coordination between scales and registers of temporal order. Natural and commercial rhythms have co-evolved and often complemented each other in the modern period. Routine and rhythm, we show, are often interdependent, not rivals. Recognition of the parallel, symbiotic nature of different temporal orders creates an intellectual space for exploring the emotional and political ambivalence of temporal constraint and freedom. Having made this space, we can then ask why so many cultures perceive order in the past and disorder in the present, why routines can sometimes represent freedom, and at other times bondage and restraint.

Introduction

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In moving into this territory, several contributors argue that at any one point in time, societies are composed of a combination of overlapping rhythms. Instead of characterizing wholesale shifts from one temporal regime to another (e.g. from a traditional, habit-ridden mode to a modern society of endless flexibility), they notice that affluent countries continue to differ in their daily rhythms, their scale, flow and compositions. The French continue to indulge in long meals and Mexicans take their siestas, while Americans snack quickly and on the move. Italian children stay up late into the evening, whereas their German neighbours go to bed early. Eating, sleeping, working and many other daily practices follow significantly different rhythms, which cannot be ordered according to a scale of development or modernity. The diversity in the ordering, sequencing and frequency of everyday practices cannot be reduced to differences in class, culture, urbanism, economic organization or evolutionary stages. Rather than supposing some dramatic divide between consumer society and an earlier phase in which life was less complicated, more relaxed or more structured, the common challenge is to detail multiple scales – short-term cycles, seasonal patterns and processes that unfold over generations as well as weeks and days – and to describe episodes and experiences of chaos and frenzy alongside those of predictability and routine.

1. Making time

Popular and academic accounts routinely assume that experiences of time – and especially those of being hurried and harried – are shaped by external ‘forces’. In so doing they overlook the extent to which temporalities are themselves continually reproduced, enacted and transformed through the sequencing and timing of daily practice. This is an important shift in perspective in that it suggests that consumption – the arch-villain in critiques of hurriedness – contributes to the making of time, and is not simply a drain, a sink which takes time away from living. Or, to put it more precisely, consumption, broadly defined as a bundle of various practices and the use of things, constitutes an arena in which daily life is woven together, often imperfectly, and sometimes with tears and breaks, but always in ways that configure and reproduce its temporal texture. In elaborating on this insight, the chapters collected here clear the way for further analysis of the temporal and spatial profiles of what people do and how these intersect to produce what Henri Lefebvre (2002 [1961]) referred to as the ‘pulse’ of society.

We are not the first to notice that temporal rhythms are actively reproduced in daily life. Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis, originally published in 1992, completed a life-long exploration of everyday life that had started in the 1940s, which took him from an analysis of daily practices to their spatial and, eventually, their temporal dimensions (Lefebvre 1991, 2002 [1961], 2004). For Lefebvre, rhythms operated along several axes: they could be ‘secret’ (physiological rhythms; the said and the non-said) or ‘public’ (ceremonies, calendars); they could be ‘fictional’ (verbal rhythms, dreaming); and they could be ‘dominating–dominated’ (made up, with an effect beyond the rhythms itself). But he was especially interested in what made a rhythm tick as regulated time, its repetitions, its evolution and its more cyclical or more linear movement. In attempting to dissect the dimensions of rhythmic movement Lefebvre characterizes coexisting pulses and comments on how these modulate and amplify each other to produce a powerful temporal ‘texture’. These textures are depicted as forms laid down, if not imposed, by social agencies and acted out by a populace unwittingly caught up in this enfolding mesh. The city, in particular, was singled out for disciplining its inhabitants into a rhythmic flow of walking and living (see also Moran 2007). There are similarities between Lefebvre’s account of ordering rhythmic regimes and that of Michel de Certeau, who also emphasizes the realm of the everyday as a central site of social reproduction (Certeau 1984 [1974]). One key difference is that Certeau takes this to be a terrain of potential and actual resistance and subversion, rather than the arena of more passive compliance depicted by Lefebvre.

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Most contributors to this book share an emphasis on the ‘everyday’, but rather than viewing temporalities as outcomes of ongoing tensions between relatively ‘heroic’ individuals and oppressive systems, they seek to understand the many processes and practices involved in reproducing regimes and routines. Examples range from commuting to hobbies. In addition, we look at discontinuous challenges to rhythmic processes, as in periods of turmoil, stress and disruption. Building on but also going beyond Lefebvre and Certeau, the common challenge is one of understanding how temporalities of practice are produced, altered and disrupted and with what political, emotional and ethical implications.

1. Materializing time

Many, perhaps even the majority, of the processes and practices implicated in making time – in the sense of giving it meaning, order and personal as well as collective qualities and characteristics – involve the use of things. Time is rich in material culture, and vice versa. We have already noted that rather than seeing consumption as a force that sucks time out of our lives, many practices and hence many interactions with material culture create temporal order (a topic only recently taken up by archaeologists like Murray [1999]). But the materiality of time goes further than this. Things age, and we and our memories and identities age with them. Objects can be signs of enduring or momentary experience (an heirloom that signifies family time; a present that triggers feelings of ‘growing up’ or ‘childhood’). Objects play a critical role as a kind of compass or clock across our lifecourse. But they also have temporal orientations associated with them, such as an appeal to novelty, different careers of obsolescence and recycling, and the various kinds of wear and patina which signify age and interactions with people (McCracken 1988).

Introduction

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How, and how much, time is in an object raises sensitive questions of value and authenticity, as any participant or observer of antique shows knows. At the same time, ‘age’ and ‘ageing’ is not simply a natural process that can be dated with the help of a calendar or mark of origin. Commercial consumer culture plays an active role in creating new regimes of temporal value, as is evident in the market for vintage reproductions. Rather than seeing material objects as a distracting presence that injects stress and temporal frenzy into our lives, then, it is helpful to see them also as communicators and stabilizing devices which people employ to attain, reproduce and challenge temporal identities.

Themes and Methods

Inspired by these overarching challenges, contributors to this book provide ideas, resources and empirical research that help in understanding (a) how multiple temporalities co-evolve and intersect and (b) how patterns of time and space are reproduced in daily life, and (c) how material culture acts as a conduit in the production and consumption of time. This three-pronged approach allows us to capture and comment anew on how time is experienced, and on the emotions, politics and infrastructures of ordering and routine. There are a number of wa-ys we could organize the chapters in the volume, for they connect with one another along many dimensions; the next section describes some of the most important intersections.

Seasonal Cycles

As noted above, critiques of consumer society routinely presume a paradigmatic shift from natural, seasonal cycles to a commodified ‘unseasoned’ and more feverish rhythm. Marina Moskowitz’s discussion of the seed trade in the USA complicates and in effect confounds a sharp distinction between natural and commercial seasons. She demonstrates that these two rhythms interacted and evolved in tandem in the course of the nineteenth century. Seed catalogues were published in January so that plants could bloom later in the year, a strategy in which seasonality was commercialized rather than exterminated.

Inge Daniels’ chapter on the way that changing seasons are made and marked in contemporary Japanese homes provides further illustration of how material culture is enmeshed in an annual cycle of consumption. Mikko Jalas offers a case study of people renovating wooden boats, a pastime that attracts devoted followers in Scandinavian countries. Here natural processes like the rotting and decaying of timber intersect with the many social, cultural and material temporalities folded together in the practice of repairing and maintaining a wooden boat. The attraction of wooden boating arguably rests on its evocation of another time which was slower and based on the rhythms of seasons and hand labour, but the possession of an actual wooden boat drags the owner into deep time commitments and obligations which are far from the imagined leisure. Although the point is made in very different ways, these three chapters force readers to acknowledge specific relations between coexisting seasons and cycles of consumption and practice.

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Circuits of Commodification

The question of how commercial circuits are made and materialized is taken up by Jukka Gronow, who deals directly with the unending reproduction of ‘fashion’. Does fashion really produce ‘novelty’? Gronow is sceptical. In distinguishing between cycles that really do go round in circles and forms of innovation that represent another kind of spiralling movement, Gronow points to a raft of neglected questions about novelty and the simultaneous production and destruction of value in material culture. These questions are explored further in Daniel Miller’s discussion of how the ‘past’ is embodied and commodified in things that people buy and use. In moving between an analysis of ‘distressed’ jeans and antiques Miller shows how contrasting temporalities worm their way through consumer culture and how products serve to reproduce as well as to mark the passage of time. The lives of objects and the lives of people intersect, but it is never possible to say one is simply driving the other.

Temporal Processes

Another strand running right through this volume concerns the processes of making and using time. What looks like a temporal order from a distance is exposed here as an illusion of scale; as we move closer to the object we see complex patterns and shifts in the micro-organization of routine and habit. The relation between social practice and ‘timespace’ is addressed from different angles in several chapters. Ted Schatzki’s contribution sets out a range of fundamental issues about the status of ‘timespace’ as a concept useful in understanding the dynamics of order and coordination. Elizabeth Shove experiments with similar ideas, wondering about how we might capture and characterize the extent and scale of synchronization, the rate at which practices evolve, and the spatial and temporal range of contemporary routines. In his chapter, Dale Southerton takes up some of these challenges using historical data to show how the rhythmic order of temporal coordination shifted in the course of the twentieth century. In comparing the ordering of domestic life in 1937 and 2000, he seeks to identify long-term change whilst also showing how routines hang together at different points in time.

Introduction

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How do moments and episodes of practice combine to form new configurations, and how do these combinations play out in the longer run? In addressing this question, chapters by Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren and by Tom O’Dell elaborate on a series of middle-range concepts like those of routine, career and generation. The daily rhythm of commuting exists before and persists beyond the ‘career’ of any single commuter – at the same time, that regular flow of people from home to work and back is felt in the precise timing of the bike ride to the station and in the seconds saved and spent along the way. These contributions provide us with insights into how micro-social temporalities, including the detailed scheduling of the day, play out across years, over decades and between generations.

Routine and Rupture

While much of the existing literature and some of the chapters included in this book concentrate on regularities of habit, ordering only makes sense in relation to processes or threats of disruption and fracture. Frank Trentmann consequently writes about daily life as a process in which permanently fragile orders are ruptured and restored – an approach that positions routine and habit as an outcome not of casual dis-attention but of concerted repair work. As he explains, greater material and technological interdependence has arguably increased the risk of breakdowns in everyday life, and our sensibility towards them. Ironically, the consequences of failure increase the more we rely upon systems and infrastructures designed to sustain the safe and secure flow of materials, resources and people.

In highlighting intriguing paradoxes in which security begets risk and in which routine and rupture are never far apart, Trentmann’s contribution disturbs and disrupts conventional representations of time in which the mindless grind of habit is set against the energizing thrill of spontaneity. As Don Slater’s chapter shows, we do not come to routines fresh. Routines are positioned, disclosed and evaluated within established ethical frameworks. Many traditions in the West, especially in the line stretching from Marx to the Frankfurt School, have presented routines as structural, non-reflexive processes that alienate individuals from their authentic, true self. Slater’s comparison between the negative evaluation of hobbies in this tradition with quite different framings of meditation and technological routines in other contexts brings to light the considerable ideological and moral work that goes into how and what people see as routines.

Richard Wilk’s essay extends this critique to the level of personal mind and action, showing that the extent to which regularity figures as comfort or constraint is in part a matter of subjective experience and perception. That ‘choice’ is rarely completely free or sovereign has been a mantra of much recent research. Similarly, we need to recognize that habits are not automatically a tool of disciplinary restraint. They can have liberating features too. It is probably unwise, Wilk argues, to look for different accounts of habitual and spontaneous action or to treat these as somehow separate domains, one marked by discipline the other by liberation, as has been common in much of the human sciences. In part, these chapters can be read as exercises in retrieval, pointing back to more organic treatments of habit and choice which recognized their creative interdependence, most notably exemplified in the works of the pragmatist philosophers William James (1890) and John Dewey (1922).

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Space and Time

Studies of time tend to lose sight of the fact that rhythms and routines have spatial qualities and characteristics. In their contribution Güliz Ger and Olga Kravets describes the teabag’s arrival in Turkey and the havoc it wrought in relation to established distinctions between slow and fast consumption. The teabag speeded up what had been a reliably time-consuming ritual, creating new and different associations between tea and time. It disrupted the daily gatherings, events and spatial movements of people which had been based on the samovar and the continual availability of tea in a particular spot. Other spatial temporalities crop up across this volume, for example in the circulation of seed catalogues across the USA; in efforts to synchronize social and spatial coordinates in rush hours and commuting; and in discussions of where as well as when practices are enacted. In this collection, Ted Schatzki addresses the integration of timespace head on, demonstrating how these dimensions of social life constitute each other. In his words, ‘timespaces form a kind of infrastructure through which human activities coordinate and aggregate’ – an infrastructure that is itself made by the activities in question.

Implications

A greater focus on multiple rhythms and on the processes of producing time is a promising way to start unravelling the complexity of social difference in space and time. This is particularly relevant for those pondering how to promote lifestyle change and more sustainable behaviour, but it concerns all agencies seeking to change the temporal order of everyday life, from education and transportation to working and shopping routines. Most discussions of time poverty and stress have been future-orientated: are we becoming a rat-race society? Is our behaviour making life unsustainable? While raising sensitive, thorny questions that deserve debate, these lines of inquiry are of limited value in helping us think about the future, since they have – as we have shown – a restricted and typically unsatisfactory understanding of the evolving rhythms underlying social practices, past and present.

Introduction

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The first implication from the studies assembled in this volume is that analysing rhythms and temporal change requires elements from a range of disciplines, including history, geography and social theory as well as sociology, philosophy and anthropology. Likewise, relevant questions range from the spatial dimensions to the politics and ethics of habit and disruption.

In producing this volume, we readily acknowledge that it has sometimes been easier to document than to explain shifts in cycles and temporal orders. Although they do not provide all the answers, the inquiries assembled here provide a starting point and suggest a number of paths towards a new synthesis. One such route involves closer interaction with theories of practice. In recent years, the theory of practice has attracted growing interest in the social sciences (Schatzki 2001; Shove and Pantzar 2005; Warde 2005; Warde et al. 2007). To date, empirical studies have tended to follow the development of individual practices over time. As discussed in several chapters, rhythms are usefully understood as bundles of everyday practices, or, to be precise, they are achievements of coordinating and stabilizing relationships between practices. A shift in one practice, say having a quick daily shower instead of a longer but only weekly bath, will impinge on this bundle. Understanding the rhythmic richness and modulations of everyday life therefore requires a move from single practices to a focus on their interactive dynamics and coordination. This raises questions about how practices with different rhythmic properties can amplify, enable or cancel out each other. In combination, these observations call for further research on the spectrum of rhythmic performance in everyday life, ranging from successful synchronization to tension and disruption.

A second implication for research arises from the recognition of rupture and stress as integral features of ‘normality’ as well as routine (see Löfgren and Wilk 2006). Everyday life, in this view, appears as a more open, fluid terrain that, to reproduce itself, requires and involves a lot of fixing, frustration and coping. This, perhaps, does not produce the picture of heroic resistance as envisaged by Certeau, but it does emphasize the role of agency and mentality, putting back into the frame individuals and their ways of coping with strain. Habits and routines, in this view, appear less as external forces that become absorbed through techniques of governmentality, as some Foucauldians would have it, and much more as the result of an interplay between internally produced rhythms, the strains resulting from coordination between practices themselves, and associated pressures and opportunities for temporal change arising from technologies and social agencies. If disruptions are unique moments that allow us to see the braiding and unbraiding of rhythmic achievements at times of stress, it is worth debating the merits of deliberate disruption as a kind of research strategy.

Time has the curious quality of being both a completely mundane everyday experience and a complete abstraction which cannot be easily or objectively described or explained. The overall goal of this book is to bring these two qualities of time closer together, to help us bridge the gap between common experience and high theory in a way which is productive of new insights. No single discipline, science or philosophy can achieve this connection on its own. The three editors of this collection, who come from history, sociology and anthropology, and all the diverse authors have worked together to construct a shared set of terms and concepts which establish a transdisciplinary (or supra-disciplinary) space where new ideas flourish. For all the participants, this has been perhaps the most valuable reward of the common project.

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References

Introduction

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