Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture

This personal relationship to jeans is clearly what commerce has attempted to replicate and then pre-empt through the phenomenon of distressing. Even if this is starting to spread to a few other garments, it clearly developed as a direct response to this unique relationship to denim. But this leads to a clear contradiction. My jeans were personal to my body because of the degree of time they spent on my body. Commercially distressed jeans are an artificial simulation of that process. Yes, you can probably artificially induce some of the softness that comes from constant wear, but not the way the jeans mould themselves to you in particular. Indeed the very sense of the commercial faking of this process seems to mitigate against the sense of the personal.

To understand what is going on, we need to situate the whole phenomenon of distressing within a wider appreciation of the special nature of blue denim jeans – a task which was recently undertaken by myself and Woodward in a paper we called ‘A Manifesto for the Study of Denim’ (Miller and Woodward 2007). This provides the academic argument for a larger Global Denim Project (www.ucl.ac.uk/globaldenim-project). The paper argues for a consideration of distressing in the context or two other unique properties of denim. The first is the sheer global ubiquity. It is equally extraordinary that at a time when there is increasing choice in a post-fordist, competitive market that we should see something increasingly approaching half the world choosing only one particular textile to wear on their lower half, at any given time. This amounts almost to a global refusal of the dictates of fashion and capitalism, since although there are designer jeans, mostly it is a preference for the mundane and non-descript that dominates jean wearing. Secondly there is Woodward’s work on women getting dressed in the morning in England (Woodward 2007), which shows that denim acts as a kind of foundational bedrock to the typical wardrobe. Woodward notes that very commonly women will start by trying one or two more adventurous items of clothing, and then find they don’t have the confidence to select them on that particular day, and withdraw to the security of denim wearing. This in turn relates to a paper published in Fashion Theory by myself and Alison Clarke (Clarke and Miller 2002) which argues that it is this point of anxiety that should be central to the study of fashion, not the study of the industry.

So we have three extraordinary aspects of denim blue jeans, and it would be unreasonable to see them as merely coincidently in juxtaposition within this single garment. It is not just that denim turns out to have the capacity to be the most individualized and personal garment, but that it is simultaneously the exact opposite – the most global, ubiquitous and in effect anonymous garment that we possess. In short it manages within itself to encapsulate that well-worn phrase about the most local and the most global, and also to somehow address the core of the anxiety that exists in that relationship. Our manifesto paper argues that denim jeans are therefore one of the most profound forms of contemporary clothing, telling us a great deal about that same modernity that is the context for much of our more general discussion over the rhythms and routines of consumption. The degree to which distressed jeans matter is also evident in the strong feelings people have about them. Since June 2007, Woodward and I have been carrying out an ethnography of denim jeans consumption in three streets in North London. Already we have found that when people are talking about their jeans consumption, many consumers, especially older consumers, are adamant about the degree to which they would never, under any circumstances, wear distressed jeans, and have equally strong feelings about the circumstances under which other people also should not wear them, for example, at work.

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The implication, as argued in our manifesto paper, is an evident need to acknowledge and account for denim jeans more in the tradition of a philosophy of practice than merely just as an item of apparel. There are many key philosophical issues raised, but for the purposes of a specific focus upon rhythms and routines of consumption the strongest conclusion from this discussion is the direct relationship between buying time, on the one hand, and then the establishment of an extreme polarity between personalization and impersonalization, on the other. If the key to distressing is the way it simulates the long-term personalization of jeans, as a means to negate the impersonality represented by denim’s global ubiquity and homogenization, how is it that this can be achieved through a commercial, industrial and thoroughly anonymous process as represented by industrial distressing and with respect to the most anonymous and homogenizing garment we possess? Denim jeans possess an apparently oxymoronic quality linking the extremely personal and the extremely impersonal. When buying time, which of these are we buying into?

Buying the Patina of the Past

At this point I want to take this paradox back into the frame of anthropological reasoning by examining it in more general and comparative terms, starting with an entirely different social and cultural context and then exploring an opposition within a UK setting. The first case is drawn from a paper called ‘Rituals of Death as a Context for Understanding Personal Property in Socialist Mongolia’, by Caroline Humphrey (2002). This starts with one of the fundamental contradictions of materiality itself (Miller 2005), where objects are used to express the desire to transcend the material, here within a Buddhist context. When a person amongst the Buryat peoples whom Humphrey studied is close to death, certain treasured objects are taken away from them, to help them separate from desire and enter more smoothly into this other state. This is even more important after they have died since there is a category of material culture called refuge objects that the dead soul still desires and wishes to return to. An astrologer identifies these and they are either destroyed, given away or buried with the corpse. So one category of objects is considered too personal, too intimate for them to be inherited or even to survive.

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At the same time Buryat people in general show a preference for things that have been worn as against new things. They like this patina of care to be attached to objects, but it should be a generic collective sense of the humanized object, not the hyper-personalization of these refuge objects. Humphrey suggests that these are more nuanced ideas of possible relationships between property and the person than those given by the legal bases of property in our society, or the extremes of Weiner’s (1992) inalienable objects as things that can never be given away. The Buryat assume that merely looking after or caring for an object attaches a person to it and helps provide a transformational quality that allows it to grow, on analogy with caring after livestock. Overall Humphrey argues that when it comes to considering the dead, the Buryat aim for a balance between the degree of personalization and impersonalization that accrues from the temporality of association between a person and a thing. So it is not just in relation to ourselves and blue denim jeans that cultural normativity establishes through material culture a parameter based on the distinction between the personal and the impersonal quality of used objects, and within this polarity creates a point of preference. Rather it may be that this striving for balance and commensurability between these possibilities in the signification of material culture is rather common, though it will manifest itself quite differently in different social and cultural contexts.

For example, a paper by Gregson et al. (2000) provides an analogous instance closer to home. They examine the work of people in charity shops selling retro clothing: for example, dresses from the 1920s and 1930s. Their paper observes how the workers in these shops clean these clothes of evident stains. People will buy such clothes unwashed, but what they don’t want to see are specific stains. In other words, just as amongst the Buryat, we want to wear something that has been given authenticity by its association with another person’s life, but a generic other person, not someone as specific as represented by a particular stain.

My second comparative study comes from a strangely antagonistic dualism within our own attitudes to consumption. This dualism struck me as particularly acute when watching Signs of the Times – a television series about home decoration made by a documentary film maker trained in anthropology. One programme focused upon two groups of people, those who largely decorated their homes with reproduction furniture and those who prefer antiques. Needless to say each of these groups utterly despised the other.

The people who brought reproduction furniture saw this as a commitment to the high quality and style of the past. But they also tended to feel disgusted by the idea of having to sleep in a bed that someone else actually may have lived in, or, still worse, died in. They would see actual antiques as worn, possibly diseased, and in general rather revolting. As far as they are concerned their devotion to reproduction furniture grants them all the advantages of the past without any of these disadvantages. By contrast, those who buy actual antiques look quite disdainfully at people who buy reproduction, almost as though it was some version of stupidity, certainly vulgarity. They see these people as being in some sense fooled by fakes, and at least vicariously associating themselves with the inauthentic that cannot match the truth of an antique.

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In general the people who buy antiques have higher status than those who buy reproduction – the former being associated with the arts, in which the original has always had to preserve itself from the mere copy. I suspect most academics would be on their side. My sense of this comes from my own experience as someone who generally prefers fake reproductions. My house is dominated by an ‘oriental’ carpet made in Belgium and purchased at John Lewis. As I would see it, both the European Renaissance and the Pre-Raphaelite could be regarded as reproduction styles, but actually the new context is a form of active reappropriation. If fakes and copies undermine the art market and its absurd prices, this seems entirely positive. But then some of my friends would see my taste as an affectation, either for the vulgar and philistine, or a desire for status by overtrumping style.

These matters are probably best argued over a drink. The point, though, is that in contemporary consumption we also often work with a contradictory and dualist relationship to time as represented in material culture, preferring to buy time in the sense of objects that were actually associated with past people rather than an appearance of the past. Most people privilege patina over veneer. One more step is required, however, to return this point to the overall focus of this volume, that is, our rhythms and routines of consumption. Fortuitously I was able to take this step recently when I was approached to facilitate a new research project. This is being carried out by Nicolette Makovicky, who had just finished a Ph.D. in my Department at UCL as research assistant to Gerry and Valerie Mars and Angela Burr. My task was to give a place for this project through our department under the title of ‘A pilot study of interactions, interconnections and change in the antiques, car boot sale and collectable trades with special reference to income provision and the enhancement of social well-being among the retired and 50 and over unemployed’.

I suspect that in general people such as myself who tend to buy fakes and reproductions have not produced from this any particular rhythms or routines of consumption. Our purchases tend to be one-off and ad hoc, according to what we see as the needs of our home decorations. By contrast, the people who are the subject of this research project are responsible for one of the most concerted routines of contemporary consumption. Many of these people visit antique markets, or the various versions of flea markets and junk markets, with considerable frequency. One suspects that many of those who sell such items are hard to distinguish from the buyers, in that both parties seem to share a general sense of the amateur love of such things, and either of them might make the commitment to a weekly attendance at such events. Indeed in some of the more informal markets I see consumers who know the sellers well enough to spend an hour or two minding the stall while the seller takes time off to be a consumer. It is hard to think of many other aspects of consumption that therefore so fully confirm the sense of routine or rhythms of the consumption process as this highly regular commitment to being present often on a weekly basis,

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This research project starts from the observation that there has developed in Britain a vast multi-million pound trade in various forms of antiques, junk and second-hand goods, often through more informal sites of provision such as flea markets and car boot sales (Gregson and Crewe 2003). On casual observation one can see that most of the people involved in this trade are 50 and over, and it seems particularly to attract those who are retired from regular work and can give themselves more fully to such activities.

This is clearly also an example of buying time, a trade in patina. These people circulate objects that have actually been used by some other person. One might have expected, then, that these objects would be possessed and treasured, respecting this patina of prior personalization on analogy with the heirloom. But actually this is not at all what we find. Instead the emphasis is rather on establishing routines of consumption. Those involved develop a very regular, often weekly ritual of trading, exchanging and collecting. The routines seem actually more important than the respect for the individuality of these objects, which are mostly gathered, traded, formed into collections, returned to the market, and so forth. This routine of exchange and consumption has the effect of making such objects almost trivial in their relative alienability and often transience of possession. The high-frequency circulation seems to cut against the idea that they are authentic to individual past lives and would be treated with appropriate respect as such.

Just as in the case of distressed blue jeans, these people seem to be buying time in the form of a material culture which seems to at first evoke a patina of its usage by other people. These objects also are worn, abraded, faded and signify their own prior lives. Yet just as with distressed jeans, this degree of personalization signifying their previous usage is instantly denied by its very opposite. They are actually highly alienated commodities that form a vast circuit of constant exchange which lends themselves to these particular routines and rhythms of consumption. As such they become tokens of a generic past rather than an individualizing past. As with the Buryat, they seem to work within a field established by these parameters of contrast, such that antiques and junk must be personal but not too personal.

Machines for the Suppression of Time

Having parked the question of why young people are involved in the purchase of distressed jeans, it is now joined by the question as to why older people are involved in the circulation of flea market goods. I want to suggest an explanation based on what is itself a well-worn classic of anthropological theorization with a patina of its own. In anthropology the concept of rhythm and repetition in time evokes the classic discussion by Lévi-Strauss on ritual and myth, as ‘machines for the suppression of time’. In particular there is the opposition of Lévi-Strauss (1972) to Sartre’s work on the dialectic of practical reason found in the last chapter of The Savage Mind called ‘History and Dialectic’, and which follows on from a previous chapter called ‘Time Regained’. In brief, Sartre’s love of history links him to his particular sense of the individual as a historical narrative leading to choices, to freedom and to death. Lévi-Strauss, by contrast, draws attention to the cyclical nature of repetitive time as another form of human experience that transcends and complements narrative time, with an emphasis on the endless and transcendent, the immortal qualities of mythic time. For Lévi-Strauss, forms of time that are constantly repeated, such as annual ceremonies or retold myths, are a means by which we deny the linear narrative sense of time that leads ultimately to death. This is why religions tend to proliferate rituals and routines of time as machines that suppress linear or narrative time.

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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.

This 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.

If 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.

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So there are clear contrasts between these two phenomena of buying time. Yet I would argue that understanding the junk/antique market as a machine for the suppression of time provides by analogy an explanation also for distressed blue denim jeans. As argued above, both are founded in the same paradoxical relation between the person and impersonal. In the case of blue denim jeans there is an equal threat of personal annihilation. But it is not that of death, but of consumers’ increasing consciousness of the anonymity and massivity of global modernity. As argued above (and in Miller and Woodward 2007), the paradox of blue denim jeans is that they are simultaneously both the most personal and the most global and ubiquitous of all garments. There are few objects that so fully objectify the modern sense of global homogenization as blue denim jeans. Despite rather than because of the fashion industry, they have become the default conformity with what everyone else is wearing at the moment across almost the entire world. It is this property, as observed by Woodward and myself, which allows them to act to help alleviate the intense anxieties that people experience on an almost daily basis when dressing. The same garment brings this ultimate depersonalization into direct relation with the most intense personalization the majority of people ever experienced of a garment, a personalization that is signified in the techniques of distressing.

If flea markets are the circulation of everyman or everywoman of the past, then blue denim jeans are the circulation of the generic humanity of the present. This may well be a reason why the most expensive labels in the denim world today tend to have names such as ‘citizens of humanity’, ‘seven for all mankind’ or ‘true religion’. I would think unwittingly these premium labels, which are all about adding value, evoke the place of jeans as something which links what otherwise might have seemed incommensurable, the extremes of the personal and the impersonal. In another paper I have shown that it is this process which has become foundational to the way we create value in the contemporary world (Miller 2008).

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In conclusion, I have used as my title ‘Buying Time’, which phrase, when used colloquially, means that one is stalling, trying to fend of the inevitable progress of time, at least for a while. If my explanation of these two paradoxical forms of consumption is correct, then certain routines and rhythms of consumption are, in Lévi-Strauss’s terms, precisely ways in which we try to hold a stance against our annihilation either by linear time or by the anonymity and massivity of modernity. We achieve this through a devotion to circulations of humanity either as the past or as the present. Distressed blue jeans for the youth and flea markets for the older generation are ways in which we try to resolve our sense of the profound gulf between the striving for personalization and individuality in life and our consciousness of the crushing anonymity of death and global ubiquity. In that case the phrase ‘Buying Time’, in its colloquial meaning as fending off time, would be entirely appropriate as a description of the phenomena I have tried to understand in this chapter.

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