The Consumption of Time: Wear, Patination and Retro-consumption in the Contemporary Age

This chapter examines the ‘feel’, look or sensation of the past (be it aural, visual or haptic) as it is industrially implemented in new cultural artefacts. More precisely, it seeks to theorise the ontological implications of artificially ‘producing’ and mirroring processes of ageing. Why is it that we can, and do, buy shoes with an ‘authentic worn look’ (as an advertisement for Gola trainers put it), or distressed, worn-out denims? Is this only a matter of aesthetics? Drawing from Rosa’s theses on ‘social acceleration’, this chapter posits that, because we do not have the time to fully experience duration or wait for objects to age, we ask them to offer us, instead, the signs of duration itself: the ‘pre-worn’ shoes, as it were, have already walked for us, on our behalf. In a context of accelerated production, consumption and discarding of objects, retro-consumption may indicate a desire to reclaim – symbolically and superficially – a sense of duration, of time passing.