‘A Form of Time Travel’: Everyday Vintage

Abstract

In Chaps. 1 and 3 I began to outline that there are three main ways to elucidate and understand the appeal of vintage. They are the ‘ghost’ in things, which includes the importance of the provenance of an item, and the resulting feeling of being a custodian of that item, therefore, secondly, invoking nostalgia and emotion, which in turn, thirdly, creates emotional durability. The concept of ‘hauntings’ and ‘ghosts’ and spectral remains can be usefully applied to the preference for vintage objects, and illuminates one of the main appeals of vintage items, which imbues them with emotional durability. The concept of ‘hauntings’ has gained ground in recent years, primarily in cultural geography (e.g. see Edensor 2008; Collins 2015 in Harris and Rapport; and Vanolo 2016) and psychoanalysis (e.g. see Frosh 2013 on trauma). Tim Edensor has written about spectral remains in cities and urban spaces, how in the process of gentrification or modernisation urban spaces can become the site of hauntings, where we find ‘traces of material forms [and] cultural practices’ and these ‘residues’ summon the ghosts of the past city, and it inhabitants. For example, in a very old town in the south of England, there is a small red decommissioned Victorian postbox set into a wall just outside the town centre, within sight of Canterbury Cathedral. The postbox reflects a whole other way of life where more letters were written and posted, there were more collections of mail and more deliveries, and much less traffic to impede the mail collections. Leftovers such as this remind us how brief is a human life, and how things simply outlive us. But such traces and residues are not only to be found in urban spaces; they also reside with us in our homes. Ben Highmore (2011, p. 82) writes about how his grandfather’s paperweight had outlived his grandfather, and now lives on Highmore’s own desk, but would undoubtedly also outlive its current owner: it had ‘called me to account as so much gristle and bone … This is the world seen as a snapshot from the perspective of eternity’. Daniel Miller (2001, p. 107) argues that traditional hauntings are the product of ‘the discrepancy between the longevity of homes and the relative transience of their occupants. In consequence, feelings of alienation may arise between the occupants and both their homes and their possessions’—in other words, the house may begin to feel to have an agency and will of its own, a soul. In the same way, Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey (2001, p. 118) discuss the ‘varied and unpredictable amassed materiality of a household which has to be dismantled following a person’s death’ and how some of the material objects may somehow ‘escape’ the controls of being ‘sorted out’ by the relatives of the deceased (or the deceased themselves, in the period before their death). These objects ‘remain present yet “lost” and drifting in the absence of the living body/self of their owners … Their enduring, melancholy qualities are accentuated’ (ibid.). Such items retain connections to the past, to ways of life, but also to people and memories, prompting the participants (and the respondents in Chap. 3) to feel they are the custodians of their things. But as Miller (2001, p. 112) notes, ‘the prior presence of material culture may have a constraining impact upon what one feels one can do with possessions.’