Paper short abstract:

What can a consideration of the relationship between money and time tell us about the politics of wear vis a vis particular money objects and the cultural concepts and conventions of value which render them interpretable?

Paper long abstract:

In her recent novel, The Psychology of Time Travel, Kate Mascarenhas describes an alternate history in which time travel was discovered by a team of female scientists in the late 1960s and rapidly thereafter turned into a practice supported by an immense and secretive quasi-governmental bureaucracy. In the context of this state institution, time travelers were issued with money in the form of what Mascarenhas terms the "achronic pound" or "achron" for short, a form of money worth the same amount in whatever year a time traveller might visit. The figure of the achron highlights a central paradox concerning money's relationship to time: namely, while money is presented as timeless, in practice the value of currency is bound up intimately with particular temporalities. My proposed essay juxtaposes Mascarenhas' notion of the achron with so-called historical currency convertors (which express the value of past currencies in "today's money") as a means of opening up a discussion of the relationship between money and time, with particular relevance to divergent modes of monetary signification in which the condition of notes alternately does or does not affect their ability to retain value. What in other words, can a consideration of the relationship between money and time tell us about the politics of wear vis a vis particular money objects and the cultural concepts and conventions of value which render them interpretable?