symploke

The whole apparatus of levels, standards, hierarchies, boundaries, limits, centers and sources needs to be rethought.

—Peter Wollen²

John Frow’s Time and Commodity Culture analyzes the nostalgic way of imagining time expressed in the theoretical concepts postmodernism, tourism, and commodity. Each of these notions is one term in a synthetic contrast that opposes modernism to postmodernism, authentic human relations to tourism and the gift to commodity, respectively. However, the very logical operation that also links both terms in opposition retrospectively constitutes one term as obsolete. The consequences of this dualistic and reductive process are temporal orders, boundaries and hierarchies of thought divorced from the actual complexities of contemporary culture. In this way, particularly in his third and richest chapter on “Gift and Commodity,” Frow demonstrates how prevailing theoretical fictions obscure communal forces that share the globe with the most advanced spheres of commodification. Here Frow addresses, among other things, the complex mixture of communal interests and private [End Page 184] property rights that play out in contemporary DNA research, the exchange of human organs for transplant and “personality” as a commodity. Frow also discusses more recent anthropological research that complicates our understanding of the practices associated with the concept of the gift in “primitive” as well as in emerging capitalist modes of exchange.

Frow’s analysis of a logical operation, if not his specific terms, has explicit precedents in discourse active over this century, proponents of which include Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Susan Stewart and others. The critique of nostalgic logic is also very alive today in other contexts, including the discourse on “orientalism” and “primitivism.” To take note of this is in no way to dismiss Frow’s efforts here; it is rather to situate his contribution in a larger, on-going and multi-generational endeavor or cultural work aimed at a long-term goal of shifting not only what but also the way we think in response to a changing world. The stakes are a tacit dimension where success is hard to measure and unlikely to be expressed as a great rupture or divide.

Raymond Williams’ Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Glasgow: Fontana, 1976) provides a most useful benchmark for assessing shifts in critical tools of thought since mid-century. “Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language,” writes Williams, a word “used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and several distinct and incompatible systems of thought” (76f). Williams’ inquiry into the wordis called forth by “problems quite literally in understanding [his] immediate world” (10). The traditions and emerging meanings of the word also record a “real social history and a very difficult and confused phase of social and cultural development” (82) in the period after WWII, when developments in language also seemed “unusually rapid and conscious” (10). Thus, key words represent more than just important discursive traditions; for this founder of cultural studies, they unlock our comprehension of social change.

Interestingly enough, commodity is not a key word for Williams, but commercialism is. This once primarily descriptive word began to indicate, for good or ill, “a system which puts financial profit before any other consideration” (60). Williams’ definition of consumersociety reflects a much earlier and more limited extension of capitalist development that encompasses fields such as politics, education and health, as well as goods and services (70), but does not reach into the body and the constitution of selfhood and personality like the “commodity culture” that Frow examines in his book. For Williams, “to say user rather than consumer, is still to express a relevant distinction” (70). For Frow, on the other hand, “Gift and commodity [End Page 185] exchange are mutually overdetermined: they merge with each other, absorb or transform each other, or clash in contradiction” (217). Ultimately, however, the distinction remains relevant: not in terms of a gift economy nor in the projection of a public domain of “inalienable personal and social goods and rights . . . that rather than deriving from personhood, precede and enable it” (214f), but...