The Way We Think Time: Tracking the Nostalgic Logic of Commodity--A Response to John Frow's Time and Commodity Culture

Abstract

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