Book review of "Time and Commodity Culture: essays in cultural theory and postmodernity" by John Frow, Oxford, UK, Clarendon Press, 1997. ISBN: 978-0-19-815948-3

[Extract] John Frow's Time and Commodity Culture analyses the role of time and the commodity in postmodern culture. It consists of four inter-related essays: 'What Was Postmodernism?' ; 'Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia'; 'Gift and the Commodity'; and a final essay on 'memory' entitled 'Toute la m6moire du monde: Repetition and Forgetting'. While these essays have appeared separately, together they comprise a coherent exploration of the temporal organisation of postmodernity. However, Frow takes his cue from stylists such as Lukacs and Adorno in seeing the essay genre as particularly suited to analysing the multiple and contradictory set of relations that constitute postmodern culture: 'I take it as axiomatic that cultural things cannot be understood in isolation from economic and political and technological things ... The essay is the form in which I feel able to get at some of these complexities of connection, and to do so by groping my way towards a structure of explanation which cannot be defined in advance' (p. 11)