Productive conjunctions

Avatars and pornography: what is the ground on which Frow brings these together? At one level, of course, it is the character systems and forms of identification that are Frow’s primary concern in this essay. Yet this aspect of his argument is subtended by a more far-reaching contention which insists on both the inherent sociality of textual phenomena and the textuality of the social. In a double movement, Frow opens up the texts he engages with from without in showing how their properties are shot through with the social relations which produce and enable them at the same time that they are inscribed as active agents within the make-up of those social relations. This is not surprising. The intermeshing of the social and the textual has been a leitmotif of Frow’s work from his early critical engagements with Marxist literary theory and the projects of the new literary history, through his preoccupation with regimes of value and their social articulations, to his more recent preoccupations with genre the theory and character systems.