being additive: on Harvey's rebuttal (JP)

Reading Harvey's rebuttal to his critics got me thinking about the politics of academic knowledge production and especially about the very personal/political and embodied nature of academic debate. References to the affective were many, including Harvey's assertion that Deutsche and Massey were particularly hurtful, insulting and personal. I found it quite curious that Harvey took a very similar tack of targeting the psyche and the person, but maybe this was not the case. Perhaps the inseparability of author and work makes academic debate, by default, a game of interpersonal conflict?

For the most part, I was quite sympathetic to Harvey's critics, especially with regards to the totalizing tone of his 'Conditions', which gives it a rather masculinist address. Perhaps a clarification is necessary here. Many feminist critics of modernist discourses are quite weary of knowledges that claim to be absolute and universal; they disdain in particular those knowledges that do not ground themselves in position and situation. This I found to be particularly acute in Harvey's case. Despite his assertion that Donna Haraway influenced him tremendously, he still performs what Haraway calls 'the godtrick', which parallels in many ways the idea of the academic gaze, an mode of seeing from somewhere outside the object. By definition, this mode of address is objectifying. Harvey's memorable methodological tack - to look at the city from the vantage point of a tall building - is his way of performing the godtrick. Where is he in his story? How does his being there (despite his claims of not being there?) matter to the type of story he can tell? The notion of the 'overview' is appropriate here. Indeed, the vantage point he holds on to is precisely this -- it is a view from above, God-like, not touching what goes on because he is separate from his object.

Another problematic: Harvey's treatment of difference is a simplistic one. This is what some of my critical race theory professors have called 'the add and stir method' of doing difference. Add gender to class and stir. Add race to class and stir. This is evident in his rebuttal when he says that poor women of colour are triply oppressed (as if it is quantifiable that way). But the problem with this is that it treats each axis as still separate, and worse, it treats class at the 'thing' to which we add other axes. This privileges class and reduces social relations to economic relations. Difference has materials effects outside of the economic, and unfortunately, the economic seems to be the dominant (dominating?) mode of inquiry for Harvey. To claim that Marx is the first scholar of difference because he divides his worldview into the proletariat and the bourgeousie misses the point of the politics of difference. This claim can only be made within Harvey's definition of the term 'difference' - additive, singular and uncomplicated.

At best, Harvey misunderstands feminist politics of difference. At worst, he contorts it to fit his mindset or critique. Difference for many feminists looks to the complicated nature of identity. This perspective refuses the additive mode of analysis. It does not deny that people are situated within capitalism; indeed, Deutsche's work on gentrification and art (in her 'Displacements') makes this resoundingly clear. Contrary to Harvey's claim, this is not about complexity for complexity's sake (what an unfair critique of postmodernists, as if po-mo scholars eschew politics entirely). Is this really Deutsche's goal? I highly doubt it.

Which brings me to my last 'beef' with Harvey: on his notion of significance. Significance to him seems to be measured thus: class + another axis of difference.