Deutsch on Harvey (claire)

Deutsche, R. (1991). Boys town. Environment and Planning D, 9, 5-30.

[1] Negligent in accepting that “postmodernism is about complication: its critique of the abstract universalism that has characterized modern Western thought disrupts the coherence of the social world.” 13. Harvey insists that there is a social world that can be known, that it is a real common entity / urban real world. Deutsch's critique is an undermining of historic materialism: undermining the idea that of the metanarrative disrupting political economy is privileged. 14-creation of a strawman of postmodernism. Because relentless need for metatheory, he reduces distinctions “to an undifferentiated mass” - postmodern undermines any metanarrative and he “never seriously consider the possibility that new ideas might call into question his basic premises” – that of production. In so doing, disciplines are maintained.

Does Harvey turn capitalism into a Cartesian causality / “dream of unity” - because all of his argument follows from the privileged position that he gives production, which Stuart Hall called into question (cited on 13). Harvey argues: overaccumulation... post Fordism eventually makes capitalism more resilient... time-space compression... spatial reorganization... new experiences of space time... postmodernism feeds right into that... space and time and economy and culture become more closely associated. Harvey fails to appreciate that his is a “one-way determination” – 17. Postmodernism therefore valorizes fragmentation 14-15. Leaving the premise that capitalist production as metanarration in one piece.

[2] A major critique is the way that he argues is as though he is outside of that which he discusses - as though there is some kind of objectivity, which is why the author spends so much time discussing his misconstrued notion of de Certeau - Re: the first chapter of the urban experience rare the preferred place from which to view the world is at the top of the tower because there he is not bogged down by empirical - places himself in a privileged God position - not unlike a colonial project-because he is not from more of this world be able [he thinks] to point out its failures [that said, I don't think that Harvey tries to argue that there is any one city as Deutsche suggests - 11].

8 – his “account of postmodernism depends on feminism's absence” followed by a “failure to acknowledge cultural production that uses feminist ideas and neglect of feminist ideas as a way of understanding cultural production” - important because no one metatheory can do everything? Feminism can dip into areas that Harvey's metatheory cannot [just as feminism perhaps is not the best lens through which to look at capitalism?] Evidence that he totally doesn't get feminism is when Deutsche takes hit understanding of what feminism can do the urban theory as adding onto it - rather feminism, or other positionalities of difference; to take such a lens sheds light on how the question changes and Deutsche posits that it is a strategic negligence.

[3] Most interesting part to me is the part that I understand the least – on representation. Perhaps b/c I am a libertarian socialist, but I need somehow to get my subjectivity back from Harvey! Follows in two parts.

ONE: Problematic of subjectivity and objectivity - by taking the stance that he stands outside of or beyond objects, you can ignore how subjectivity grant positionality and that they are not always in the same position at any time, to which she refers to as his “mistaken identity” 7. And by denying those subjectivities, Harvey turns them into objects, himself into a voyeur (11), and ends up seeing the world in binaries 10 [although I think this is somewhat ungrounded given his problematizing of modernity in The condition of postmodernity.] That said, once one is objectified, one cannot become whole again 12. From this is his failure to understand representation: differences are lumped in together (15).

TWO: Pomo itself undermines the historic-materialist epistemology / ontology. Harvey strategically needs to undermine pomo and does so via a circular argument (19). Representations are social – “themselves productive of meaning and subjectivity” (18) – and to take them as material alone means that there is a “single set of necessary laws” (18), to fit all understandings of the social into a capitalist economic framing (despite his efforts to demonstrate Marxism’s flexibility to accommodate otherness) (19), and assigning representations as or by categories without allowing that they reflect (represent even) reality (20-21). Harvey is relentless in assuming there is a reality that can be represented. Thus for him what is question of representing politics – implying an infinitely more fixed set of responses – is for Deutsch a question of the politics of representation – diffuse, infinite, without a metalogic. The condition of post-modernity picks up on a trajectory of historic-materialism of which postmodernism is a possible logical outcome. Thus, into the discussion of visualization and the arts, for Harvey it is a black and white world [not unlike early feminist art critiques that sought positives and negatives (27)]: an image is a thing or no thing vs from a pomo point of view, the image is a splice of a representation of the world that is not fixed because it needs a viewer as much as a creator. E.g. the fetishism of the “underlying social meanings” in Sherman’s work is a result of him not being able to find what he wants to see in her work – itself a statement about how one represents reality to oneself, and end that is impossible [?] to come through via a purely political-economic lens.