Harvey says that Haraway is correct to argue that “epistemology is about knowing difference” (304). He warns against research that is essentialist, non-dialectical, and relativist – these characteristics make it difficult to even discuss situatedness. He absolutely argues that differences matter but what he especially wants to emphasize here is that what we need to focus on are significant differences.
Harvey also points out that an emphasis on commonality does not deny difference; the two are not mutually exclusive. He adds that “properly done, it can enhance the understanding of differences at the same time as it provides a critical basis from which to evaluate the work of those who purport to write critical theory outside of the confines of what capitalism as a social system is all about” (304).
He says the critiques of Deutsche and/or Massey are: unnecessarily personalized, hurtful, sometimes abusive, shallow and uninteresting, undifferentiated, homogenizing, a-historical, purely idealist, that they ignore the political problems they define, trivializing, and that they avoid the central issues illustrated in The Condition.
Re: Deutsche (three main objections)
1) He says she seems to claim that feminists discovered the politics of difference and representation. He says this is absolutely false. Rather he says what feminists have successfully argued is that gender and sexual differences are significant forms of difference that must be taken into account in any general social theory.
So he argues that if she had been able to see this, Deustche would have understood that The Condition “provides one potential set of bases for defining what significance is all about” and to “develop a more nuanced understanding of internal differentiation and of internal dynamics within capitalism without descending into an essentialism of difference” (311).
2) Responds to Deutsche’s comments about how he supposedly ignores the contextualization and situatedness of all knowledge (including his own). The main point in this section is that a big problem with postmodernism often eschews “all attempts at general explanation and assert a priori that they are doomed to failure” (311).
Re: Complication versus explanation - at some point you need to stop complicating and start explaining. You can’t just keep deconstructing ad infinitum.
3) Which brings him to the problem of representation. He says that Deutsche “reduces the problematic of representation thereby confusing visualization with seeing” (312) and that his theory is cognitive, not perceptual and what’s more Deutsche should have known this. He says he does not reduce visualization to seeing, as she argues he does.
He points out a clear example of representation in his work: money, and the fact that the representation of money is always problematic. “Money should represent social labour but the contradictions it embodies prevent it from so doing. Money becomes a form of social power, an end in itself, an object of personal desire, and specific kinds of money help shape a sense of national identity” (313).
Another of his key points in the rebuttal then is that “some representations are more adequate than others and that the search for proper and powerful representations (theory) is always a matter of serious commitment for committed people” (316).
His response to Massey is next – he’s much more critical of Massey than Deutsche.
* Boils down to: “it is well-nigh impossible to extract from Massey’s critique any deep understanding of the complex relations between modernism, postmodernism, socialism, feminism, and geography” (319), because she’s too busy attacking him for his use of language and for pointing out what he could have done. He says the most important problem with her critique is that she doesn’t even say which kind of feminist theory she subscribes to and that she never really engages with the central theses of The Condition. Harvey argues Massey is too busy placing herself above him (and a lot of other researchers) and making herself look good.
Feminism (and postmodernism) in General (Three main points):
1) He sees problems with the supposed postmodern challenge to authorial authority and says that Deutsche and Massey resort to a no-holds-barred an unambiguous authorial authority and style in their criticism. He says in some cases postmodern claims can be “mere rhetorical devices to enhance a particular authorial authority, or put another way, sophisticated camouflage for claiming higher moral authority” (321).
2) “Otherness and difference and the situatedness they define are of variable rather than fixed significance depending upon the circumstances” (322). Quotes Haraway “epistemology is about knowing the difference” and in order to now that difference we must necessarily engage in systematic (meta-theoretical) rather than fragmented enquiry.
3) He says postmodernists “cannot criticize The Condition as wrong, misguided, or fundamentally misconceived without deploying truth terms of their own which presuppose have an ultimate line on a truth they theoretically claim cannot exist” (322).
“We should get on with a more serious discussion of how contemporary failures of political representation… might be linked to the supposed crisis of representation… and get a better understanding of how postmodernist practices with respect to representation directly or inadvertently contribute to the crisis of proper political representation. We should also get on with the negotiation of gender differences, as well as with consideration of all the other forms of significant difference. This implies serious debate on what criteria of significance are to be deployed in the identification of difference, how we are to identify the commonalities which bid, so that differences can be considered not as essentialist fragments, but as rich complexities which coexist within a common frame of contemporary political-economic life and which have to be conceptualized as internally and dialectically interrelated” (323-4).
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