Nate - Morris article + Harvey Rebuttal

MORRIS REVIEW
-Harvey’s manifesto is an epistemological sweep aiming to bring what might in fact be a chaotic reality into some kind of form – mistaking postmodern concerns with narrative as ‘image’ or ‘surface’ concerns, rather than the disposition and power-direction of the author, leads Harvey to grasp, predictably although with great nuance and complexity, for the classical terminology (capital-labour) with which to tell a sweeping story
-Harvey gives fleeting reference to the core importance of ‘other’ phenomena than class relations as more than epiphenomenal, then goes on to throw all these other ‘categories’ into the grab-bag of difference and analyze them as a coherent postmodern category, while basing most of this on white male theorists
-Goes so far as to confuse the discourses of pomo theory with its objects of criticism – Lyotard is not Jencks, and both actually have a lot of linkage with Harvey’s arguments, which Harvey seems miss when attempting to link them into a metatheory of chaotic Nietzchean frenzy without direction (although Harvey himself acknowledges the value of Nietzche’s notions of Dionysian creative destruction in the analysis of capitalism’s history)
-Harvey’s Marxism doesn’t allow complexity of specific postmodern theorists to enter in as deeply critical social theory; builds it up as ‘opaque’ where it is in fact conflictual, etc…Harvey is then fundamentally setting up dialectical relations where they may not be pertinent (ie. between Fordism and flexible accumulation, modernism and postmodernism)
-Harvey’s dialectics is a means of displacing what for him is a privilege of a God’s eye view on ‘historical and geographical truths’, a capacity of representation he implies as possible (particularly when contrasted with postmodernism’s fascination with aesthetics, seen as in contradistinction to ‘real’ ethics) even though he would try and use dialectical reasoning and ‘historical materialism’ to deny this Enlightenment conceit
-By not dealing with the fruitlessness of the search for a centred subject, Marxism on the whole has divided itself from possible alliances with postmodern thought, and instead has contradictorily aligned a meta-theory transcendent of our situated, partial materiality (searching instead for some semblance of a total materiality)
- Marxism has indeed constructed much of the cultural idea of what postmodernism is…as such it is in the mirror, embedded within postmodernism itself (to say nothing of the importance of Marxian theory to the developments of branches of philosophy, etc. labeled postmodern since then)

HARVEY RESPONSE
-He does identify strongly with certain strains of feminist though, and counters that he has always emphasized the continuity of both Marxism and socialist feminism, as well as modernism and postmodernism
-Truly successful critiques of existing social theory has proceeded dialectically, identifying the outgrowth of one from the other and the continual tension between camps that is internalized in competing theoretical positions – feminism did this in a way to Marxism, Marxism to bourgeois political economy – postmodernism attempts to hide away in its fragmentary deconstructionism, never dialectically engaging its enemies
-We are situated, deep in capitalism; postmodernism, situtated in the roots of the modern and now wandering without acknowledging its own relations to capital’s effects; gender, etc. is not epiphonemal, but is a parcel of the dialectical nature of the world, and needs to be analyzed through a dominant set of social relations of which it is a part (and if we can think of capitalism more cogently than other social relations, why not)