Rob: Boys Town/Postmodern Morality Plays

I enjoyed my weekend, so i'll only provide very brief comments. First, the polemical debate surrounding the Condition of Postmodernity seems more interesting than the actual book itself (not that it is uninteresting); and curiously, I find myself agreeing with both Deutsche and Harvey. Deutsche is quite right to critique Harvey's modernist "totalizing" vision. He might disagree with this characterization, but his own writing leaves him very open to this charge. The broader question for me, and I think Harvey, is what is lost by refusing to engage with the totality (even if this is more of an ideal than practical possibility). This notwithstanding, the terse and sometimes dismissive response from Harvey seems to be more than a little counter-productive. He could have addressed the more substantive points about other dimensions of difference (beyond class). Instead he comes off as stiff and reactionary. To be fair this isn't restricted to Harvey...James Duncan and David Ley's response to Vera Chouinard and Ruth Fincher's critique of their Structural Marxism vs. Humanism article in the early 1980s (i.e. the structure-agency debate in the annuals) comes across much the same way (i.e. dismissive, rather than engaging their substantive points).