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Although in his taxonomic work, “Postmodern Geographies”, Soja pays little attention to the work of David Harvey it is beyond contention that he has been at the forefront of ‘the reassertion of space in critical theory’. Given that Giddens has described him as “perhaps the greatest living geographer”1_{, it is perhaps surprising that Soja pays him so little regard, especially given that}

their projects, as we shall see in more detail below, are broadly very similar. Like Soja, Harvey’s concern is to reintroduce a missing geographical sensitivity into the body of Marx’s historical materialist method. His work bridges the period of this spatial revival in social theory, such that in 1973 he wrote, “Social and spatial forms are, for the most part, distinct in our

minds...distinctive and irreconcilable modes of analysis” [1973; p 10]; in 1985 that, “the question of space is surely too important to be left to geographers exclusively […] [s]ocial theorist of all stripes and persuasions should take it seriously” [1985; p xii]; while by 1989 he notes the revival of recent interest in “the problem of spatiality”, citing the work of Gregory and Urry [1985] and Soja’s principal theoretical text discussed above [Harvey, 1989a; p 284]. Indeed, reflecting my argument and concerns about a new ‘structure of feeling’ towards space, in recent work he comments that, “[a] seeming consensus can be constructed from [these] multiple inquiries to the

effect that time and space are social constructs...[behind which]...there lurk innumerable and potentially damaging confusions” [Harvey, 1996; p 207].

There is however a distinct difference in approach between the two authors. For Soja, the spatialization of historical materialism is not an absorptive but a transformative process allowing Marxist geographies to meet with postmodernism both as a theoretical position as well as a historical phenomenon on an equal and symbiotic level. We begin to see in Soja’s later works, therefore, a move away from a classic Marxian analysis, founded ‘in the last resort’ on an analysis of the economic sphere. It becomes clear that Soja’s main referent for his theoretical position is Lefebvre, and particularly The Production of Space [Lefebvre, 1991] with its far less prescriptive theoretical structure based in a typology of three types of social space. This

theoretical structure comes to dominate his less objective and more positional writings about Los Angeles, in particular Thirdspace [Soja, 1996] which through its deliberate engagement with not only the subject but also the ‘attitude’ of postmodernism (to follow Cloke, Philo and Sadler’s distinction [1991]) displays the myopia of both the alephic and ecstatic visions discussed previously.

Harvey’s approach is more cautious however, and his intention is to invoke a spatial element in dialectical materialism without significantly altering the understandings advanced by Marx. Ultimately he relies heavily on the idea of the economic as being the determinant of last resort and this in turn has an important impact upon the conception of space that is embedded in his ‘respatialization’ project. In clinging to the fundamental importance of the economic and without, I will argue, any satisfactory way of dealing with the relationship between the morphological nature of space and the social (and implicitly, therefore, economic) structures within space, Harvey presents a conception of space based upon the idea of differentiation. His is a

geographical more than spatial ‘consciousness’, and the link between the two cannot be made because he lacks a theoretical tool for doing so without returning to the rejected spatial science and determinism of earlier geographical theory [see above, chapter 1].

The previous section of this thesis introduced three key themes which will be further developed in this chapter. The first, originating in the analysis of Borges’ work, was epistemological in nature - the idea of the aleph, not as a physical object but as an epistemology that forces the world to fit a theoretical schema already devised – ‘the alephic vision’. The second was the idea of an ‘ecstatic vision’ - a view of the world rich in chaos, fragmentation, where ‘everything solid melts into air’.

The third was that the theoretical positions advanced to understand this world are based upon the removal of ‘matter’ from the classical ontological trialectic (space-time-matter) and its

replacement with an alternative term, ‘sociality’ in Soja’s renewed trialectic of spatiality- historicity-sociality.

These themes will be encountered again in the analysis of Harvey’s work, although for different reasons and to varying extent, and the analysis will point to the same inability to deal

convincingly with the impact of physical space and the experience of cities. This is particularly true in Harvey’s 1989 work, The Condition of Postmodernity, still his best selling and perhaps, therefore, most influential book2_{. This work extends the earlier theoretical propositions of Limits}

to Capital [1982] to the phenomenon of ‘postmodernity’, and Harvey’s ambitious scope includes not only what Cloke, Philo and Sadler term ‘postmodernism as subject’ but also ‘postmodernism as object’ [1991, see above p 117]. It is their last distinction, ‘postmodernism as attitude’, that Harvey is most wary of, anxious as he is not to make the same elisions as Soja. Although Harvey examines a number of ‘postmodern objects’, most notably in his comparison of the visual work of Salle, Rauschenberg and a contemporary advertisement [1989a, chapter 3], the central theme is the contemporary experience of space and time.

While his tone is indeed far more measured than that of Soja, once again familiar themes emerge, particularly in the synechdotal reference to particular key buildings such as the Bonaventure Hotel and also the ‘ecstatic’ treatment of the experience of time and space under the supposed ‘condition of postmodernity’ with its emphasis on flux, impermanence and polyvalence. This would indeed be contested strongly by Harvey himself, who is keen to distance himself from the ‘excesses’ of the postmodern discourse. He argues that, “postmodernism, with its emphasis on jouissance, its insistence upon the impenetrability of the other, its concentration on the text rather than the work, its penchant for deconstruction to the point of nihilism, its preference for aesthetics over ethics, takes matters too far”. Note here the familiar relationship between jouissance and nihilism, the former taken from Barthes’ attitude to the pleasures of textual deconstruction, the latter from postmodernism’s debt to Nietzsche, which parallels the tautologous nature of ‘ecstasy’ captured in Nietzsche’s term ‘rausch’ [See above, chapter 4]. Harvey continues, “postmodernist philosophers tell us not only to accept but even to revel in the fragmentations and the cacophony of voices through which the dilemmas of the modern world are understood” [1989a; p 116].

Harvey groups this literature together as his fourth ‘response to [the] time-space compression’ that he sees as the basis of the postmodern condition. He describes these authors as, “trying to ride the tiger of time-space compression through the construction of a language and an imagery that can mirror and hopefully control it”. Within this group he highlights “the frenetic writings of Baudrillard and Virilio...since they seem hell-bent on fusing with time-space compression and replicating it in their own flamboyant rhetoric” [ibid.; p 351] and I would argue that Soja, among others, could be added to this grouping, although more as an emulator at second-hand of the frenetic writings of the inspirational ringleaders such as Baudrillard. Harvey accuses these writers of, “[losing their] hold on both the reality [they are] seeking to represent and on the language that might properly be deployed to represent it...” (speaking this time of Jameson), such that, “the hyper-rhetoric of this wing of the postmodern reaction can dissolve into the most alarming irresponsibility”.

There are strong sympathies, therefore, between these and my own criticisms expressed in the preceding section. Harvey cites the selective use of sources (referring to Jameson, but as pertinent would be my criticism of Soja above) and indulging in euphoria in describing the experience of neurosis and anxiety. This last criticism, levelled at Jameson, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, is exactly analogous to the reading of ecstasy from the work of Koolhaas. He also follows Eagleton in warning of the powerful influence that such rhetoric has over ontological positions; “there can be no difference between truth, authority and rhetorical seductiveness” Eagleton argues in relation to Lyotard, mirroring in this instance the power of the ‘alephic vision’ presented above3_.

In making these criticisms, Harvey is articulating the complex and blurred division of postmodernism as subject, object and attitude that Cloke, Philo and Sadler distinguish in an attempt to clarify such muddled rhetoric. However, Harvey’s antithetical position to the latter and indeed his concurrence with my argument presented above, is perhaps not quite as clean-cut as it might first appear. For while lambasting the authors cited above for their rhetorical excesses, he nonetheless refers to them either explicitly (in the case of Jameson whom he cites frequently) or implicitly in the debates with which he engages, clearly accepting the “fact of fragmentation, ephemerality and chaotic flux” [ibid.; p 117 sic]. Furthermore, he evidently accepts the thesis of a recent transformation in patterns of thought and practice and asks why “such a fact [of

fragmentation etc] should have been so pervasive an aspect of modern experience for so long a

3 _{Eagleton, 1987 ‘Awakening from modernity’, Times Literary Supplement, 20 February 1987; quoted in Harvey,}

period of time”, and further, why “the intensity of that experience seems to have picked up so powerfully since 1970” [ibid.] making the current features of “excessive ephemerality and fragmentation in the political and private as well as in the social realm [an] experiential context that makes the condition of postmodernity somewhat special” [1989a; p 306].

At some point, therefore, Harvey’s critical stance towards so much of the paradigmatic literature on the postmodern condition seems to be compromised. Although certainly he avoids the

rhetorical excesses of Baudrillard and perhaps the more extreme passages of Jameson, his work is certainly not free from unsubstantiated generalisation, hyperbole and the fixation with the

aesthetic of fragmentation. Once again, we find that distinctions between object, subject and attitude, though schematically useful, are easily blurred and transgressed in practice. I will seek to demonstrate that the critical turning-point that leads Harvey into such uncharacteristic ground comes as the argument moves to deal with the experience of urbanism in the contemporary period, and the relationship between the physical structure of the city and buildings

(postmodernism as object) and the social structures within the city (postmodernism as subject). The lack of a satisfactory conception of this link, caused I will argue by an understanding of space which replaces matter with meaning, results in the blurring of Harvey’s epistemological and ontological positions on the city4. The result, as with Soja, is a description of the [universal] experience of urbanism based in concepts of flux, fragmentation, schizophrenia etc which evolve less from a detailed study, either psychological or behavioural, of how people relate to the spaces of contemporary urbanism than from an engagement with the fashionable academic discourses of the generation. The inevitable consequence is that Harvey simply reiterates the alephic and ecstatic tendencies of the paradigm, and in doing so further entrenches the parallel approaches to

4 _{This chapter focuses mainly on Harvey’s descriptions of the contemporary urban experience in The Condition of}

Postmodernity [1989], linking this to the earlier theoretical texts, Social Justice and the City [1973] and The Limits to Capital [1982]. In so doing I am aware that I have not discussed directly his 1985 volume Consciousness and the Urban Experience. The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, my interest is in addressing writing on the contemporary urban experience. While, as I have argued above in chapter 4, there is a strong genealogy of ideas between 19th _{and 20}th

century interpretations of the urban experience, my intention has not been to focus on discussions of the 19th century city such as Harvey presents in this volume, beyond the necessity of explicating this genealogy in the context of contemporary descriptions. Secondly, although Harvey’s subject matter differs in this volume, whose empirical content focuses around his two famous essays, Paris, 1850-1870, and Monument and Myth: The building of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, his theoretical position remains unchanged from his earlier 1973 and 1982 volumes [‘Social Justice’ and ‘Limits’] – that is, “to progress toward[s] a definitive Marxian interpretation of the urban process under capitalism” [1985; p xi]. His understanding of space is, as will be demonstrated in detail below, encapsulated in the diagrammatic representation of the flow of capital through the urban system, manifested ‘physically’ only in terms of geographical differentiation (of, for example, rental values) [see Harvey, 1985; p 92 ‘Rent and the Sorting of Land to Uses’]. Similarly, his approach to built form, particularly in this instance Sacré-Coeur and the Place Vendôme, is restricted to suppositions about ‘meaning’ similar to his (as well as Jameson’s among others) comments on the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles.

space within geography - the abstract approach of diffusion and the hermeneutic approach of space as place, as decodable sign.

It requires some archaeology to explain why someone whose approach, even conviction, rests on a tradition of material understandings of social conditions should come to make such

unsubstantiated claims of ‘common experience’ and ‘everyday life’.

6.2 “Empty Boxes” - The spatialization of historical materialism

Harvey’s work, as explained above, has tended to take the form of a diachronic development of theory and ‘empirical’ extension through the elaboration of historical-geographical materialist method that he advocates. Certainly his 1973 Social Justice and the City marks a turn towards the consideration of the linkages between ideas in social and moral philosophy and geography that are returned to in his more recent Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference [1996]. The 1973 text, however, deals not with ecological issues but with the urban processes in a way that “[he] later saw to be erroneous” and whose reformulation into “a definitive statement on the urban process under capitalism” formed the basis for the subsequent The Limits to Capital [1982; p xiii, xxix in the 1989 edition]. A close parallel exists between this work and The Condition of Postmodernity [1989a], the former essentially developing the theoretical framework that is to be applied to the understanding of contemporary changes in the latter. He describes this combined project as an attempt “to write the theory of urbanization, to integrate it with detailed historical studies...and to casually fill in a few ‘empty boxes’ in Marxian theory en route” [ibid.].

The Limits to Capital is, therefore, a critical fulcrum in Harvey’s work. Not only does it propose the theoretical union between Marxian theory and a geographical perspective (what Harvey describes as “deal[ing] only with the ‘empty boxes’ in the theory”) which is the theoretical core of his later work on the experience of urbanism, it also represents an abandonment of earlier theoretical perspectives set out in Social Justice and the City, which when re-examined reveal some significant repudiated positions that chart the course of subsequent work.

That Limits (as Harvey refers to it) is prescient for the concerns of this present study is clear. On reflection he writes, “I had no option except to write a treatise on Marxian theory in general, paying particular attention to the circulation of capital in built environments, the credit system

and the production of spatial configurations” [ibid. emphasis added]. This passage is important for two reasons. Firstly, it clearly orientates this work within that of the ‘re-spatialization’ theorists of whom he is clearly aware, making reference in a footnote to Lefebvre and Soja among others [1982; p 337]. Secondly, it introduces my principal criticism of Harvey’s approach - that he reduces the ‘spatial’ to that which he can conceive of as being important in the capital circulation system. ‘Space’, in Harvey’s self-declared “definitive statement on the urban process”, even modified by the qualifier “under capitalism” or “from a Marxian perspective”, is reduced simply to a consideration of rent and, as with Soja, the importance of the friction of distance to the distributive process. He states, “I saw...that earlier errors on the interpretation of rent arose precisely out of a failure to integrate this single aspect of distribution into the general theory of production and distribution that Marx proposed”, resulting in a holistic reworking of Marxian theory, since “the virtue and difficulty in Marx [is] that everything relates to everything else” [ibid.].

The principal contribution to this reworking is the idea of the importance of ‘spatial

configurations’ and for us it is the link that Harvey draws between spatial configurations and social processes that is of central importance. The process of capitalism and the productive forces that lie at its root always form an intermediary layer between the two. “The historical geography of capitalism is a social process which rests on the evolution of productive forces and social relations which exist as particular spatial configurations” [ibid.; p 421]. This might suggest that spatial configurations remain passive manifestations of a social context that produced them. However, Harvey would adamantly deny this. In the introduction to the reissued volume [Harvey, 1999] he makes the argument that many of his peer group of theorists working within Marxist Geography at that time tended “to segregate the geographical and spatial arguments from the general theory of accumulation that Marx proposed, and to cast the argument in a fixed rather than malleable spatial frame” [1999; p xxi]. He clearly rejects, therefore, the notion of a ‘theoretically disenfranchized’ space standing outside the complex system of dialectical

relationships that is the key epistemological and methodological tenet of Marx’s theory, ensuring that “everything [including space and society] relates to everything else”.

This link is most clearly made in the section of Limits titled ‘Space, Place and Location’ which opens, “[r]ent is that theoretical concept through which political economy (of whatever stripe) traditionally confronts the problem of spatial organization” [1982; p 337]. Rent forms a

activity” [Capital Vol 3, quoted by Harvey, 1982; p 337]. Furthermore, Harvey follows Marx in arguing that ‘spatial properties’ (he gives the list location, situation, shape, size, dimensions, etc) are to be considered as ‘material attributes of use values’, which “claim our attention only in so far as they affect the utility...of commodities” [ibid. quoting directly from Marx]. Hence, “the social aspects of use values is what counts in the end” which cannot be understood separately from exchange and the formation of values. Exchange involves the bringing of commodities to a market place and “this eventually involves a physical movement in space” and so we have the inevitable appeal to the friction of distance. Similarly, locations, stripped of their ‘material properties’ are given their true significance when seen in relation to use values, exchange values and value (following Marx’s framework). This leads Harvey to consider space in terms of “more favoured locations” [ibid.; p 339] in the production and consumption process. “The trick” he describes, “is to set our understanding of material spatial properties of use values into motion together with concepts of exchange value and value. The meaning of the spatial properties of use values in their social aspect can then be unravelled” [ibid.; p 338].