Antipode 24:4, 1992, pp.

300-326 ISSN 0066 4812

POSTMODERN MORALITY PLAYS

David Harvey*
My purpose is to confront the criticisms of my book, The Condition of Pos tmodernity (Harvey 1989b) advanced by some feminists, in particular those articulated by Deutsche (1991) and Massey (1991). I say "some" because the feminist movement now contains a vast panoply of opinion within which multiple and frequently conflictual feminisms flourish. In academic circles, for example, conflict has swirled around the question of the relation between feminism and postmodernism with particular intensity over the last ten years or so, and in the last five has produced a flood of literature for or against pursuing the connection. This engagement between feminism and postmodernism has produced all manner of creative insights and some fundamental contributions to social theory. But it has led only some feminists to throw in their lot wholeheartedly with postmodern forms of argumentation and there are abundant signs not only of outright rejection (on the part of feminists such as Hartsock) but of strong second thoughts (see, for example, Fraser) as to the wisdom of getting lost in the postmodern swamp. In order to fashion a response to the feminist criticisms that have been made of The Condition, I must begin with some preliminary, albeit schematic discussion of which feminism I am persuaded by and which feminist propositions I find compatible with my overall argument. For it is, I maintain, simply not the case that all feminist argument is inconsistent with the account set out in The Condition (Martin (1992), for example, made positive use of my arguments in her 1990 American Ethnological Society Distinguished Lecture). The diversity and dynamism of feminism makes it difficult, however, to encompass or do justice to it in any brief overview. The overt opposition between essentialist and anti-essentialist views, for example, defines a multitude of intermediate positions (in part because as Fuss (1989) has shown there are many respects in which the opposition is false). Ecofeminists and gydecologists take up quite different intellectual and political positions to those held by socialist feminists and major differences of emphasis if not of method hover around the academic divide between cultural studies, humanities and literary theory on the one hand and the social
* School of Geography, University of Oxford.

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sciences on the other - the former being much more concerned with discourses, representations of women and symbolic exclusions in the sphere of representations, the latter more directly concerned with studying the material condition of women in society. And then there is a widening political division (see, e.g., the discussion by Parsons, 1987) between those who seek alliances across gender lines on the immediate issues of the day (such as abortion and equal rights in the work place), those who push for an increasingly separatist feminist politics, and those who seek to use feminism to gain a clearer understanding of what revolutionary politics might be all about. In my own case, I was early influenced by writers such as Haraway, Hartsock and Martin and more recently by the writings of Fraser, Young, Segal, Soper, Scott and other feminist historians. I also find the issues which Spivak and Kristeva pose (though not necessarily their solutions) of considerable import. All of the above make me generally sympathetic to the social science, non-separatist, anti-essentialist (in the accepted sense of that term) and socialist end of the feminist spectrum. And while each of them has given some consideration to postmodernist forms of argumentation none of them, with the exception of Spivak and Kristeva, could be said to favor much more than a critical engagement with what postmodernism purports to be about. I accept the criticism that I could have integrated more of the writings of those feminists I am persuaded by into the general argument set out in The Condition. This would have immeasurably strengthened and in no way diluted my case and I regret that I did not do so. In my defense I can offer only the relatively weak excuse that much of the more easily accessible feminist response to postmodernism (see, for example, the influential collection edited by Linda Nicholson, 1990) has been published since 1988, when The Condition was finally sent to the publishers (it was basically completed in manuscript in 1987). If they had been available at the time, I might have made much of Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990) (see Harvey, forthcoming where I take up some of her arguments in a positive manner) and Fraser's Unruly Practices (1989). I have particularly high regard for the latter work precisely because it grapples clearly, firmly and sympathetically with what was attractive about the writings of Foucault, Rorty and Habermas for a feminist en route to the construction of a feminist politics which leaves such writers very much behind. As it was, Hartsock (1987) was most influential in persuading me (see The Condition, p. 48), rather too hastily it turns out, that feminists had nothing much to gain from postmodernist forms of argument. I believe, as she does, that much of the supposed opposition between postmodernism and modernism is a "dead end" and that "the task facing all progressive theorists is that of trying to expose and clanfy the theoretical

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bases for political alliance and solidarity (Hartsock 1987, p. 192). From this latter standpoint I would follow her in arguing that: there are a number of similarities that can provide the basis for differing groups to understand each other and form alliances. In addition, attention to the epistemologies of situated knowledges can allow for the construction of important alternatives to the dead-end oppositions set up by postmodernisms rejection of the Enlightenment. The kind of critical engagement with postmodemism which writers like Haraway and Hartsock envisage undoubtedly deserved more careful scrutiny. The idea of situated knowledges is of particular interest, since it challenges in certain ways the basic epistemological grounding of a whole line of western political philosophy and scientific practice. But it is important to discriminate between the different meanings which can be given to this idea and to recognize that it has a rather longstanding provenance. Bakhtin (1990, 23) argued, for example, that cognition (as opposed to perception) always involves the transcendence of any phenomenological sense of situatedness through putting oneself in the others place. This relates directly to Hegels parable of the master and the slave, in which situatedness is not seen as separated difference, but as a dialectical relation between the oppressed and the oppressor operating within a power-relation of domination. This was also the way that Mam looked at the relation between capital and labor; his long and critical engagement with bourgeois philosophy and political economy then became the means to define an alternative subaltern and subversive science situated from the perspective of the proletariat. Haraway and Hartsock take up the question of gender difference in exactly the same way. This dialectical conception lies at the root of Hartsocks refusal of those typically postmodern conceptions which rest on fragmentation, non-related meanings and rejections of, rather than engagement with, dominant discourse. We cannot, she suggests, abstract from power relations. The struggle of those whose knowledge arises out of conditions of domination is always to engage and transform the dominant discourses rather than to disengage. And postmodernism, by avoiding such engagement, typically renders non-dominant discourses relatively powerless. This argument parallels my own conclusion in The Condition (p. 117): Worst of all, while (postmodernism) opens up a radical prospect by acknowledging the authenticity of other voices, postmodernist thinking immediately shuts off those other voices from access to more universal sources of power by

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ghettoizing them within an opaque otherness, the specificity of this or that language game. It thereby disempowers those voices (of women, ethnic and racial minorities, colonized peoples, the unemployed, youth, etc.) in a world of lopsided power relations. The language game of a cabal of international bankers may be impenetrable to us, but that does not put it on a par with the equally impenetrable language of inner-city blacks from the standpoint of power relations.

I do not believe there is anything inconsistent in that statement with the position which Hartsock (1987) adopts. I could easily have made the connection and regret I did not do so. There are, however, rather more vulgar postmodern conceptions of situatedness and contextualization which depart significantly from those which Hartsock and Haraway espouse. These dwell almost entirely on the relevance of individual biographies for the situatedness of knowledge. In so doing they dwell on the separateness and non-compatibility of language games, discourses and experiential domains, and treat these diversities as biographically and sometimes even institutionally, socially and geographically determined. This is, to put it mildly, a very essentialist and non-dialectical notion of situatedness. It proceeds as if each of us exists as an autonomous atom coursing through history and as if none of us is ever capable of throwing off even some of the shackles of that history or of internalizing what the condition of being the other is all about. Spivak (1988, 294; 308)counters this whole idea by invoking Derridas call to render delirious that interior voice that is the voice of the other in US as the prime means available to us to give voice to the condition of the voiceless other. Interestingly, this view of the internalization of otherness within the self is entirely consistent with the philosophy of internal relations as espoused by Ollman (1971) which was, I suspect, as formative in shaping Hartsocks views as it was in shaping my own. What I shall call the vulgar version of situatedness is frequently used, however, as a rhetorical device either to enhance the supposed authenticity of ones own accounts of the world (since I am a white Anglo heterosexual male from Gillingham, Kent, in England and educated at Cambridge no one can speak for me or ever give an account of my situation that can even complement let alone parallel mine) or to deny the veracity of other accounts (since she is black and female of rural origins she cannot possibly have anything authentic to say about conditions of life of the white bourgeoisie in New York City). None of this implies that individual biographies do not matter because indeed they do. Nor should it imply that there are no problems to be confronted when someone privileged purports to speak about or for others, partic-

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ularly those who are marginalized or triply oppressed by structures of class, race and gender. This is, it seems to me, one of the most difficult of all issues for contemporary social science and philosophy to confront, as Spivak (1987; 1988) shows. But a relativist, essentialist and nondialectical view of situatedness generates immense difficulties for any kind of discussion at all. Feminists, for example, would not be able to justify the right of white, secure professional women without any maternal obligations living in, say, New York or London, to speak for any woman whose situation and context is different. Haraway (1990, pp. 202-3) recognizes the dilemma: it is not difference which matters, but significant difference: In the consciousness of our failures, we risk lapsing into boundless difference and giving up on the confusing task of making partial, real connection. Some differences are playful, some are poles of world historical systems of domination. Epistemology is about knowing the difference.

So how, then, should The Condition be situated? It was written, like all of my preceding works, from a relatively privileged position within the belly of the beast that is capitalism. It was written with the primary intention of giving the beast belly-ache. But it was also written to try and remind many who seem to have forgotten or mislaid their sense of it, that this particular situatedness is both important and revealing. For this reason, it did indeed emphasize the situatedness of postmodernism within the belly of the capitalist beast. It also emphasized the commonality of our condition as users of commodities and money and as participants in labor markets and the circulation processes of capital. But emphasizing commonality does not deny difference. 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. I here make common cause with Spivak (1988, 280) who in a sense captures the whole point of The Condition when she writes:
However reductionistic an economic analysis might seem, the French intellectuals forget at their peril that (their) whole overdetermined exercise was in the interest of a dynamic economic situation requiring that interests, motives (desires), and power (of knowledge) be ruthlessly dislocated. To invoke that dislocation now as a radical discovery that should make us diagnose the economic (conditions of existence that separate out classes descriptively) as a piece of dated analytic

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machinery may well be to continue the work of that dislocation and unwittingly to help in securing a new balance of hegemonic relations. At the very end of The Condition (p. 355), I laid out what I saw as the four basic tasks which required integration (with all kinds of open possibilities for transformation) into the understanding of capitalist dynamics. These included the treatment of difference and otherness as fundamental, a recognition that the production of images and discourses is important, that space and time must be better understood, and that a meta-theoretical approach was by no means redundant to understanding differences, discourses, and the dimensionalities of space and time, provided that we understood the full potentialities and perpetual open-endedness of dialectical argumentation. By this I meant that a dialectical view of historical-geographical materialism had to incorporate all such problems without losing sight of the dynamics of one of the key world-historical systems of domination (Haraway, 1990, 203). Anyone who in these times fails to situate themselves inside of the capitalist relations of domination is, I maintain, simply fooling themselves. The counter argument that I am fooling myself because I do not explicitly situate myself as a white male heterosexual is correct only to the degree that my account of postmodernisms role in the belly of the capitalist beast stands to be significantly affected thereby. I am, as I have indicated, open to persuasion on that, but I have yet to encounter criticisms which would change anything other than the mode of appearance of my argument rather than its fundamentals. Put another way, if situatedness is a social construct, then there are no essentialist grounds for arguing that it arises by virtue of being a man or a woman, a capitalist or worker, an African American or a WASP, or whatever. Situatedness must always be related, then, to socially constructed systems of domination. And there is nothing inherent in the operation of such structures to suggest that they necessarily escape from the confines of our ability to render coherent accounts of how they operate. It is certainly the case, for example, that a more sophisticated understanding of uneven development (a task which some of us have been struggling with in the geographical domain for some time) can embrace gender issues as well (see for example, Pooveys (1988)study of the ideological work of gender in mid-Victorian England which she neatly pluralizes along with class and nation under the title of Uneven Developments). Kristevas views open up other issues. Consider, for example, her description of the three ages of feminism. The first aims for integration into the male order (equality of political, economic, civil rights) while the second searches for a distinctive feminine identity. Kristeva lauds the achievements of both, but argues that the first has made much

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progress without altering the terms of what she calls the symbolic contract which keeps women subservient to men and that the second, for all of its achievement in challenging that contract poses the constant threat of disintegration into violence (Kristeva 1986, pp. 203-04): When . . . a woman feels her affective life as a woman or her condition as a social being too brutally ignored by existing discourse or power (from her family to social institutions); she may, by counter-investing the violence she has endured, make of herself a possessed agent of this violence in order to combat what was experienced as frustration - with arms which may seem disproportional, but which are not so in comparison with the subjective or more precisely narcissistic suffering from which they originate. Necessarily opposed to the bourgeois democratic regimes in power, this terrorist violence offers as a programme of liberation an order which is even more oppressive, more sacrificial than those it combats. . . . Third wave feminism, she suggests, confronts the fact that many women today see the possibility for fulfillment . . . in bringing a child into the world and that this is a question the preceeding generation has foreclosed. Pregnancy (p. 206). seems to be experienced as the radical ordeal of the splitting of the subject: redoubling up of the body, separation and coexistence of the self and an other, of nature and consciousness, of physiology and speech. This fundamental challenge to identify is then accompanied by a fantasy of totality narcissistic completeness - a sort of instituted, socialised, natural psychosis. The arrival of the child, on the other hand, leads the mother into the labyrinths of an experience that, without the child, she would only rarely encounter: love for another. Not for herself, not for an identical being, and still less for another person with whom I fuse (love or sexual passion). But the slow difficult and delightful apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself. The ability to succeed on this path without masochism and without annihilation of ones affective, intellectual and professional personality - such would be the stakes to be won through guiltless maternity. It then becomes a creation in the strong sense of the term.

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On this basis Kristeva advocates a third kind of politics, which entails the demassification of the problematic of difference, implying (p. 209):

. . . an apparent de-dramatisation of the fight to the death between rival groups and thus between the sexes. And this not in the name of some reconciliation - feminism has at least had the merit of showing what is irreducible and even deadly in the social contract - but in order that the struggle, the implacable difference, the violence be conceived in the very place where it operates with the maximum intransigence, in other words, in personal and sexual identity itself, so as to make it disintegrate in its very nucleus.
I interpret Kristevas third wave politics not as a substitute for the first two but as a reintegration and transcendence of all three of the trends she identifies. This is not a politics of reconciliation but of dissolution of gender difference through personal struggles within the realms of personal and sexual identity. I also think it better to regard her argument less as a periodization and more as a characterization of three styles of feminist politics, paying particular attention to the third wave as potentially the most radical and transformative of them all. Kristeva argues that there is a realm of the semiotic, which attaches to the pre-Oedipal matemally-oriented phase of a childs life, which is ungendered and, precisely for that reason, exists as the only ground for real as opposed to surficial challenges to any dominant symbolic order. While women have privileged access to that realm by virtue of their maternal functions, the realm is not closed to men either (they, too, had a pre-Oedipal phase) and it is out of this realm, she argues, that truly revolutionary consciousness arises. This is a difficult and challenging idea and one that I am not sure I accept. What I do accept is the pressing need to understand both the possibilities and the potential sources of truly transformative and revolutionary changes in social life. This poses a general problem which 4 ) thought, for exhas persisted for generations. Rousseau (1973, p. 3 ample, that those who mistook revolutionary change for unbridled license would only ever manage, by their revolutions, to . . . make their chains heavier than before. M a x Weber (1970, p. 125) for almost identical reasons rejected much of class politics because its internal premiums consist of the satisfying of hatred and the craving for revenge; above all, resentment and the need for pseudo-ethical self-righteousness. This was, furthermore, the sentiment which most bothered Paul0 Freire (1972) as he struggled in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed to teach the oppressed that their vision could and should rise above that of merely aspiring to the status of oppressor. We know from experience,

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writes Foucault (1986, p. 46) that the claim to escape from the system of contemporary reality so as to produce the overall programs of another society, of another way of thinking, another culture, another vision of the world, has led only to the retum of the most dangerous traditions. Experience indeed does teach that this is a consummate danger for all movements towards social change. Kristeva poses it directly precisely from a feminist standpoint, not with the pessimism of Weber or Foucault, but with the ambition to define what kind of feminism can avoid its pitfalls. First wave feminism, like social democracy in general, in no way challenges the overall functioning of a social system although it can and does address the specific problems of power relations within it. Second wave feminism, though it puts the boot on the other foot, is in perpetual danger of merely replicating power relations of domination. In trying to characterize third-wave feminism in the way she does, Kristeva may not have the right solution, but she at least confronts an issue which has bedeviled all social movements in modem times. Against this general background, let me take up the criticisms on offer in the pages of Society and Space, by Deutsche and Massey. Much of this criticism I find unnecessarily personalized, hurtful and sometimes abusive, so my first question is to ask why it takes the tone it does and to what ends - political, intellectual and ethical - it is directed. Put another way, and in language that is more familiar in these times, I want to reflect on the form of the discourses deployed, to what structures these particular human agencies are directed, and in what ways the practices engaged in reinforce rather than supplant the politics they overtly object to. I shall broadly argue that the politics on show here belong rather exclusively to Kristevas second wave of feminism (with more than a hint of an understandable but degenerative violence) and that they exhibit not the slightest hint of concern to grapple with the deeper problematic which she argues should be the centerpiece .of attention in third wave feminism. Neither, interestingly, exhibit any concern in their reviews for the socialist ideals frequently embraced in first wave feminism and, in so doing, pretend to put themselves outside of being situated within capitalism. Consider, first, Deutsches (1991) review. It is by far the most serious of the two, and at least in the Society and Space version she calms an earlier rhetoric (see Deutsche, 1990a and 1990b) that had me aligned with the dark satanic forces of right wing reaction now stalking American campuses and takes some pains to spell out the bases of her objections. The argument is dense, sophisticated and clever, but all too frequently proceeds by sleight of hand. What is so striking is how shallow and uninteresting the feminist part of her critique is, compared, as I hope to show, with the real root of her objections which lie in

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cultural and discourse theory. On the feminist front she makes much of the quite correct complaint that I do not pay sufficient attention to feminist writings (though she erroneously states that Gilligan constitutes my only token reference to feminism when Hartsock was much more important as I have already indicated) and periodically resorts to the construction feminists have known for years . . . (as if feminism was a monolithic body of thought). Apart from that her central contribution lies in a three page disquisition on a supposed Freudian slip (my mistaking Brunos gender - an issue which Massey also derivatively makes much of ), my supposed misappropriation of Brunos arguments on Blade Runner (I merely pointed out that while there was much that was brilliant in Brunos argument there was a striking absence of any concern with class which, when rectified, changed the meaning of the film quite significantly) plus - and this may well be the cornerstone of our differences - a strong disagreement on the way I neglect the politics of Cindy Shermans photographs (on which more anon). Deutsche does, however, seem to claim, quite erroneously, that feminists have discovered the politics of difference and of representation. Since these have crucial roles to play in her argument I shall primarily focus on them. She holds that I find differences illusory and that I fail to recognize the sheer materiality of representations. These are surprising statements. Let me begin with the question of difference. At the very minimum I thought I would be accused of putting class difference to the forefront of analysis and subordinating others but never treating difference as illusory. Was it not Man, after all, who was one of the very first to deconstruct the supposed universality of bourgeois notions of progress by insisting that class position made all the difference in the world and that the working class had been constituted as the prime other through the appalling violence of capitalist history? The politics of difference (and the problematic of representation) is not a feminist discovery and those like Deutsche who claim it so to be grossly misrepresent. 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. This is a quite different argument. So let me clarify my views on it: there are multiple significant differences in the world (including, incidentally, those of place as well as of race, class, gender, ethnicity, religion, etc.) but the criteria of significance are always open to debate and, even more importantly, the only way significance can be understood is in terms of what it is that binds them together. The dialectic of commonality and difference is at the center of my concern. The Mamian dialectic always implies, as Soper (1990, p. 11) argues, a subversive rejection of all attempts to find a sameness in otherness while refusing to disintegrate into an assertion of an indefinite and multiplying plurality of particulars and specifici-

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ties." Feminists have generally and convincingly shown that there are good reasons to multiply the "otherness" to which we should pay attention but many would go on to insist that this does not mean multiplying the plurality of particulars and specificities in the way that Deutsche does. Moreover, the introduction of gender and sexuality into the debate does not mean that we can ever afford to neglect what these differences have in common, in part because understanding commonality helps identify potential alliances between differentiated social groups. This, after all, is part of Hartsock's central argument and it is one that quite a few feminists would accept. Here, for example, is Young (1990, p. 98): Any identifiable something presupposes a something else against which it stands as background, from which it is differentiated. No utterance can have meaning unless it stands out differentiated from another. Understood as different, entities, events, meanings, are neither identical or opposed. They can be likened in certain respects, but similarity is never sameness, and the similarity can be noted only through difference. Difference, however, is not absolute otherness, a complete absence of relationship or shared attributes. [my emphasis] But Deutsche has no real concern with this dialectic between commonality and difference. In her judgement The Condition obviously strayed far too far down the commonality path. Against which I hold that to develop an argument which looks closely at commonality does not necessarily eliminate concern for difference. Done correctly, it can enhance our understanding of what signific!nt difference is about. Deutsche, for example, has all kinds of trouble dealing with my views on money. She recognizes its significance and power but is forced into the odd assertion that a totalizing perspective is not necessaj to appreciate the totalizing ambitions of global capital (p. 19). This misses the point by a huge margin: for example, the innumerable individual differences which we now observe in capitalist society can exist in the particular form they do only in the context of the multiple commodity choices which the money form (and all that this implies about commodities, capital and labor in a world space economy) now renders feasible. Lacking any sense of the commonalities which define difference, Deutsche is forced to adopt an undifferentiated, homogenizing, a-historical and in the end purely idealist notion of difference as the basis for her charge that The Condition is exclusionary in its politics. Insofar as this reflects back into her particular version of feminism, it leans strongly towards essentialism, in spite of her claims to the contrary. (This is an excellent example of Fuss's (1989) claim that essential-

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ism and constructivism are always tightly bound to each other in all feminist theory.) Deutsche has not, it seems, progressed to Haraways point of considering what is or is not significant difference. If she had, she might have seen that The Condition provides one potential set of bases for defining what significance is all about. Put another way, Deutsche replaces the supposed essentialism of the totality with an essentialism of difference and of fragments in general and of woman in particular. My aim in The Condition was to develop a more nuanced understanding of internal differentiation and of internal dynamics within capitalism without descending into an essentialism of difference. This same point arises when Deutsche argues that I ignore the contextualization and situatedness of all knowledge (including my own). I have two problems with that. First, as I have already objected, situation and context are unhelpful constructs unless attached to some notion of what is or is not significant. The feminists who have appreciated The Condition do so precisely because it contextualizes and situates political and cultural practices in ways they find helpful. Deutsche cannot reasonably praise the postmodernists practice of situating and contextualizing their own cultural products while denying my attempt to situate and contextualize postmodern cultural practices in general. Indeed, she freely admits that my economic and spatial contextualizations are the most valuable part of the b o o k (p. 17 ) and my practice here is in no way inconsistent, as I have already argued, with that of Spivak. There are, I suspect, other grounds for disagreement with Deutsche, however, since I do regard situating and contextualizing as pointing towards active rather than accidental rela tionships between phenomena and therefore as a necessary basis for explanation. Contextualizing cultural practices in relation to political economy and the changing experience of space and time is consequently proffered in The Condition as a cogent framework (though not the whole story) for explanation of what postmodernism is all about. Deutsche, however, seems more content than I am with the idea that postmodern thinking should be merely about complication without explanation. But this is where my problems with it begin. While it is always useful to be reminded that the world is a complicated place, that it is always hard to grasp what is happening to us and it, and that something can sometimes be gained from looking at oddities and complexities rather than presuming simplicities, it is quite another matter to eschew all attempts at general explanation and assert a priori that they are doomed to failure. It is a symptom of the times that resort to the mere phrase the world is manifestly more complicated than that is often treated as a sufficient counter-argument to any theoretical proposal or political practice. Knowledges that are solely concerned with their own situatedness and context without acknowledgement of their

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commonalities, that insist upon complication as an end in itself rather than as a problem to be confronted, do indeed constitute a retreat into emasculated and relatively powerless formats (Harvey 1989a, p. 4) of thought and political action. Deutsche (p. 12), however, merely rebukes my phrase for its gendered metaphor while ignoring the political problem it defines. So what do we do when Nazi-style video games proliferate in which players try to emulate Hitler or Goebbels in gassing Jews, Turks and Gypsies? Throw up our hands, sigh sadly and say what a complicated postmodern world this is? I do not for a minute believe that Deutsche herself would countenance such a stance and in so doing she must perforce abandon the view that only complexity and difference matter and begin to argue much more selectively as to what kinds of complexities and differences she takes as positive and what kinds she regards as trivial, unimportant or downright objectionable. We probably do disagree somewhat about emphases (e.g., on Sherman), but her polar case argument that all differences are equally significant is simply not sustainable, intellectually or politically. This brings me, finally, to the thorny problem of representation. Here, too, Deutsche exaggerates with the claim that feminists have discovered a whole range of findings on the subject. Not only is the relationship (if it indeed exists) between representation and represented an age-old issue but there are innumerable other sources of its particular consideration over the last few decades (Saids Orientalism, for example of Lefebvres examination of the topic in The Production of Space (1991)). I put the question against this general background because Deutsche reduces the problematic of representation to seeing (a particular facet of the problem about which she has much that is useful to say), thereby confusing visualization with seeing. The sleight of hand comes with her reading of my metaphor of visualizing the city either from on high or from street level (in much the same fashion as I often use metaphors of constructing theory through triangulation from different viewpoints or examining reality through different windows) as if it forms a perceptual basis to my theorizing. I believe she knows my work well enough for such a misreading to be anything other than innocent. My argument against de Certeau is precisely that it is impossible to see the circulation of capital in the built environment, the amortization of fixed capital, the maximization of land rent, and the transfer of value through commodity exchange in ways that rely purely upon a perceptual and phenomenological relation to the world. My theorization is cognitive not perceptual and Deutsche should know full well that such is the case. By reducing my theory to visualization understood as seeing she can, of course, more easily attack it. She correctly points, for example, to the materiality of representations and goes on to consider how this materiality (partic-

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ularly in the field of vision) poses acute problems of interpretation. I accept quite a lot of what she has to say on this matter with the caveat that visualization (seeing) doesnt pose nothing but problems to me alone. It poses general difficulties for everyone. How do we connect the architectural shaping of spaces with the world of social thought, relations and intersubjective practices which go on in and around those spaces? Why is it that Aldo Rossis architecture conjures up images of fascism for some but not for others or that Kings College Chapel looked like a sow on its back to D. H. Lawrence and one of the glories of English architecture to Pevsner? At this point Deutsche flies in the face of her own criticism. I refuse, she says, to accept representations as material events in their own right. Yet, she herself goes on to argue that we can make sense of the representations only through appeal to psychoanalytic interpretations of the sort that feminist art historians have indeed done much to advance. But if psychoanalysis can provide theoretical insights then why cannot they be conjoined with those from political economy? Here, too, Deutsche and I arrive at a parting of the ways, for while it may be true that the Trump Tower or the Rockefeller Center can in part be explained as phallic erections celebratory of a dominant masculine power, I suggest that the maximizing of land rent and floorspace together with the sheer political-economic will to domination of central urban space also plays a role (otherwise, what do we say about the Chrysler and the Woolworth buildings?). Her charge that I do not concede the materiality of representations is, furthermore, manifestly false (see, for example, my study of Sacr6 Coeur in Harvey, 1989a, a work she quotes liberally from in her critique). For what is money if it is not a representation? My analysis of money (following on Mam and Simmel) dwells on both its material qualities and its representational role. And this representation is always problematic. Money should represent social labor 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 (Freud and other psychoanalysts have, as Borneman (1976) documents, gone to immense trouble to analyze the meaning of that), and specific kinds of money help shape a sense of national identity (as the British are finding as they face up to the prospect of no longer carrying that portrait of the queen in their pocket but some faceless Eurocurrency). The most intriguing question we can ask here concerns the relationship between different forms and materialities of representation. Deutsche, surprisingly, evades what is perhaps the most transparent facet of the New York art market with which she is surely familiar the relationship between money and art, the use of cultural artifacts as investments and as cultural capital, art as an alternative means for

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storing value in an inflationary era. In her earlier criticism of The Condition in Artforum, Deutsche (1990b) attacked me by association with T. J. Clarks The Puinting of Modern Life (1985), a book I do indeed admire in many ways yet I disagree with him on the ground that money cannot be viewed as just one representation of equal import to all others precisely because it is the means of registering social power in a capitalistic society (see Harvey, 1987). Deutsche makes an even more profound mistake than Clark. By treating money as a real thing rather than as a slippery representation of social labor and social power or as itself a complex object of desire, she fails to see the potential relational intertwining between different forms of representation which bridge what are otherwise so frequently seen as separate worlds of political economy and cultural production. There is a general point here which is perhaps worth highlighting because it bedevils almost all reception and critique of political-economic perspectives on geography. It is generally the case that those who are most critical of political-economic perspectives entirely misrepresent (in an extraordinarily reductive and one-dimensional way) the complexities of political-economic life. By so doing they are enabled to dismiss or mock works which incorporate its perspectives. But, as the case of money so clearly illustrates, the world of political-economy as commonly understood already contains within itself all of the dilemmas of representation, of difference, and of the slipperiness of discourses and in that sense it operates not as a clear material base but as a complex world in which all of the elements often now separately treated under the heading of cultural theory are already omnipresent. My argument in The Condition is that the rationale for making any distinction between base (the economy) and superstructure (culture), if it ever was there, has by now entirely disappeared. Cultural production, both high and low, both supportive or critical of capitalist values, has now become so commodified that it is thoroughly implicated in systems of monetary evaluation and circulation. Under such conditions, the varieties of cultural output are in principle no different from the varieties of Benettons colors or the famous 57 varieties that Heinz long ago pioneered. To be sure there are many specificities of labor processes, marketing tactics, consumption time and the like to be looked at but here, too, the distinction is no different in principle from the production of ice creams versus the production of bridges. Furthermore, all oppositional culture (and there is plenty of it) still has to be expressed in this commodified mode, thus limiting the powers of oppositional movements in important ways. This brings me to what is probably the crux of Deutsches objections: my inability to appreciate the depth and politics of Cindy Shermans photographs. She goes to great pains to elaborate her views on this

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matter and, my fairly peremptory treatment of Shermans work put Deutsche very much on the defensive (she has been a major supporter of Shermans work, I believe). The cultural theory which Deutsche outlines is indeed instructive and useful and there is much to be debated there. Yet it turns out in the final paragraph that I had Cindy Sherman right all along. Deutsche (1991, p. 29) quotes Williamson with approval. The attempt to find the real Cindy Sherman is unfulfillable, just as it is for anyone, but whats so interesting is the obsessive drive to find that identity. The false search for the real her is exactly what the work is about, and it leads people . . . right up the garden path. Deutsche then comments (p. 29): What Harvey cannot locate in Shermans photographs and, more broadly, in postmodern culture - what he takes them to task for concealing - is not the real woman but another fantasy - a preexisting and directly accessible social reality behind the image. The quest for that meaning parallels Harveys search for social unity behind fragmentation and behind what he considers to be the illusions of difference. He finds it not in the world but in his image of the world - his social theory. Feminist and other anti-essentialist projects that assert the inadequacy of all representations are the casualty of Harveys doctrine, but they also hold the key to its secrets. Harvey, in other words, may not consider feminism worth knowing about, but feminism, although it hardly knows everything, knows something about him. [my emphases] It would be hard for me to construe social reality as preexisting because all of my work is about the social processes of its construction. Which leaves us with the idea that to think that there might be a directly accessible social reality behind images and representations is to engage in a fantasy because all representations are inadequate. I suspect many feminists will find assertions like those - the first in particular - deeply troubling if not absolutely objectionable. From this standpoint it is easy enough to see why Deutsche finds The Condition so threatening for it does indeed insist that there is a non-fantasy and very real world of directly accessible social reality against which we can get some sense of the truth of our understandings. I furthermore insist that we should have some commitment to representing that reality, including the differences and commonalities that exist within it, as reasonably and accurately as we can in order to confront the multiple and manifold injustices which exist there.

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Representation is, to be sure, a problematic and sometimes excessively slippery business (as the case of money so amply illustrates). The concepts we create can mystify, mislead, and conceal as well as reveal. It is therefore wise to accept (as I certainly do in The Condition) that at some level or other all representations are inadequate. Self-critical practice and radical doubt with respect to all forms of representation are healthy guardians of the search for meaning. Cindy Shermans work is interesting at this level (which is why I included it) precisely because it questions modes of representation. But at a deeper level I find it vacuous precisely because it is about masking and nothing else (even those, like Mulvey (1991, p. 150) who are sympathizers with her work worry about the accusation that Sherman is stuck in the double bind of the fetish and its collapse). So while it would be foolish to assert that any representation can be perfect the counter proposition that all representations are indequate leaves us with no way to represent to each other whatever might be happening in that social reality of daily life. I hold 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. Against that, Deutsche chooses to invoke that notorious anti-feminist Reaganadmiring Baudrillard who inverts Marxs theory of fetishism to argue that anyone who seeks to go behind a supposed surface appearance of images and discourses is fetishistic. His latest jest (Baudrillard 1991) is to tell us that the Gulf War never really happened. Since it was all communicated to us through tv images (true), which were highly controlled (true), there was no way in which we could find out what really happened (questionable) or reach out and consider the fate of the 150,000 or so Iraqis who died (false) and those who believe they can so do are not only giving themselves over to the worst kinds of fetishistic fantasies (a view I find appalling) but behaving as the true warmongers (a view which is so reactionary in its implications that I find it hard to contemplate). Deutsche may find my view that there are social processes at work which are real unduly limiting, but I find the Baudrillard view that all understanding is preconstituted, not with reference to a material world of social processes but with reference to media images and discourses about that world, not only even more limiting but downright reactionary since it leaves us helpless victims of discourse determinism (see, for example, Norriss (1992) thorough critique of Baudrillards irresponsibility with respect to the Gulf War). What Deutsche has actually done here is to use her peculiar and partial version of feminism as a cover for the reassertion of discursive idealism (and discourse determinism) in social theory. She is asserting the vested interest of art historians in the total autonomy of cultural production and the inadequacy of all representations in relationship to

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social reality - a condition which provides the infinite permutations of aesthetic judgement and which provides abundant opportunities for those with the charisma (like Deutsche) to get to tell the stories (cf. The Condition, p. 210). It would not then be too hard to turn her critique around and, in so doing, to get to the central point upon which our differences appear to turn - a central point that has nothing to do with feminism whatsoever. Half the children in New York City, the very place where Deutsche is situated (in the vulgar sense), are raised under conditions of poverty (see The Condition, pp. 330-35). Yes, I do think that that social reality of blatant and totally unjustifiable violations of the right to live a decent life is (unfortunately) real and accessible enough and I most certainly do not believe that the differences to be observed, experienced and documented there are in any way illusory. Deutsche may consider these social realities of daily life of women, men and children in New York City (given not by my social theory but by the daily struggles of multiple insecure and difficult existences) as not worth knowing about let alone struggling over, but, if I may be forgiven for parodying her own conclusion, all of us who are concerned about such mundane problems, while we hardly know everything, know something about her. I imagine, however, that this misrepresents Deutsches politics. If so, it is no more gross a case of mistaken identity than that which she constructs of me in her reviews. And that is the tragedy of the matter, because as she correctly states we have, over the years, learned a lot from each other and I certainly hope to continue so doing in the future. The Fine Art of Gentrification (Deutsche and Ryan 1984) and the essay on Uneven Development: Public Art in New York City (Deutsche 1988) have had a major influence upon my thinking. The former (referenced in The Condition) alerted me to the problem of the aestheticization of poverty and this had a lot to do with my thinking about how to relate images of poverty to its social reality. There is much more to be said on this, I am sure, but it cannot be said in the idealist terms which Deutsche now chooses to use and I am at a loss to understand her transformation of position. Could it be that the discourse idealism she now apparently favors is fundamentally threatened by my historical-geographical materialism? This brings me to Masseys (1991) curious exercise in flexible feminism. I say flexible feminism because that is the nether side of her splendid and catchy title of flexible sexism. Armed with the infinitely flexible view that whatever the male gaze lights upon is bound to be given an exclusively masculine and therefore sexist reading, Massey can have a merry old time nit-picking her way through The Condition idenhfying its innumerable faults. Armed with such a scattergun ap-

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proach she is bound to be on target part of the time: for example, where she cites Pollock's interesting analyses of the male bias in Second Empire modernism which I certainly should have made something of. But she is just as frequently off target. She attributes to me all of the sins of David Salle and his macho crew of postmodernists and takes even those passages most loaded with irony and reads them literally, without a trace of humor. It never enters Massey's head, for example, that the illustrations set out in Chapter 3 of The Condition, which she makes much of as evidence of my sexism, might have been deliberately chosen to highlight the persistent problems faced by women across the supposed divides of classicism, modernism and post-modernism. The pictures were chosen because they allowed a neat thematic comparison across those divides. The classical Titian nude is actively re-worked in Manet's modernist Olympia, Rauschenberg simply reproduces the Rokeby Venus through collage, David Salle superimposes ontologically different worlds and the Citizen's watch advertisement (which appeared, as far as I know without protest, in the weekend magazine supplements of several quality newspapers in Britain for an extended period) is a slick use of the same postmodern technique for purely commercial purposes. All of these illustrations make use of a woman's body to inscribe their particular message. The additional point I sought to make is that the subordination of women, one of the many "troublesome contradictions" in bourgeois Enlightenment practices (see The Condition, pp. 14 and 252) can expect no particular relief by appeal to postmodernism. I thought (mistakenly, as it turns out) that the illustrations made these points well enough that no further elaboration was necessary. Massey was certainly unable to accredit them their usual thousand words. Nor should I have relied, it seems, upon a postmodernist appreciation of the technique of telling complementary stories through illustrations and texts. Nor does it ever occur to her that Manet, in Dejeuner SUT I'Herbe'(which she uses as evidence of sexist male vision) was parodying the man equals civilization and woman equals nature conventions in an age of mass commodification of women's bodies through widespread prostitution in Second Empire Paris (how else can we explain the bourgeois male hysteria that greeted the painting when it was first shown?) My own particular view, furthermore (though obviously controversial), is that Manet's is by far the most sympathetic 'gaze' among the illustrations sequenced in Chapter Three precisely because of its elements of parody, irony and the subtle markings of defiance written into both look and posture. As such, I find it a telling example of what Kristeva (see Soper's discussion of Kristeva, 1990, p. 12) would identify also in the modernism of some male writers like Joyce, Mallarme, Rimbaud and others - a semiotic of feminine negativity subtly challenging a male-dominated symbolic order.

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Massey likewise has a lot of fun with language, discovering all kinds of gender insinuations. This is indeed important and I would not claim to be above all criticism on it. But it is not always an easy matter. I have for some time been persuaded not to use constructions such as man and nature (except in quotation marks), not to use the generic he and his in my writing and to have some sensitivity to the use of words with especially charged sexual or gendered meanings. But proper practice here is hard to define, not least because feminists themselves vary greatly in what they practice and preach. This is a serious matter in which we badly need careful and principled discussion. Massey, however, trivializes the whole problem by looking for any convenient word that might have a sexual connotation and flexibly using it as an indicator of sexism. Any day now, I expect her to go after the famous Royal Geographical Society monograph The Making of the Norfolk Broads (with all of its supposedly innocent references to peat beds) which provoked some hilarity amongst the smutty-minded at an AAG meeting several years ago. Her flexible feminism takes an even more bizarre twist when she engages in that age-old reviewers trick of i d e n w n g places where, had I wanted to, I could have written different books on, for example, the construction of sexual identity in Blue Velvet (a film I devoted three lines to). The deepest problem of all is that Massey provides no clue as to what kind of feminist theory she subscribes to. And, given the volume of rigorous feminist theorizing now available, she can scarcely claim that concern with rigorous theory is a purely masculine preoccupation. Consequently she wanders eclectically from this to that positionality within the vast panoply of feminist theory as if it is all the same to her provided, of course, it gives her some purchase to take a few more knocks at The Condition. Had she wanted to she could have taken up Hartsocks argument, which is fundamental to my own, and instead of breezing by it as far more complicated than I allow (see her footnote, p. 52) elaborated upon its theses and actually defined where and under what conditions our arguments diverge.* On that basis we could indeed have initiated some discussion but vitiation rather than discussion is evidently her sole purpose. Her postmodernism is equally flexible and impossible to pin down, appealing to Clifford and Marcus whenever it is convenient to make a point against The Condition, while later revealing that feminists have many criticisms of them too. It is well-nigh impossible to extract from Masseys critique any deep understanding of the complex relations between modernism, postmodern, socialism, feminism and geography (compare, for example, Sopers (1990) thoughtful piece on Feminism, Humanism and Postmodernism in Radical Philosophy, Segals (1991) discussion on Whose left: Socialist Feminism and the Future in New Left Review or McDowells (1992) far more sophisticated recent discussion in Antipode). Like Deutsche, Mas-

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sey has no concern to practice what she preaches although she goes to great pains to tell us ad nauseam what a good person she is, hesitating to write this review, not wanting to engage in gladiatorial combat or play academic games, stressing how important the criticism she is about to offer is for all of us (including herself ), how "we" (totally unproblematized) ought to discuss our practices and be more democratic in our procedures. Yet she plays academic games, personalizes her criticisms (telling us, for example, how much moral scruple she has in not contributing blurbs to other peoples' dust jackets), becomes more than a little gladiatorial and never once returns to the relevance of the criticisms to all of us, let alone herself. Even more deeply troubling is the total absence of any sense of socialist concern, epitomized by her frequent appeal to that tired old rhetorical device of referring to "white, male and heterosexual" without ever bothering, as someone like Young does, to insert the term "bourgeois." "For heaven's sakes," Massey intones, "whoever says we are only interested in the problems of capitalism?" Quite, but then that ought not to imply, as Massey's contribution does, that criticism and analysis can proceed as if contemporary women (including herself ) are situated outside of the shaping powers of capitalist society. Her critique is impossible to respond to in anything but polemical terms. She rarely engages with the central theses of the book and when she does so it is in the form of cavalier asides of the sort which accuse me of confusing "universal" with "global" when it is readily apparent that the universals of capitalism to which I appeal are money, commodity, capitalAabor relations, and the like which have the interesting property of being simultafieously both global and local. This odd amalgam of flexible feminism and flexible postmodernism and the laying aside of any socialist concerns brings her very close to embracing in practice that same kind of discursive idealism which Deutsche promotes but which, in Massey's other incarnation as a socialist, I am sure she would be at pains to deny. The stunning effect of her criticism, if it were generally applied, would not only be to "vitiate" The Condition but to vitiate almost everything she herself has written these last twenty years, as well as materials she has published since (see, for example, Massey, Quintos and Wield, (1992), which has one entry for women in the index and which systematically ignores feminist theory in the discussion of "high-tech fantasies," the sort of subject on which Haraway, among others, surely has fundamental insights to offer). I can well understand that she might want to engage in a little auto-criticism but covering her own lapses by attacks on others is a very elliptical way of doing it. As she correctly points out, debates of this sort are "frequently conducted more with an eye to positions of power and influence within the academy than with

POSTMODERN MORALITY PLAYS 321

any liberating project of the full recognition of others (p. 34). She presents herself as if she is above all that. Yet her contribution has the look of an opportunistic and intellectually shoddy attempt to assume a vanguard role in a burgeoning feminist movement in geography which she herself has largely ignored over the years. The paternalistic condescension of this ambition becomes even more transparent when it is realized that she makes no more than one passing reference to the work of any feminist geographer in her lengthy discussion of how we should handle the gender question in geography. There are many serious issues raised by feminists that need to be debated and n e g ~ t i a t e dBut . ~ I find it hard to do so in the terms which these reviewers define. On the other hand, they do provide an opportunity to reflect on some general issues swirling around in contemporary geographical debate concerning the potentialities of a coupling of feminism with the postmodern turn. There is, first of all, the supposed postmodern challenge to authorial authority. Both reviewers criticize my assumption of a mantle of authorial authority (a supposedly male failing) but express very strong views and resort to a no-holds-barred and unambiguous authorial authority and style in their criticism. From this standpoint neither reviewer takes a truly postmodern stance. I increasingly suspect that postmodern claims dismissing authorial authority and fetishizing situatedness are for the most part mere rhetorical devices to enhance a particular authorial authority or, put another way, sophisticated camouflage for claiming higher moral a ~ t h o r i t y . ~ This connects directly with a second issue which concerns the interpretation of situatedness and the particular perspective or localization of the dynamics of struggle which this implies. On the one hand, situatedness can be considered as set by biology, geography, class position, individual biography, or whatever, in which case the struggles to be waged are predetermined (between men and women, between nations, between classes). Or situatedness can be understood as itself a social construct, which may either be thought of in anti-humanist terms as a Foucauldian discourse in which individuals are bearers of discursive practices, or be considered as a social condition in which political choice and social action can be mobilized to counter or sustain particular structures of domination. Whichever way we go, it is hard to make claims about the situatedness of knowledges while denying, as both my critics do, the ways that situatedness localizes and thereby limits perspectives on struggle, even when, as in my own case, the situatedness tries to confront a primary form of world-historical domination. For my own part, I would want to argue for heterogeneity of situat-

322 DAVIDHARVEY

edness with a parallel recognition that the choice (albeit limited) of situatedness is dialectically related to some assessment of the sigmficance of difference and the significance of the structure of domination being confronted. Let me give an example. In September, 1991, an Imperial Foods chicken plant in North Carolina caught fire killing 25 people (caught behind locked doors), 18 of whom were women and 12 African-American. The tale of total exploitation, non-regulation (the plant had never been inspected in the eleven years of its existence) is a tale of Republican Party class war waged against occupational health and safety regulation and the rights of low-paid, marginalized workers over the years. In this case, a simple class politics would suffice to protect men, women and African-Americans and the salient differences between men and women, white and African-American, were broadly irrelevant. We ought not to hesitate in the face of such a circumstance to invoke class politics (though I note in this case that the incident passed largely unremarked and provoked little in the way of popular protest) as a primary means of protection of all oppressed groups (see Segal, 1991 for a parallel argument). Not all situations are this simple, of course, but the lesson is surely obvious: otherness and difference and the situatedness they define are of variable rather than fixed significance depending upon the circumstances. To cite Haraway (1980, p. 203) once more, "epistemology is about knowing the difference" and in order to know that difference we must necessarily engage in systematic (meta-theoretical) rather than fragmented enquiry. There is, thirdly, the supposed postmodern antagonism both to "totalizing" discourses and to the deployment of absolute rather than relative truth terms to evaluate the status of any work. The dismissals of The Condition in these reviews are, however, quite totalizing, revealing the fundamental paradox from which postmodernists can never escape - they cannot criticize The Condition as wrong, misguided, or fundamentally misconceived without deploying truth terms of their own which presuppose they have an ultimate line on a truth they theoretically claim cannot exist. I am reminded here of William Blake's great aphorism: "to generalise is to be an idiot; to particularise is to achieve the greatest distinction of merit," which sounds great (particularly to geographers) until it is recognized as a generalization and thereby selfcondemned as idiotic. There is, furthermore, the problem of the nature of the truth terms to which the reviewers in practice appeal: since Deutsche directly rejects the view that there is any social reality beyond those constituted in discourses, the only truth-terms left are precisely those generated out of that "pseudo-ethical self-righteousness" which all too frequently substitutes for more cogent forms of realist or historical materialist argument. Such "pseudo-ethical self-righteousness" seems, furthermore, to be

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the trademark of late twentieth century romanticism. But it is a romanticism of a particular sort and again I think Max Weber (1970, p. 115) had it right when he dubbed it the romanticism of the intellectually interesting running into emptiness devoid of all feeling of objective responsibility. The standard of debate set in Society and Space (a journal launched with good intentions) has evidently slipped into intellectualized postmodernist romanticism with not a little quackery thrown in. These particular reviews, furthermore, lie close to the understandable but degenerative end of Kristevas second wave feminism. Those feminists (see, e.g. McDowel15), who are concerned to change the rules of the game, disapprove of the competitive machismo and use of power of some of their women colleagues. The high modernist world of rigid hierarchies, systems of authority, domination and repression may have much to answer for including its masculinist biases. But the style of the Deutsche and Massey reviews all too clearly indicates a mere concern to put the boot on the other foot. Which brings us back to the Kristeva problem of where will true revolutionary change come from. As we confront an economic and political integration on the scale of the planet, she writes, shall we be, intimately and subjectively speaking, able to live with others, to live as others, without ostracism but also without levelling? (cited in Watts, 1992, p. 115). Feminists frequently argue as if they have the answer, as if they stand to accomplish a real as opposed to surficial transformation in the deep structure of social relations. But many movements for social change throughout the twentieth century have foundered on the belief that because their cause is just they could not possibly themselves be unjust. Contemporary feminism, as these reviews demonstrate, is not immune from exactly such a conceit. It would make much more sense, of course, to transcend this sort of thing. We should get on with a more serious discussion of how contemporary failures of political representation (as manifest, for example, in the electoral politics in many Western social democracies) might be linked to the supposed crisis of representation (understood in the sense of portrayal) 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 difference, 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 bind, 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

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conceptualized a s internally a n d dialectically interrelated. The basic qualities of that political-economic life cannot be changed in a n y meaningful a n d progressive ways without mobilizing the powers which already latently reside within such relations. Above all, we have surely to remember, a s Heraclitus so long ago recognized, that the finest harmony is born from differences, a n d that discord is the law of all becoming. It may even be possible, therefore, to regard even the sharp discords I have dealt with here a s not entirely foreign to such a process.

Notes
1. The relationship between cognition and visualization is a difficult and complex matter which deserves much deeper elaboration than I am able to give it here. The most abstract concepts are frequently understood or arrived at through processes of visualization - the DNA discovery rested on a visualization of a double helix and contemporary physics examines the nature of matter via string theory for example. Metaphors of space play a crucial role but, as Lefebvre (1991) observes, this role has to be understood in terms that go beyond a mere perceptual field of the sort that Bakhtin (1990) invokes in his arguments concerning the essential spatiality of difference. 2. She actually quotes with approval (p. 33) a long passage from Hartsock which asks why is it, exactly at that moment when so many of us who have been silenced begin to demand the right to name ourselves to act as subjects rather than objects of history, that just then the concept of subjecthood becomes problematic? This is, of course, the root of Hartsocks rejection of postmodernism and parallels, as I have already indicated, my own objections. 3. The theoretical sophistication exhibited in such feminist writing has not, unfortunately, entered very strongly into geography until very recently. This is a pity since geography is desperately in need of a systematic analysis from the standpoint of its covert as well as its overt gendering. I wonder how the history of the discipline might be viewed, for example, if Haraways magnificent essay in Primate Visions (1989) on Apes in Eden, Apes in Space: Mothering as a Scientist for National Geographic (in which she dissects the five National Geographic television series that ran in the 1980s sponsored by Gulf Oil) became a more general model for research. Recent contributions by, for example, Bondi (1990), Domosh (1991) and MacDowell (1991; 1992) indicate that this general lack of theoretical feminist argumentation in geography is now beginning to change. As this happens, so the conflicts and differences within feminism in general will almost certainly emerge within geography itself. 4. OHanlon and Washbrook (1992, 166) have recently argued that postmodernist approaches to the problems of colonial peoples are nothing more than a new form of that key and enduring feature of Western capitalist and imperial culture: the bad conscience of liberalism, still struggling with the continuing paradox between an ideology of liberty at home and the reality of profoundly exploitative political relations abroad, and now striving to salve and reequip itself in a postcolonial world with new arguments and better camouflaged forms of moral authority. 5. McDowell (1992) puts it as follows: We have recently witnessed in geogra-

POSTMODERN MORALITY PLAYS 325 phy both senior and less senior women go for male colleagues in typically masculine ways - disturbing to all of us who are arguing for or hoping for a different and more supportive form of interaction within the academy. Whatever the merits of different sets of arguments, it seems to me that a brutal and combative oppositional stance serves only to polarize debates in an unhelpful manner.

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