Vol. 19 No. 8 · 24 April 1997
pages 22-23 | 2472 words
Spaced Out
Terry Eagleton
- Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference by David Harvey
Blackwell, 496 pp, £50.00, December 1996, ISBN 1 55786 680 5
From the Romantics to the Modernists, time was a fertile concept and space a sterile one. Space was static, empty, what you had between your ears or needed to eradicate by bridging; time – or perhaps history – was fluid, burgeoning, open-ended. For a Modernist writer like Bertolt Brecht change in itself is a good, just as for Samuel Johnson change was in itself an evil. Bad things were reified products; good things were dynamically evolving processes.
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 11 · 5 June 1997
From David Harvey
Terry Eagleton, like many others with Marxist sympathies, looks to a revival of Modernism as a way to counterattack the excesses of Post-Modernism. Judged in terms of some grand battle between Modernism and Post-Modernism, my book Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (LRB, 24 April) appears, no doubt, to make too many concessions to the latter position. But there is another way to locate what it is about. For many years I have tried to get Marxists to take the geographical conditions of both their theorising and their politics rather more seriously man is their wont. While my initial interests focused on urbanisation, they subsequently encompassed questions of environment, space and time, the geography of uneven development, the significance of place, and other geographical questions. The productions of space, place and environment in their various guises have much to tell us about how capitalism works and how oppositions to capitalism get constructed and why they succeed or fail (hence my plea for a ‘historical-geographical materialism’).
But it has not been easy to get any of the ‘big hitters’ in the Marxist team to listen. For example, New Left Review carried not a single article on the extraordinary political-economic shifts occurring through massive urbanisation until 1984. When it did so it was appended to Fred Jameson’s article on Post-Modernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism. This is typical. Most of the themes I am interested in are entailed in the Post-Modern critique of Modernism and Marxism. Under assault from outside, Marxist Modernism has to confront the questions that I try to consider from within the Marxist frame in this book. Eagleton accepts that ‘old-fashioned left internationalism was callously cavalier’ about the issues I raise and paid a price for ignoring them. But he worries that I leave too many holes for Post-Modern dilutions to pour into the tight ship of a revitalised Modernist Marxism. I share his concern, but I also worry that in the haste to pull Marxism back up by its Modernist bootstraps, these vital geographical questions will be prematurely relegated to that periphery of Marxist thought where they languished in the past. Eagleton pinpoints the problem when he asks: ‘How are we to avoid at once the fetish of the particular and a universalism cruelly indifferent to difference?’ I cannot say exactly how to do it or where the proper balance lies. I tried in justice, Nature and the Geography of Distance to theorise it, but I am still not sure I got it right. Eagleton, judging by his review, cannot find the balance either.
David Harvey
Johns Hopkins University
