David Harvey : space, limits and the politics of movement
Date
1998
Authors
Whitehall, Geoffrey Alexander Wallace
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Abstract
There is a trend towards thinking about movement in contemporary social and political thought. However not all movement is the same. I focus on one dominant attempt to think about movement of which David Harvey's dialectic and his relational metaphysics are exemplary. I argue that although Harvey is attentive to movement, his politics remain caught within a spatial discourse that he claims to avoid. This discourse is based on an Euclidian, Newtonian and Kantian conception of absolute space and spans the work of Kant, Hegel and Marx. As such, I argue that this discourse has grave implications for David Harvey's project in particular and progressive politics in general.
Specifically, the discourse condemns any attempt to think about movement and change within an eternally recurring infinite form. Change and movement are only possible within this form since the latter acts as their condition of possibility. Therefore, Harvey is caught within this discourse and thus working at odds with the revolutionary goals of his project.