“Why did we begin with David Harvey?” you might be tempted to ask.
We began with David Harvey—first his Brief History and then his Condition of Postmodernity—for a couple of reasons. First, Harvey presents what I now take to be the received understanding of the history of neoliberalism, if not in all of its dimensions (and certainly not in its interpretation of class), then at least in its grasp of the emergence and elaboration of a new regime of regulation (composed both of lawmaking and of self-enforcement, i.e., cultural production) and a new regime of capital accumulation (composed of new ways to organize capital investments globally and new ways to organize investment and production locally and globally). My sense is that this was a fairly straightforward, if contested, in any case clear presentation.
Second, Harvey does something that many of the other authors we will consider does not. He struggles with the ways that cultural and economic reproduction implicate one another. This problematizes (but, in my view, does not develop an adequate response to) the traditional Marxian base-superstructure presentation of culture which holds economic relations “in the last instance” to be determinative for both institutional and cultural forms. I say that he problematizes this presentation of culture because he calls for us to reflect on the ways that cultural forms both reflect and reproduce the dominant social form. He invites us to look at cultural forms (in this case postmodernism) and he invites us to reflect on these cultural forms in light of changes in regulation and capital accumulation.
This is not our parents’ or grandparents’ Marxism. And, I think, that is good.
But was that in fact where we began?
It was not. In fact, we began with the Gymnasium in a box (or on a stick). Among the elements in this box, you may recall, was Hegel’s “immanent critique” and Kant’s “transcendental critique,” either one or both of which may have struck you at the time as interesting, but perhaps beside the point.
Let me therefore reintroduce the point now. Assume that I take up the vantage-point of the proletariat, the vantage-point of labor. Assume furthermore that I take up this vantage-point because I hold that the vantage-point of the oppressed is superior to the vantage-point of the oppressor; or perhaps because I assume that the oppressed enjoy insights into the way that the world works to which the oppressed do not have access. That is to say, I believe that necessarily something happens to the ways that the oppressed experience their world that grants them deeper and more accurate information about how the world works.
Here, however, I am taking up the vantage-point not simply of any oppressed group, but, specifically, the vantage-point of labor.
And, yet, I also claim that this vantage-point is decisively shaped by, structured by, the capitalist social formation. In other words, this vantage-point is not simply a mechanical reaction to being hurt or harmed, a self-protective response that fascists and communists would presumably share; but a vantage-point intimately and necessarily related to the very structure of the social formation that is oppressing them. The proletariat, after all, is one of the leading, if not the leading, elements in the composition of the capitalist social formation.
The natural question arises then: what is it that grants this element within capitalism a special vantage-point over or outside of capitalism?
Were Marx a Kantian this question would make little sense since, for Kant, the very precondition of cognition itself is transcendental independence from non-transcendental (immanent) determination. (If I think the way that I do because I am hungry or thirsty or ignorant or angry, my thought lacks transcendental objectivity.)
The question only makes sense if Marx is an Hegelian. How does my thinking, which is shaped and structured by its object, grasp this object? It can only do so immanently.
That is to say, I must offer a critique of my conditions that acknowledges that my thinking about those conditions is shaped by them. In this case, there is no “outside” to which I have access. There is no vantage-point from outside capitalism from which I then critique capitalism. Rather, I and my thought are entirely within the object of my critique.
Back to Harvey. Harvey seems to feel that he can take up the vantage-point of unalienated humanity in order to critique alienated humanity. And, yet, since his understanding of unalienated humanity is transparently bound to the conditions of domination unique to the capitalist social formation, he posits a non-alienated humanity that has shed many of the very qualities that human beings across time and space hold in common; such as constructing and using symbols and signs.
He reverts, that is to say, to a transcendental critique from the vantage-point of a (in my view spurious) universal humanity. This, however, is not at all what Marx was doing in Capital. And this means that Harvey inadvertently critiques postmodernism from a vantage-point that he believes to transcend the specific conditions of our contemporary world. And with this he abandons Marx’s immanent critique and exchanges it for Kant’s transcendental critique.
(Obviously, since Harvey is not in fact an extraterrestrial being and therefore does not in fact have access to information or knowledge produced anywhere else but here, we might still be interested in theorizing from where his “misrecognized” (Bourdieu) objectivity springs. But that is another question.)