22- David Harvey; the condition of post moderninity

Post Modernity is embraced as the general rejection of all that was modernity (mass production and unified presentation and common solidarity), but in completely rejecting all of that it has done little more than flip the structure on its head- thereby embracing the categories that were set before them and validating all they seek to reject.

I think I might be missing something critical with Harvey, but I’m just gonna go ahead and write my criticism as if I know what I’m talking about. I had a lot of trouble digesting Harvey. Not only because it’s a complex read, but more because he seems to assess postmodern theory from its most extreme platform. While I think it’s necessary to look at extremes - it’s about as useful as saying all feminists are lesbian separatists and all Catholics think they’re the only ones going to heaven. For most of the article I got the sense that Harvey equated Pomo thinkers to little more than teenage anarchists without a clue, pot stirrers without a point. Harvey opens by saying that pomo is an expression of social conditions. In my book this is true of most art/architecture/theory. What makes pomo different is that it embraces and mimics the subcultures. Pomo embraces the "other". Pomo rejects modernism in that modernism tried to create a universal solidarity focused on functionality. Pomo itself prefers to focus on individuals and aesthetic. However by othering the dominant structure doesn’t pomo succeeding in doing what it condemns modernism for?

Harvey assesses both Modernism and Post Modernism as a reaction to social conditions, particularly capitalism. Modernism made aweful cookie cutter box shaped houses out of fiscally friendly, but solid materials. Yeah they’re ugly, but at the same time they solved a pressing issue of the time- affordable mass housing. Pomo embraces a more aesthetic method, but if these methods can only be taken upon by the rich (making a crazy artistic house or building is expensive) then aren’t you just buying into the system you’re trying to subvert? Harvey points out that the anarchy embraced by post modernism is mostly an illusion.

I get the feeling that Harvey is all but calling Pomo subversive to the point of stupidity. He seems to feel that pomo desires to invalidate the structure when I always interpreted it as simply questioning the structure; Should the structure fall in the face of said questioning- all the better. (The difference is subtle but I think important.) Harvey is also annoyed that Pomo has no unified political face, but I thought instability was the point?

It is only toward the end that I start to get at Harvey’s basic argument (or perhaps it is merely that I only then start to see some validity). Post Modernity only succeeds in flipping the social structure (the way that lesbian separatism merely flips the patriarchal gender structure) rather that truly subverting it. And when it turns the structure on its head it does little more than embrace the categories that have been established before them. Harvey closes on the note that Pomo has the right idea (in that it seeks to change that which is contradictory) but it fails to materialize change in a meaningful way.