(From an interview in the July/August 2000 New Left Review. Although I number myself as one of the most bloodthirsty critics of "Justice, Nature & the Geography of Difference" on the planet, I found Harvey's reflections most salutary in their honesty. This honesty was in fact present in the introduction to the book, where he confesses being unable to integrate himself into a study group organized on behalf of auto workers facing a plant shutdown. As a prominent intellectual, Harvey could teach some other big names--who will remain nameless here--a thing or two about humility.) NLR: There seems to be an alteration of references in Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference in other ways, too. Heidegger and Whitehead become much more important than Hempel or Carnap. It is a very wide-ranging collection of texts. What is its main intention? Harvey: It must be the least coherent book I’ve written. There may even be some virtue in its lack of cohesion, since the effect is to leave things open, for different possibilities. What I really wanted to do was to take some very basic geographical concepts—space, place, time, environment— and show that they are central to any kind of historical-materialist understanding of the world. In other words, that we have to think of a historical-geographical materialism, and that we need some conception of dialectics for that. The last three chapters offer examples of what might result. Geographical issues are always present—they have to be—in any materialist approach to history, but they have never been tackled systematically. I wanted to ground the need to do so. I probably didn’t succeed, but at least I tried. NLR: One of the strands of the work is a critical engagement with radical ecology, which strikes a characteristic balance. You warn against environmental catastrophism on the Left. Should we regard this as the latter-day equivalent of economic Zusammenbruch theories of an older Marxism? Harvey: There was quite a good debate about this with John Bellamy Foster in Monthly Review, which laid the issues out very plainly on the table. I’m extremely sympathetic to many environmental arguments, but my experience of working in an engineering department, with its sense for pragmatic solutions, has made me chary of doomsday prophesies—even when these come from scientists themselves, as they sometimes do. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to persuade engineers that they should take the idea that knowledge—including their own technical ingenuity—is still socially constructed. But when I argue with people from the humanities, I find myself having to point out to them that when a sewage system doesn’t work, you don’t ring up the postmodernists, you call in the engineers—as it happens, my Department has been incredibly creative in sewage disposal. So I am on the boundary between the two cultures. The chapter on dialectics in Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference was designed to try to explain to engineers and scientists what this mystery might be about. That’s why it is cast more in terms of natural process than philosophical category. If I had been teaching dialectics in a Humanities programme, I would, of course, have had to talk of Hegel; but addressing engineers, it made more sense to refer to Whitehead or Bohm or Lewontin—scientists, familiar with the activities of science. This gives a rather different take on dialectical argumentation, compared to the more familiar, literary-philosophical one. Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
