Boys Town

Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity combines urban and cultural discourses in order to defend a foundationalist social theory against the challenges raised by new social movements, political philosophies, and cultural practices. Adopting Jameson's definition of postmodernism as an embracing historical condition in which the valorization of fragmentation and difference conceals the spatioeconomic relations that underlie the totality of late capitalist society, Harvey contends that intellectual and aesthetic currents which insist on different starting points of social analysis or identify new objects of political analysis are necessarily complicit with advanced capitalism's concealment of social reality. It is no accident that Harvey's claim to perceive an objective basis of totality entails a refusal of feminist theories of representation, for feminists have analyzed such totalizing visions as the fictions of subjects driven by the desire to disavow their own partial and fragmented condition through the refusal of difference.