Harvey presented, under a description of his approach four sections. The first was the axiomatic level where Production was the top generalized level, then below Distribution, and Exchange---which are fed back into the top level. He considered this something of fixed form, an abstract architecture.
The next area he considered not in terms of a fixed architectonic, but a flow in the sense of thermodynamics. The central form was the flow of money, composed of labor value, rents... I lost him here, almost nodding out. He wrote out a relational equation of balance that essentially said, if any of these factors is stopped it stops the flow, and shit breaks down.
His third category was the dynamic of interlocking systems which included technology, social relations, conditions of daily life, relation to nature, an ideological system and its discontents, and others. The basic idea was the presentation of the categories of potential change that animate the system and which Capital mobilizes. The condition was that if these interdependent factors are not simultaneously addressed, change on our side fails.
The fourth section was on Geography, the wide field of application, which for Harvey the urban environment was central. The city was center place in its dialectic with nature, as landscape was the locus of change-revolution.
The latter was really interesting and I definitely woke up for this part, since my ex-wife was a city planner, worked for Berkeley city government, and we had talked endlessly about this dialectic between city and country, Berkeley and Yosemite, the take over of local business by national franchise, the nastiness of the Chamber of Commerce and its feudal land system...
The crowd were all graduate students, old timers something like me, and the young professional turks. This was a fine view of actual, living, breathing left. Very glad I got off my hermit(internet) ass. It was really nice to be around smart people. These folk have no idea how lonely it gets in the bullshit that passes for life in the US. I want to debate Darwin---fucking kiss my ass.
The questions were interesting. The first was about the role of proletariat---standard issue Marxism.. Havery redirected the understanding of who the prols were, in caspule, the makers of cities. He used several other examples like the obvious disaffect intellectuals...
The DOE library is under current occupation---who knew? The guy sitting next to me was an archaeologist on staff in Geography whose period, place was ancient Peru. We chatted about the Peruvian collection below the Hearst women's gym and swimming pool, a Julia Morgan building, which worries the archivialists---as it fucking should below many tons of water.
Patrick Bond turned me on to this lecture, but he was very distracted. We only exchanged a few words of greeting. I have to say, the most beautiful thing geography does is maps, fabulous maps that track the rotten-right through its Mason-Dixon territories. If you notice these traces follow the central river systems of the US, the Mississippi, Ohio, and Missouri. What does that mean?
Then there are the scatter diagrams of blacks and minorities in major urban centers, or the crop intensity plots of the California landscape. The landscape creates the gigantic wealth of California because it has virtually every productive eco-system from SEA rice paddies to grasslands for live stock to valleys of custom Tuscan grapes for wine, cheese, and wheat plains for bread. It has three giant natural ports in SF, LA, and San Diego. The idiots that run this state have never seen it. The river systems that flow into the Sacramento Delta create something compariable to the ancient deltas of yore. Well that's the conceptual level of the geography of California;
I have gone on about this because there is a lot of intellectual life in Berkeley, but it is incrediably difficult to keep track of. You have to evolve a system of some social sort I never mastered to follow all the goings on. The Berkeley Planet sure ain't the New Yorker or the NYT.
For those around the bay area here is the link to David Harvey's big public lecture:
http://events.berkeley.edu/?event_ID=32976&date=2010-10-08&tab=all_events
Summary. Wurster Hall 112, 4pm. Parking. Go to the concrete parking structure on Bancroft a block below College in front of Kroeber Hall and cheat anyway you can. It is a short walk from this parking structure to the Architecture and Design building of Wurster---a souless Le Courbusier modular structure. I assume this lecture will be a book lecture on The Engima of Capital. Of course it is popular because art and architecture students are too stupid to grasp the abstract concepts. I hate the idea, but that is about right.
CG