David Harvey's lecture

Thanks for my advisor's information, I didn't miss David Harvey's lecture on our campus this week. Although at the first, I was very doubtful about how geography could have anything to do with Information Technology, or the social or culture, I was impressed by his perspective about various issues of the world on the first day(It was a three day lecture). It is very informative, insightful, profound, imaginative, and critical. He touched all these general issues concerning humanities, which is certainly what we should understand to make computers really work for people. This level of concern about humanity is much more profound than just make computers more efficient.

During the lecture, a audience asked him who started cultural geography(actually that's what I want to ask too. obviousely, he is also confused by the name Cosmopolitan Geographies, or Geographical Ontologies, or Freedom Geographies). His answer was if you can say intelligent things, who cares what discipline that is. I feel this is kind of trend in contemporary academia, that people are less concerned about which discipline the study is. we are trying to work across boundaries, and make insightful studies. It seems it was like before middle ages, scientists could be artisit, and etc. There are intellectuals but not field experts. The division of disciplines sometimes cause reductionism, and since more and more fields are interconnected, reductionism will become obstacles to the truth. Shall we advocate holistic thinking? Architeture is not just about a building, but also compatible with the enironment, view, energy, comfort, urban and etc. I believe that should become true to for the IT field. Maybe we could be experts in every field, but we should have this holistic thinking when we approach issues.

Starting from Geography, David has wide ranging enquiries from politics, nature, economics, and human natures. Facing the globalization, he shows his concerns about what is freedom, what is justice, how the globalization should work, and whether freedom is gained just for some group but at the cost of another group. Is there absolute justice or freedom? Surely, the answer is no. Facing the globalization and the growing interdependence, who is able to stand for the global benefits. How things are going to work out? According to my observation, the advancement of technology, the release of labors, and the imperialism have profoundly caused inequality. The widens the gap between classes. I observed in the previous years in China more and more workers were laid off from manufacture industries, and can only become cheap labors for capitalists. Although overall, seems more people are becoming wealthier, still more and more people are becoming poorer, and the machinism of this pattern seems to reproduce itself.

What struck me most was his distinction of the concept of time and space in terms of "absolute", "relative", and "relational". He explained this concept by analogy of "use value", "exchange value", and "representational value". It is from more concrete to more abstract. "Absolute" is the reality, the world, and the practice. "relative" is about who see it, so it is relative to the person who perceive it. "relational" is after the things are represented, it has its own form of existence, and it is tranfered. They are immaterial, but they are objective. Like thoughts, they exist in our mind. You can't see, can't touch, but they exist in our mind objectively. I feel what IT has big impacts is in the relational level.

He mentions process philosophy several times. Obviously process philosophy has a big impact on his thinking. Process philosophy stresses that the nature and reality is best understood in terms of processes rather than things, and things are just stabilized existences. In process philosophy, recipes are more important than particular cookings, because according to the former, you can reproduce the later. So what we should concern is the process that makes the product, rather than the final products. In the same way, the realy and culture are ongoing productions of certain processes.

So we are all in the process. I am in the process of some projects, in the process of getting my Ph.D. degree, in the process of a meeting. The problem is where to find the transitional point.Where is the closure? Where is the beginning? To answer these questions, we should not ignore negative aspects of things such as resistence and conflicts. Rubbing two rockes to make fires. We should always have this critical thinking, examine all the sides of problem, assemble things in different ways and to find new forms of existence. We should all try to make new kind of fires.

We are in the process of transformation, and the world is in the process of transformation. How we can transform ourselves depends on how we can transfrom the world, and how we can trasnform the world depends on how we can transform ourselves. It seems the fragmentation of cities, the reforced class power is resulted from the "let market do it". Where is the outrage then?