BETWEEN FIXITY AND MOTION - ACCUMULATION, TERRITORIAL ORGANIZATION AND THE HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF SPATIAL SCALES

During the last decade, discussions of geographical scale and its soci al production have proliferated. Building upon this literature, in par ticular the writings of Lefebvre and Harvey, I investigate the implica tions of the contradiction between fixity and motion in the circulatio n of capital-between capital's necessary dependence on territory or pl ace and its space-annihilating tendencies-for the production of spatia l scale under capitalism. I elaborate the notion of a 'scalar fix' to theorize the multiscalar configurations of territorial organization wi thin, upon, and through which each round of capital circulation is suc cessively territorialized, deterritorialized, and reterritorialized. T hese multiscalar configurations of territorial organization position g eographical scales within determinate, hierarchical patterns of interd ependence and thereby constitute a relatively fixed and immobile geogr aphical infrastructure for each round of capital circulation. Drawing upon Lefbvre's neglected work De l'Etat, I argue that the scalar struc tures both of cities and of territorial states have been molded ever m ore directly by the contradiction between fixity and motion in the cir culation of capital since the late 19th century, when a 'second nature ' of socially produced sociospatial configurations was consolidated on a world scale. On this basis a schematic historical geography of scal ar fixes since the late 19th century is elaborated that highlights the key role of the territorial state at once as a form of territorializa tion for capital and as an institutional mediator of uneven geographic al development on differential, overlapping spatial scales. From this perspective, the current round of globalization can be interpreted as a multidimensional process of re-scaling in which both cities and stat es are being reterritorialized in the conflictual search for 'glocal' scalar fixes.