The Performativity of Scale: The Social Construction of Scale Effects in Narva,Estonia

In their recent critique of the politics of scale literature, Marston, Jones, and Woodward (2005, “Human geography without scale” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series 30 416–432) argue against the continued use of scale in human geography. While acknowledging that there are significant problems with scale as it has been conceptualized and operationalized in human geography, we argue that more, rather than less, attention needs to be paid to the political genealogy of scale ontologies, defined here as the historically contextualized analysis of the social production of scaled knowledge. As a first step in this direction, we develop a poststructural reframing using performativity, as an approach that explores the reiterative and citational practices through which scale effects are socially produced. We are especially concerned in this paper to examine the ways in which scale effects are produced and deployed as discursive devices that create timespace conjunctures and ruptures between place and identity. Using sites of memory as our analytical lens, we trace the citational practices that have naturalized and sedimented a series of scale effects in Narva, Estonia, and explore the consequences of these discursive rescalings for the articulation of place and identity.