‘By our metaphors you shall know us’: The ‘fix’ of geographical political economy

Abstract

This paper traces the transformative travels of the metaphor of the ‘fix’ across the unbounded terrain of geographical political economy. It argues for taking the fix seriously as a root metaphor of the field, a signifier of its history and theory-cultures. Critically excavating the entwined genealogies of the metaphor and the field, it illuminates several historically successive and thematic moments of ‘fix thinking’, including: the spatial fix (1980s); institutional and spatio-temporal fixes of regulationist-theoretical approaches (1990s); and the scalar fix of state rescaling theory (2000s). It reviews these stages and their broader intellectual and political implications for critical geographical scholarship.

Keywords

capitalism economic geography fix geographical political economy geography metaphor spatial fix

I Introduction: Geographical political economy’s ‘fix’ as root metaphor

Without theory we can scarcely claim to know our own identity…Perhaps the slogan we should pin up on our study walls for the 1970s ought to read: ‘By our theories you shall know us.’ (David Harvey, 1969: 486)

…The nature of society…is measured in part by the kind of metaphors it induces or allows, and the [kind] of judges of metaphor that it educates or rewards. By our metaphors you shall know us. (Barnes and Duncan, 1992: 12)

Most disciplines are marked by crucial, turbulent transitions in their histories that promise to transform the cultural sensibilities, social practices, and politico-institutional norms through which disciplinary knowledge is produced, consumed, and made known. Geographical political economy’s transitions can be traced across its ‘quantitative revolution’ of the 1950s, embrace of radical political economy during the 80s, and ‘cultural turn’ over the 90s. Those were three periods distinguished by sharply divergent ideals and aspirations of how geographical theory was to be ‘done’, but which have nonetheless contributed to the discipline’s layered, palimpsest-like quality (cf. Scott, 2000).

Characterized as a heterodox project whose origins can be located in the emergent strains of Anglophone radical geography – especially its exploratory engagements with Marxian thinking – of the 1970s and 80s, geographical political economy both exceeds and exists within the broad banner of ‘economic geography’ (see Sheppard, 2011, 2016). Ambitious though it might be to impose a singular label on the diversity of approaches associated with both (sub)fields, a ‘critical commonsense’ can nevertheless be determined. Both are sensitive to the inherent instability and contradictory character of capitalism as a socio-economic system, embodied in its endemic tendencies for uneven development; such insights are underpinned by a critical consciousness of spatiality, relationality, and contingency (Peck, 2015; Sheppard, 2011). Barnes (2001) maps the theoretical shifts from the quantitative revolution to the cultural turn, observing a growing use of metaphor as theoretical device in ways illustrative of shifting disciplinary norms of knowledge production. These ‘theory-cultures’, reflecting the ‘character and consequences of analytical and theory-making practices’ (Peck, 2015: 1), direct attention to transformations of the milieux of knowledge production and epistemological sensibilities through which economic geography was made and remade.

Taking as a point of departure these interpenetrations of theory-cultures and disciplinary identities, this paper critically examines the travels and theorizations of a metaphor that is central to the enterprise of geographical political economy: the ‘fix’. Best known through the ‘spatial fix’ of David Harvey’s The Limits to Capital, the fix remains a metaphor extensively used across critical geography, creatively yet in many respects fairly consistently. Examples include discursive fixes (González, 2006); neoliberal spatial fixes (Hackworth, 2007); infrastructure fixes (Desai and Loftus, 2013); big data fixes (Thatcher et al., 2016); and logistical fixes (Danyluk, 2017). Economic geographers, the early adopters, have embraced the fix with particular enthusiasm to discuss regulatory fixes (Leyshon, 1992); labor’s spatial fix (Herod, 1997); territorial fixes (Christophers, 2014); and network organizational fixes (Coe and Yeung, 2015). The fix has been variously invoked to denote capitalism’s contradictions, spatialities, and, above all, insatiable thirst for provisional ‘solutions’ to periodic crises. This latter meaning is now so entrenched in debates that geographers have come to rely on the metaphor as a symbolic shorthand to gesture to different dimensions of capitalism – a quick-fix in geographic theorizing, as it were, indicative of how the metaphor has become so taken-for-granted that it has evaded explicit analysis altogether.

The very fact that the fix now occupies a commonplace presence in critical geography illustrates an extraordinary flexibility of uptake which exemplifies its ambiguous, adaptive character and conduct as a malleable, mobile metaphor of the discipline. These attributes are most pronounced in the domain of geographical political economy where the fix retains an emblematic presence, having become so internalized as a metaphor that it quite literally hides in plain sight within the pages of geographical scholarship. It is this phenomenon that the paper probes. It argues for taking the fix seriously as a root metaphor of geographical political economy, a signifier of the field’s history and theory-cultures. The mobilities of this foundational metaphor are mutually constitutive with the complex evolution of the discipline. Revisiting these histories through the optic of the metaphor provides a distinctive perspective that unveils deeper intellectual tensions of economic geography.

The fix is a pliable enough metaphor that encourages theoretical inventiveness. Its chameleon-like character enables different conceptual orientations to be grafted onto the root meaning, epitomized by the existence of varying appropriations that combine and advance divergent research agendas. This polyvalence permits a peculiar plasticity and breadth of theory-making – congruent with the comparatively catholic theory-culture of economic geography today – even while it has also imbued the fix with historically recurrent commitments. Scott (2000: 495) likens the landscape of economic geography to an ‘intellectual palimpsest rather than a unified front’, noting the presence of ‘traces’ that linger over time. As one such ‘trace’, the fix is unusual not least because of its endurance, especially considering the proclivity for presentism in critical geography. This persistence symbolizes not just Harvey’s prevailing influence, but also a deeper sense of how geographical political economy remains ‘haunted by Marx’ (Sheppard, 2011: 320), manifested in variants of Marx(ism) that linger, unevenly, through invocations of the fix. The paper thus identifies a historically successive, taken-for-granted stream of ‘fix thinking’ in geographical political economy that broadly illustrates how economic geographers have grappled with capitalism over the decades. But to the extent that fix thinking has blended into the background of disciplinary lives, an excavation thereof also reveals some tacitly accepted norms of theorizing in the field. The paper ultimately unearths an ingrained sense of neo-Marxian political economy that can be viewed as an expression of, but also a strain on, the discipline’s self-proclaimed heterodoxy insofar as it highlights the entrenched dominance of Marxism and the politics of writing worlds through this particular metaphor.

The paper consequently investigates the fix vis-à-vis the evolution of geographical political economy as a historically recurrent root metaphor, one that is prolific yet particular. Proceeding in four parts, it deploys the metaphor diagnostically and diachronically as a framing optic to illustrate geographical theory-cultures. It first elaborates on the root metaphor (Buttimer, 1982) as an analytical apparatus of meaning-making, against the backdrop of deeper disciplinary undercurrents and the mechanics of metaphor. The next section traces three historically successive moments of fix thinking in geographical political economy – the spatial fix (1980s); institutional and spatio-temporal fixes of regulationist-theoretical approaches (1990s); and the scalar fix of state rescaling theory (2000s) – before discussing a more speculative stage of environmental fixes of political-ecological approaches (2010s). Together they show how a geographical sensibility of capitalism’s crisis-reproduction came to be refined alongside the growing complexity of capitalist regimes. Third, it charts the politico-intellectual limits of fix thinking that manifest in the ‘strategic silences’ (Hepple, 1992) of the metaphor, together with their implications for critical geography. The conclusion reflects on the metaphor within the present political moment as an evolving analytical device of critical geographers.

II Root metaphors of geographical political economy

To evaluate the place of the metaphor in geographical political economy, the paper considers first the rich constellation of metaphors that have permeated the discipline over the past four decades. Some are not merely entangled with prominent theories but have come to be seen as stand-ins for those ideas, to the point that it is not easy to tell where metaphors end and theories begin. One need only think of Doreen Massey’s (1984) geological metaphor to depict the layering of regional histories; Neil Smith’s (1984) seesaw of uneven development; J. K. Gibson-Graham’s (1996) language of rape to describe globalization’s dominance, and their iceberg of social reproduction that languishes beneath ‘capitalocentric’ readings of the economy; and Peter Dicken et al.’s (2001) chains and networks of the interconnected global economy.

Though their accuracy or capacity for explanation may be ceaselessly debated, the bridging of associative linkages between metaphors and the wider theories that they encapsulate has already been accomplished in the imaginations of their audiences (Barnes and Curry, 1992). Building on the foundational work of Trevor Barnes (1991), a metaphor is defined as an analytical device which pivots on wordplay to generate thought and render complexity comprehensible. Through a rhetorical sleight-of-hand, metaphors meld familiarity and unfamiliarity, similarity and difference, the real and the representational, to kindle a ‘creative spark’ that triggers the thought process by which theory comes into being (Buttimer, 1982). Much of extant geographical scholarship focuses on critiquing the logical consistency of metaphors; this paper, instead, addresses deeper questions arising from the inseparable intellectual and political implications of mobilizing symbolic metaphors (e.g. Kelly, 2001).

‘Big’ metaphors, like the seesaw and the network, which captured certain dimensions of capitalism so expressively, have the persuasive power to stimulate research agendas and schools of thought, compared to the ‘little’ metaphors that surface at smaller scales of language (Barnes, 1991). Some big metaphors become so ‘deeply engrained in our thinking of the world that we may well see them as “roots”’ (Barnes and Curry, 1992: 62). By unearthing these gestalt-type ‘root metaphors’, Anne Buttimer (1982: 90) insists that geographers can learn something from ‘this encounter with our terrae incognitae’ to comprehend the dominance and decline of influential metaphors as reflective of shifting power interests within and beyond the discipline. The very naturalization of such metaphors indicates their cognitive potential to operate on fundamental levels of theory-building, whereby they become conceptual frames through which the world is interpreted (Klamer and Leonard, 1994). Root metaphors thus possess methodological import by functioning as vehicles and abstractions of theory(-making), simultaneously existing as subsets and signifiers of wider theories and concepts. If the history of the discipline is one of different metaphors (Barnes, 1991), then root metaphors punctuate that historically successive stream of ideas by operating as indispensable markers of continuity within disciplinary landscapes.

Considering their centrality, root metaphors constitute points of ideational convergence for disciplinary community-building (Barnes and Duncan, 1992). Geographers rally around symbolic metaphors in overlapping ways to declare certain theoretical stances. Political economy has the biological metaphor of ‘reproduction’, political ecology has the organic metaphor of ‘metabolism’, and cultural geography has its ‘landscapes’ and ‘texts’. It relates to how metaphor’s capacity for ‘novel redescription’ can connect seemingly dissimilar geographers and hence might be conceived as a vehicle of theorizing (Barnes, 2001: 548). This became especially important in a field which had grown to espouse proto-theoretical, systematic theory-building studies after the decline of approaches of regional synthesis (Scott, 2000). Barnes (2001) claims that the transition from the quantitative revolution to the cultural turn recast economic geography’s foundations of knowledge production. Theorization became viewed hermeneutically, as social practice, and theory became more open to reworking and reformulation. Economic geographers began to ‘do’ theory differently, perhaps more loosely, but certainly more creatively and inclusively, resulting in the comparatively pluralistic nature of the discipline today.

The entanglements between metaphor and theory, then, reflect broader, shifting theory-cultures. An outcome of the cultural turn was a heightened consciousness of the potential of metaphors for theorizing; the proliferation of the fix was one consequence. A fix, in everyday parlance, refers to a temporary measure undertaken to preserve existing arrangements with superficial success. Geographical political economy’s fix upholds this etymological premise, but operates only in relation to a more fundamental biological metaphor mobilized by Marx to conceive of capitalism as a living organism: reproduction. Barnes (1992) examines Marx’s use of this metaphor in the context of Marxian theories of crisis and social transformation. The theoretical basis is the assumption of economic rationality and crisis-free accumulation which underlies ideals of the smooth reproduction of the economy. Marx juxtaposes these ‘benchmark conditions’ with actually-existing conditions of production to reveal the immanent difficulties of reproduction, materialized in the crises of overaccumulation that punctuate cycles of production:

The economy is rational provided that there is crisis-free accumulation. Such a condition is pivotal to Marx’s scheme because of the circular view of production that he adopts…if accumulation does not occur, then the economy, by its very definition as a circular system, is unable to reproduce itself. (Barnes, 1992: 128–9)

Working through Marx’s metaphor of reproduction exposes the gap between assumptions of economic rationality and economic reality. This disjuncture poses an overarching obstacle to capitalist reproduction, for ‘changes [in production] are never fundamental enough to prevent future crisis, and the processes associated with restoring “rationality” are ones that will also undermine it in the future’ (Barnes, 1992: 113). This paper suggests that such short-termist processes undertaken to sustain capitalist reproduction are, for geographical political economy, encapsulated in the ‘fix’. When reproduction is in danger of disintegrating, a fix must be found to secure the conditions for continued reproduction, even if the results are provisional, for reproduction needs to be fixed for capital to continue circulating.

III Moments of metamorphosis

1 The ‘spatial fix’ (1980s)

If an origin of the fix can be found, it is surely David Harvey’s formulation of the spatial fix. It remains a key aspect of his work on Marxist historical-geographical materialism, having entered mainstream geographical scholarship through The Limits to Capital (1982), which Sheppard (2011: 320) considers the ‘foundational theoretical intervention’ of geographical political economy. The spatial fix first surfaced in Harvey’s Antipode (1981) essay, wherein he frames Marx’s treatment of colonization as a response to the inner contradictions and widening inequalities of civil society in Hegel’s theory of capitalist imperialism. Skeptical of Hegel’s proposal that imperialism and colonialism can address society’s ever-intensifying ‘internal contradictions’, Harvey asks instead if these contradictions can be resolved through a ‘“spatial fix” – an outer transformation through imperialism, colonialism and geographical expansion?’ (1981: 2, original emphasis).

Harvey turns to Marx’s theory of historical materialism to foreground questions of widening social disparities as inevitable consequences of capitalist modes of production. Hegel’s ‘inner dialectic’ periodically arises in Marx which, for Harvey, elicits questions of ‘a spatial resolution to capitalism’s contradictions’ (1981: 6, emphasis added) and whether ‘the formation of such crises [can] be contained through geographical expansion’ (1981: 7). From Marx he extracts several suggestions for addressing the overaccumulation problem, nonetheless concluding that ‘there is no long-run “spatial fix” to capitalism’s internal contradictions’ (1981: 9, emphasis added). The conceptual seeds of Harvey’s spatial fix have been laid: the conception of capital as a social relation; the dynamics of inner and outer transformations; and the spatial fix as a form of geographical expansion that only temporarily addresses overaccumulation crises.

In Limits, Harvey extends his earlier conceptualization of the urban built environment via theories of accumulation in his 1978 paper, invoking the spatial fix to incorporate ‘geographical expansions and restructurings as a temporary solution to crises understood in terms of the overaccumulation of capital’ (2006 [1982]: xviii), the pursuit of which would simply ‘end up projecting them…upon the world stage’ (2006 [1982]: xxxiii). These negotiations of capitalism’s deep-rooted crisis-tendencies are ultimately expressed in its uneven geographical development (2006 [1982]: 373). Centering the built environment as a leading site of capital circulation, Harvey situates the spatial fix in concepts of fixed capital and immovable capital to introduce the decisive spatial mechanisms through which surpluses might be converted into, or absorbed by, fixed capital to temporarily negate devaluation, but also to demonstrate how capital becomes sunk in space. The immobility of disparate elements of the built environment implies that they cannot be moved without simultaneously destroying the value therein – powerfully illustrative of the spatial dimensions of (fixed) capital, and suggestive of how Harvey’s spatial fix came to develop undertones of fixity and territoriality.

Harvey develops an expanded conception of capital to account for the mobility of its heterogeneous forms (commodities, labor, money capital). Alluding to the provisional nature of the spatial fix, he elaborates on the role of switching crises, arguing that fixed capital formation is a temporary mechanism to address problems of overaccumulation – a ‘short-run solution [which] exacerbates the difficulties in the long run and puts part of the general burden of periodical devaluations upon fixed capital’ (2006 [1982]: 219). The ultimate contradiction of the built environment as a form of fixed capital ‘appears from the standpoint of production as the pinnacle of capital’s success, [but] becomes, from the standpoint of the circulation of capital, a mere barrier to further accumulation’ (2006 [1982]: 238). The only way to confront such contradictions is to tackle them head-on during crises or to defer them onto a higher plane, where the seeds of crisis are planted anew and more savagely.

Returning to the relations between inner and outer transformations, Harvey finally invokes the spatial fix in the context of uneven geographical development to consider the role geography plays in processes of crisis formation and resolution, together with the forms of geographical differentiation capital yields when forced to confront its inner contradictions. He conceptualizes uneven geographical development as contradictory, dialectical expressions of concentration-dispersal and fixity-motion that exhaust the organizational capacities of capitalism, resulting in the formation of ‘nested hierarchical structures of organization which can link the local and particular with the achievement of abstract labour on the world stage’ (2006 [1982]: 422).

If Harvey’s spatial fix was yoked to an emergent conception of uneven development, then Neil Smith’s (1984) contemporaneous rendition of the metaphor in Uneven Development unfolded through an explicit conceptualization of the phenomenon, wherein nature and scale were incorporated into his categories of thinking from the outset. For Smith (2008 [1984]: 180, emphasis added), ‘scale plays little part in Harvey’s exposition, resulting in the misleading impression that while a systematic if inherently contradictory logic guides the capitalist production of space, the product does not reflect the organization of the process’. Smith sees in Harvey’s analysis these implicit questions of geographical differentiation, framing the spatial fix as illustrative of how capitalist contradictions are momentarily displaced to achieve a provisional state of equilibrium, the temporary equalization of difference. He identifies three principal scales (urban space, the nation-state, the global) that emerge through the differentiation of absolute space as ‘a means to organize and integrate the different processes involved in the circulation and accumulation of capital’ (2008 [1984]: 181). Scale thus connotes the dialectic of equalization-differentiation that is crucial to capitalist reproduction.

Observing that capital’s reimposition of spatial barriers at different scales stimulates a ‘new spatial fixity [which] brings back the old contradictions in spatial integration’, Smith similarly concludes that ‘there is no spatial fix’ (2008 [1984]: 196). He goes further, however, to elucidate how the production of spatial scales is achieved only through ‘an acute differentiation and continued redifferentiation of relative space, both between and within scales’ (p. 196). Through this he arrives at his seesaw of uneven development, setting up two poles of development and underdevelopment, to convey the immanent instability and circularity of capitalist accumulation. Inextricable from the twinned rhythms of accumulation and crisis, capital ‘attempts to seesaw from a developed to an underdeveloped area, then at a later point back to the first area which is by now underdeveloped, and so forth’ (p. 198). Insofar as capital can stay ahead of declining profit rates, Smith concedes that capital can theoretically achieve a spatial fix in the form of complete mobility, but experiences limits in reality.

Unlike Smith, who rarely returned to the spatial fix following Uneven Development, Harvey has dedicated an unusual amount of attention to the metaphor over the decades. Across Harvey’s oeuvre there exist three overlapping, historically evolving formulations of the fix (spatial, temporal, spatio-temporal), none of which has explicitly defined boundaries. Each operates distinctively to provisionally secure the spatial and temporal conditions that momentarily displace capitalist contradictions. Each is sporadically summoned by Harvey as an intermediary concept that constitutes part of his moving explanatory system to ‘construct a general theory of space-relations and geographical development under capitalism’ (Harvey, 2001: 326; see Jessop, 2006).

More recently, Harvey (2003: 115) has elaborated on the ‘double meaning’ of his interpretation of the fix: in the literal sense, a portion of the total capital becomes territorialized in physical form; in the metaphorical sense, it epitomizes a provisional solution to crisis through geographical expansion and temporal deferral. These distinctions between the literal and the metaphorical are porous, their meanings inseparable; in Harvey’s work, both converge and collide when expansion and restructuring threaten to disrupt the values fixed in place, but are nevertheless inextricable. The spatial fix, in particular, works as a signifier of a series of interrelated concepts and theories of capital’s territoriality and the spatio-temporality of crisis-management, symbolic of the general idea of an unstable solution to capitalist crisis-tendencies. On an ontological level, Harvey (2004: 545) has characterized the spatial fix as an ‘intuitive leap’ that he continues to find useful for theory-building. It remains an anchoring aspect of his ongoing endeavor to construct a general theory of capitalism, though he likely never meant for the term to gain currency in the way that it did, much less come to be perceived as a shorthand for the significance of spatiality for capitalist reproduction.

If a fix principally refers to a provisional measure undertaken to address predicaments – a definition which evokes widespread consensus and familiarity – then Harvey’s spatial fix may be parsed in those mainstream terms. Where it adds value to this definition lies in the analytical purchase of a geographical approach to capitalism. The nod to a common description partly explains why Harvey’s spatial fix has traveled more widely in the abstracted form of the fix. It need not stay tethered to its spatial attributes but can adopt diverse, context-dependent guises. To this end, Harvey’s spatial fix is readily acceptable because scholars are already convinced by the intuitive appeal to familiarity that is coupled with the-then novelty of its unfamiliarity as a geographical referent for capitalist reproduction. This flexibility translates into a ‘slackness’, which enables easy ‘interaction’ between two referents, stimulating new meaning in the process (Barnes and Curry, 1992). It propels the travels of the fix, rendering it a ‘vehicular idea’ that is capable of generating debate at varying levels of abstraction (McLennan, 2004). At the same time, the metaphor holds an adaptive capacity to evolve with the times and maintain a semblance of empirical and theoretical relevance.

There is also the question of socio-historical context, which emerges in Schoenberger’s (2004: 427) reflection on the intuitive, gestural appeal of the spatial fix for geographers and its symbolism of ‘an entire history of geographical restructuring under the aegis of capital’, embedded in how

Limits appeared [when] other influential works focused far more specifically on the contemporary restructuring of manufacturing industries in advanced capitalist economies and the relocation of some of this activity to low-wage, underdeveloped regions of the globe. (Schoenberger, 2004: 427–8)

Compared with Massey’s (1984) grounded conceptualization of spatial divisions of labor, which targets empirically-inclined accounts of that era (e.g. deindustrialization in Britain), Harvey’s fix works at higher levels of abstraction and theoretical generality to privilege what he considers necessary factors. But insofar as its arrival coincided with debates encapsulated in the restructuring approach, the spatial fix remains a resolutely embedded metaphor that foregrounded very real socio-political questions of its time, making a particular sort of sense when viewed from the traditional manufacturing heartlands of the Global North during a period of dislocation and crisis of the 1970s and 80s (see Lovering, 1989). It rose from this historical context to give shape to then-inchoate, emergent research questions.

The ubiquity of the fix is thus representative not just of the (evolving) theoretical robustness of the spatial fix, but also of a certain confluence of circumstances surrounding the historical situatedness of theory-making and the power of metaphors to grip the imaginations of (economic) geographers. These shifts were enmeshed with changing economic geographical theory-cultures that came to re-envision practices of theorization in a more accommodating fashion. Through its 1980s ‘origin moment’, the metaphor is grounded in – perhaps even synonymous with – that historical phase. It resonates through key conceptual elements of this stage of fix thinking that include the: (a) territoriality of built environments; (b) fixity of capital; and (c) pure abstraction of theory.

2 The ‘institutional fix’ and ‘spatio-temporal fix’ of regulationist-theoretical approaches (1990s)

Born of Atlantic Fordism, geographical political economy’s next stage of fix thinking unfolded over the 1990s through regulationist-theoretical approaches.¹ Regulationists take as their starting point the incompleteness of capital as an economic relation and the impossibility of its reproduction through purely market-mediated means, broaching questions of how capitalist reproduction is regulated in spite of its manifold contradictions. As a heterodox account of capitalist accumulation, regulationist approaches strive to explain not just conditions of growth but also those of crisis (Peck and Tickell, 1994a), their primary concern being how capitalism’s reproduction hinges on the extra-economic conditions that take shape through social and institutional norms (Jessop, 2000). Comprehending capitalist reproduction therefore requires analyses of wider socio-institutional contexts, processes, and strategies through which accumulation occurs (Jessop, 1997), along with their material and discursive formations (MacLeod and Jones, 1999). To connect ‘the general logic of accumulation and [its] more concrete expressions’ (MacLeod, 2001: 1157), regulationist approaches offer an array of meso-level, historically specific ‘intermediate concepts’ across medium-term time-scales. This highlights the forms of coupling (structural and contingent) between a regime of accumulation and its mode of (social) regulation. The latter takes the form of various institutional ensembles, formal procedures, informal social norms, and state forms (Peck and Tickell, 1994a).

Regulationist approaches emerged in the context of, and crises in, Atlantic Fordism and Keynesian-welfarism to elucidate how relatively closed national economies were institutionally and materially established as objects of regulation (Jessop, 1997). This emphasizes the concept of social regulation and its roots in the ‘socially constructed congruence between national economy, national state, national citizenship [which] embrace[d] social as well as civil and political rights, and national society; and the consolidation of institutions relatively well-adapted to the twin challenges of securing full employment and economic growth’ (Jessop, 2013: 14). The Fordist regime of accumulation was preserved through a ‘virtuous circle’ of mass production and mass consumption, underpinned by the state-labor social contract, and regulated by Keynesian macroeconomic redistributive policies (MacLeod, 1999). Such was the salience of the nation-state in ensuring ‘a strong structural coupling and co-evolution between the economic and the political in accumulation regimes and their modes of regulation’, which also stressed the role of power struggles embroiled in capitalist reproduction (Jessop, 2000: 331). The Keynesian-welfare nation-state thus operated as the fulcrum of Fordist regulation, the spatial scale at which capitalism’s contradictions were negotiated.

Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell (1994a: 290) discuss this scalar primacy, contending that the state of apparent harmonization was in reality dynamically dependent on implicitly international dimensions. Arguing that the regulation of Fordism was ‘primarily articulated at the interface of the national and the global’, they frame the international institutionalization of American financial hegemony as a perilous ‘institutional fix’ that ‘provided a means of regulating the international system in a way compatible with the requirements of Keynesian-welfarism’ at the national level. Likewise, Gordon MacLeod (1999: 234) alludes to these extra-national aspects to consider how the Fordist institutional fix was predicated on the integration of political and economic forces between European regions, only to eventually ‘run out of regulatory steam’, diluting its capability to continue internalizing the deepening cross-border tensions of Fordist accumulation regimes.

These scalar tensions indicate how Fordism and Keynesian-welfarism were beset by internal contradictions, even while they were also dissolved by external stresses in the forms of international competition and financial instability. This paradoxical state of scalar interdependence – wherein Atlantic Fordism was co-produced in complex ways with international Bretton Woods and GATT regimes – was critical to constituting the Fordist fix. But it also sounded its death knell, triggering a ‘regulatory vacuum’ that sparked a search for ‘fresh’ post-Keynesian, post-national institutional fixes to address predicaments of local and national growth (Peck and Tickell, 1994a). Rather than a sustainable solution to counter the disintegration of Fordist accumulation regimes, institutional fixes were strategic yet short-termist responses to new global realities (Peck and Tickell, 1994b).

In the most elaborate formulation of institutional fixes yet, Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum (2013) have tackled the role of agency in their evolving cultural political economy approach, which includes a regulationist exposition of spatio-temporal fixes. Jessop (2013: 9) defines an institutional fix as ‘a complementary set of institutions that, via institutional design, imitation, imposition or chance evolution, helps to provide a temporary, partial, and relatively stable solution to the regulation-cum-governance problems involved in constituting and securing a social order’. His spatio-temporal fix, contra Harvey’s, maintains a regulationist tenor; it exceeds institutional fixes to acquire an organizational capacity that hinges on its ability to establish boundaries for securing a core set of meanings and values (Jessop, 2000, 2013). Elsewhere, Jessop and Sum (2013) acknowledge that since a fully structured social formation is unrealistic, fixes are most productively explored at the level of an institutional fix, suggesting that spatio-temporal fixes function largely as abstractions.

In that extra-economic mechanisms routinely reproduce the crisis-tendencies intrinsic to the economic mechanisms of the capital relation, they generate an expanded scope for actors to strategically shape the accumulation process, reflecting the wider regulationist argument for taking agency, discourse, and semiosis seriously (MacLeod, 1998). But such possibilities unfold amidst conditions of crisis, or the ‘jungle law’ of neoliberalism (Peck and Tickell, 1994b). Symptomatic of this instability, a sharper sense of precariousness pervades the metaphorical character of institutional fixes. The very act of ‘feverishly searching for a fix’ (Peck and Tickell, 1994a, emphasis added) speaks to this tactical yet tentative aspect. Reverberating through an after-Fordist regulatory vacuum, these fixes hover on the tipping point of institutional exhaustion – ‘running out of regulatory steam’ only to meet ‘institutional meltdown’ (MacLeod, 1999: 234) – and are thereby increasingly less capable of containing the growing social, political, and economic tensions that duly manifest in crisis.

Regulationist fix thinking is broadly aligned with the overarching metaphorical message of Harvey’s spatial fix as a temporary solution to crisis, but lays more emphasis on the extra-economic aspects of agency and improvisation. The infusion of regulationist approaches refined the fix and geographical political economy to incorporate distinctive conceptual elements, namely: (a) institutionalization; (b) regulation-cum-governance; and (c) meso-level modes of theorizing.

3 The ‘scalar fix’ of state rescaling theory (2000s)

In the wake of crises surrounding Keynesian-welfarism, the post-1970s stage of globalizing processes disrupted traditional notions of national territorial space, resulting in the ‘reshuffling of the hierarchy of spaces’ (Lipietz, 1994: 32) and the rescaling of processes of capitalist accumulation. Although, as Cox (2009) observes, issues of metropolitan devolution have been studied since the 1950s, it was only with the advent of more recent efforts to characterize post-1980s shifts as ‘globalization’ that the concept of scale gained traction, especially in urban and regional studies. State rescaling theory is concerned with such dimensions of statehood, delving into the dynamics of state space, social struggles of state power vis-à-vis capitalist accumulation, and social (re)production of spatial scale (Brenner, 1998a; Jessop, 2000).

This rising interest in the shifting relationship between national and subnational scales, spurred by a deeper ontological imperative to understand scale as fluid and dynamic rather than pregiven and rigid, is situated in two interrelated political-economic transformations over the past four decades: crises of Atlantic Fordism and Keynesian-welfarist institutions that prevailed in the Global North during the postwar era, and the expanded influence of transnational corporations in organizing global capital (Brenner, 1998b). New contradictions and dilemmas accompanied these changing patterns of accumulation regimes and state governance, hastening the disruption of existing national-level modes of regulation. The result was growing, unstructured complexity, embodied in the foray for new fixes at competing scales of governance (Jessop, 1999; Swyngedouw, 1992).

Building on Harvey’s (1982) fixity-motion dialectic, Neil Brenner (1998a) argues that the recurrent territorial mediation of globalizing processes through specific subnational sites can be captured in the territorialization–deterritorialization dialectic. There exist endemic tensions between capitalism’s impulse towards the territorialization of socio-spatial relations, enabled by the emergence of certain urban and regional locales as temporarily stabilized structures of territorial organization, and capitalism’s equally marked tendency for deterritorialization, expressed in its persistent drive towards space-time compression. These cyclical shifts translate into periodic processes of restructuring and rescaling of territorial states, resulting in the rise of ‘glocal’ forms of governance that are not easily isolated at either global or local scales (Swyngedouw, 1992).

Contra the redistributive impetus of Keynesian-welfare states, glocalizing states are distinguished by efforts to restructure regulatory processes of social reproduction away from the national scale towards supranational/global or subnational urban/regional scales to produce globally competitive spaces (Brenner, 2004). These processes entail multiscalar configurations, rather than a simple decline of the national (Swyngedouw, 1997). State rescaling, as a distinctive trait of glocal states, is a prime accumulation strategy which hinges on the entrepreneurialism of states to restructure their competitive capacities at multiple scales, for instance, in the form of global cities (Brenner, 2001). Such efforts, however, cannot escape a ‘territorial non-coincidence’, which manifests during the rescaling process as a major scalar disjuncture between the scales of state territorial organization and those of capital accumulation (Brenner, 1998b).

Through a significant theorization which recast the ‘scale fix’ (see Smith, 1995) as a ‘scalar fix’ to elucidate the importance of state territoriality and spatial scale for capitalist accumulation, Brenner (1998a) integrates Harvey’s (1982) fixity-motion dialectic with Lefebvre’s (1991) historical conception of spatial scale under capitalism and Smith’s (1992) ‘politics of scale’. For Brenner, Limits implicitly evokes elements of scale (e.g. urban built environments, regional structured coherence) but is ambiguous as to how such forms of spatiality are periodically (re)organized to secure accumulation – or what, indeed, is the difference to capitalism scale makes. He turns to Lefebvre’s (1991) theorization of the historical linkages between spatial scale and social relations under capitalist reproduction to conceive of the hierarchical dimensions of scalar reproduction. Further drawing on Lefebvre’s (1978) ‘state mode of production’, Brenner foregrounds the role of the territorial state in constructing and regulating territorial configurations to secure successive rounds of accumulation.

This results in Brenner’s (1998a: 464, original emphasis) conceptualization of scalar fixes as ‘the forms of territorialization for capital [which] are always scaled within historically specific, multitiered territorial-organizational arrangements’. In Brenner’s formulation, a scalar fix is essentially a mode of spatial restructuring which serves to secure the social relations of capitalism in response to crisis. Its historical properties are parsed as path-dependent forms of institutional evolution through which scalar fixes are dynamically reshaped. Brenner (1998a) argues that the territorial state has been institutionally vital for producing scalar fixes since the 19th century, identifying several scalar arrangements that reflect evolving forms of state territorial power. The latest stage of ‘denationalization’ takes the form of glocalizing processes of rescaling towards supranational and subnational scales that have unfolded since the 1970s, indicating a multiscalar restructuring of state power that has strengthened national dependency on subnational scales of governance, while concurrently intensifying uneven development. As a contested accumulation strategy, scalar fixes illustrate the evolving role of territorial states in managing capitalist accumulation.

Following the regulationist imperative of institutional fixes, scalar fixes are typically characterized in strategic, organizational terms, reflecting the expanded emphasis on politico-institutional mechanisms of state restructuring. Brenner (1998a) delineates the role of the territorial state as an institutional mediator of uneven development at multiple scales that embarks on the restructuring process through ‘spatially selective political strategies’ (Brenner, 2003: 200; cf. Jessop, 1990; Jones, 1997). Like Harvey’s spatial fix, scalar fixes are heavily grounded in the language of territoriality and hierarchy, connoting a strong sense of path-dependence, but are combined with institutionalist concerns. Through state rescaling theory, the fix and geographical political economy came to incorporate concerns including: (a) territorial statehood and state power; (b) rescaling; and (c) meso-level, meta-regulationist abstractions.

4 ‘Environmental fixes’ of political-ecological approaches? (2010s)

Since the 2000s, the fix has continued to travel across subfields of critical geography. It is in the realm of political ecology, though, that the metaphor really seems to have resonated with various audiences, manifesting in a series of environmentally-oriented fixes to parse the current environmental-economic conjuncture. Rising in the aftermath of industrial capitalism’s decline and the growing impossibility of sustaining accumulation through fossil fuels, the ‘environmental moment’ connotes entangled risks of climate-ecological crises, financialization of the environment, and multiscalar dilemmas of environmental governance, all of which intersect with anxieties over systemic political-economic change (especially post-2008) (Ekers and Prudham, 2015). Analyses of contemporary capitalism have garnered notable interdisciplinary attention, and the outpouring of ‘environmental fixes’ demonstrates how geographers have gravitated toward such calls. This nascent moment of political-ecological approaches seeks to foreground the environmental dimensions of capitalist crises; unlike previous stages of fix thinking, however, it is far more contested and speculative, making it difficult to discern a consistent understanding of an ‘environmental fix’.

There are three chronologically and conceptually distinct waves of environmentally-oriented fixes, all of which relate differently to central concerns of geographical political economy:

‘Urban sustainability fixes’ (mid-2000s): Devised by Aidan While and colleagues (2004), this fix is inspired by Harvey’s spatial fix and institutional fixes to address the ecological modernization of urban governance and, more fundamentally, the strategic selectivity and conundrums of contemporary urban governance. Its regulationist roots are evident in how ecological incentives are cast as ‘part of the search for a spatio-institutional fix to safeguard growth trajectories’ (2004: 551), resulting in a mode of socio-environmental regulation that reinforces the partial ‘greening’ of capital. More recently, While et al. (2010) have reframed urban sustainability fixes as ‘environmental fixes’ of eco-state restructuring to integrate environmental and economic geography.

‘Environmental/biophysical fixes’ (late-2000s): Grounded in the debates on ‘neoliberal natures’, Noel Castree (2008) turns to Karl Polanyi and James O’Connor to scrutinize the seeming ‘rationality’ assumed by factions of neoliberal capital. He uses ‘fix’ more deliberately to discuss how neoliberalism offers stakeholders environmental fixes to manage the nonhuman world, and to negotiate endemic crises of growth and legitimacy, identifying four environmental fixes that relate differently to logics of capital and the state. Karen Bakker (2009) critiques Castree’s conceptualization for being too analytically broad and for neglecting the spatial qualities of Harvey’s fix, preferring her own conception of ‘ecological fixes’ (2004), which works more narrowly vis-à-vis environmental externalities that undermine the conditions of production.

‘Socioecological fixes’ (mid-2010s): In the most ambitious intervention yet, Michael Ekers and Scott Prudham (2015) build on Harvey’s longstanding neglect of questions of nature, turning to ecological Marxism to create a new conceptual vocabulary that foregrounds ‘socionatures’ as immanent dynamics of spatial fixes. Crises of accumulation and legitimacy are argued to be displaced by shifts in the social regulation of space and nature, wherein capitalism and social regulation are articulated with the production of nature. Ekers and Prudham (2017) return to Harvey’s formulations of fixed capital and capital switching, combining re-readings of Marx with insights from Neil Smith and James O’Connor to suggest that the very production of fixed capital renders it a historically contingent, ‘metabolic’ process, during which society, nature, and space are mutually transformed. Ekers and Prudham (2018) emphasize social struggle and the discursive-ideological dimensions of fixes, incorporating work from cultural Marxism in ways that implicitly recall earlier research in regulationist fix thinking (see MacLeod and Jones, 1999 on the ‘politics of representation’ of institutional fixes).

This stage of ‘environmental fix thinking’, provisionally termed, departs from earlier phases of fix thinking in three ways. First, it is more concrete-complex, unfolding through varying levels of abstraction to complicate broad theoretical claims by illustrating actually-existing fixes. Urban sustainability fixes are popular with scholars examining urban ecological governance (e.g. Pow and Neo, 2013; Temenos and McCann, 2012; see Holgersen and Malm, 2015, on ‘green fixes’), while environmental/biophysical fixes have been adopted to study neoliberal(ized) natures (e.g. Johnson, 2017). This empirically-driven nature manifests in attempts to create conceptual synergies between different bodies of literature, demonstrating the metaphor’s role as a vehicle of theory-making. It is seen in hyphenated terms such as ‘eco-scalar fix’ (Cohen and Bakker, 2014) and ‘ethno-environmental fix’ (Anthias and Radcliffe, 2015), where the complexity of actually-existing fixes belies neat categorization, in stark contrast to the largely abstract, (hyper-)theoretical nature of spatial, institutional, and scalar fixes.

Second, it is more extra-economic, exhibiting a pronounced shift away from earlier foci on the formal, value-theoretical conditions of capitalist accumulation and crisis-tendencies. Ekers and Prudham (2017: 1381, emphasis added) note that overemphasizing the economic aspect of the capital relation risks downplaying ‘the constitutive role of struggles over the material and ideological dimensions of the production of space and nature’. Attention to these extra-economic dynamics, therefore, usefully fleshes out multidimensional understandings of the political-cultural dimensions of capitalist reproduction in everyday life. But it is worth noting that in some appropriations this diluted focus on the economic results in accounts with tenuous links to concerns of capitalist accumulation, for better or for worse (e.g. Long, 2016; Pirro and Anguelovski, 2017).

Third, and above all, it is far more fragmented. By now it is evident that there is no single environmental fix. These formulations arise from a general interest in environment-economy contradictions, but they are quite differentiated in terms of analytical antecedents, treatments, and terminologies – an understandable outcome considering the expanded cast of characters and concerns at work, reflecting the urgency of the environmental conjuncture. The three waves of environmental fixes – and adoptions thereof – draw unevenly on earlier fixes and resonate differently with diverse geographical audiences of political ecology, resulting in analogous vocabularies and subtly competing notions of what exactly an environmental fix entails. Some, such as urban sustainability fixes, are oriented more towards geographical political economy – though its regulationist imperative has been diluted in adoptions, illustrating the wider decline of regulationist approaches in critical geography. Others, such as socioecological fixes, see their core concerns in political ecology. In a way, the difficulty of discerning a single environmental fix reflects the polysemic nature of the metaphor, which lends itself easily to creative (re)appropriation. So while there is no clear consensus on what an environmental fix is, the speculative upsurge of environmentally-oriented fixes does indicate how ‘many contemporary efforts to remake socionatures have been shaped by the difficulties of maintaining accumulation in the [neoliberal] era’ (McCarthy, 2015: 2489). Such is the nature of environmental fixes in the wild.

IV Limits to ‘fix thinking’ in geographical political economy

Having traced the historical and conceptual developments of the fix and geographical political economy, this section critically reviews central moments of fix thinking across spatial, institutional, and scalar fixes.

Table 1 provides an overview of key traits of each embodiment of the fix, together with the strong family resemblances across these stages, demonstrating how the metaphor has morphed vis-à-vis evolving concerns of geographical political economy. True to their historical-geographical materialist roots, each fix pivots on dialectical thinking to foreground endemic, contradictory tensions as the premise for investigating processes of socio-spatial restructuring under capitalist reproduction. There has been a discernible shift away from Harvey’s comparatively abstract formulations;² subsequent conceptions have endowed the metaphor with greater historical, geographical, and political content and nuance – necessary moves to grapple with the growing complexity of capitalism itself. Collectively, these formulations emphasize the core meaning of geographical political economy’s fix, which is a precarious, temporary solution mobilized in response to crises of capitalist reproduction that only exacerbates fundamental, underlying contradictions.

Table 1.

Central streams of “fix thinking” in geographical political economy.

Main features	Spatial fix	Institutional andspatio-temporal fixes	Scalar fix
Time period	1980s (origin)	1990s (Atlantic Fordism)	2000s (globalization)
Key interlocutors	David Harvey; Neil Smith	Bob Jessop; Gordon MacLeod; Jamie Peck; Ngai-Ling Sum; Adam Tickell	Neil Brenner
Historical context	Deindustrialization, decline, and restructuring in the Global North; capital mobility and creation of new markets abroad	Crises of Atlantic Fordism; breakdown of national Keynesian-welfarist infrastructure in the Global North; creation of regulatory vacuum at national scale	Dismantling and restructuring of national Fordist-Keynesian system in the Global North, conjoined with new, ‘glocal’ forms of competition between cities and regions
Theoretical concerns	Spatialization of Marxian political economy; space and time under capitalism; geographical expansion and restructuring; territoriality of built environments; fixity of capital; uneven geographical development	Regulation-cum-governance of capitalism’s extra-economic factors; institutional and organizational norms and forms; coupling between accumulation regimes and modes of regulation; uneven development	Spatial dynamics of statehood and state power; territorialization of capital; rescaling as state accumulation strategy; politics of scale; glocalized forms of governance; uneven geographical development
Mode of theorizing	Abstract dynamics of capital(ism)	Meso-level, intermediate modes of theorizing indexed to institutional change	Meso-level, intermediate modes of theorizing; meta-regulationist approach
Mode of operation	Built environment as fix to address mismatch between amount of capital produced and limited opportunities for investment	Institutional form as fix to bridge the disjuncture between national production and national consumption	Rescaling as fix to manage interlocality competition at the subnational scale
Metaphorical properties	Temporary, provisional solution to crisis based on spatial restructuring that only allows law of value to operate more freely, exacerbating uneven geographical development	Strategic yet short-termist response to new global realities of neoliberalism; temporary resolution to crises of overaccumulation at multiple scales	Temporarily stabilized scalar forms of organization articulated at different spatial scales that serve to, and are reflective of, deepen(ing) uneven geographical development
Real-world expressions	Territorialization of capital in physical forms; immobility of capital (e.g. expanded built environment; fixed investments in physical infrastructure)	Institutional and discursive set of norms and forms; discourses; representations (e.g. social norms, laws, customs, and formal and informal institutional ensembles organized around the nation-state)	(De)(re)territorialization of capital in subnational scalar forms; territorial state power (e.g. global cities and city-regions; large-scale urban territorial infrastructures)

Like any other thought device, the metaphor necessarily highlights some dimensions of the object of study at the same time that it hides others. Hepple (1992: 142) terms this quality the ‘strategic silences’ of metaphor, which ‘sustain and legitimate particular social and political orders, and are adopted by social groups in their interests’. Given that such silences of fix thinking constitute implicitly accepted norms of theorizing in the discipline, they impose certain intellectual and political limits on geographical research. Perhaps the beginnings of these silences lie in the analytically abstract nature of metaphor that infuses it with a sense of analytical generality. Combined with its roots in Harvey’s analyses, the (spatial) fix becomes doubly abstract, moving above historical-geographical specificity as a mobile metaphor. Across critical geography the metaphor is regularly conflated with ‘concept’ and ‘theory’, making it remarkably difficult to pin down because of the general lack of sustained treatment. The multivalence of the metaphor – the very trait that affords it (sub)disciplinary mobility – is precisely what lends the fix to misreading and misinterpretation.

The idea of the spatial fix is one that many geographers have seized upon…There has been, perhaps inevitably, a certain reductionism in most appropriations of the spatial fix…This has allowed easy borrowing without enough appreciation of the whole theory of accumulation and geography that Harvey presents. (Walker, 2004: 437, emphases added)

Fixes are often equated with fixity and flatness – strikingly so, when compared to the richness of social life. Massey (1991: 275, original emphasis) sees Harvey’s spatial fix as ‘the prison-house of capital tied up…There is no stable moment, in the sense of stasis, if we define our world, or our localities, ab initio in terms of change’, hinting at how the fix is a particularly poor metaphor for conveying the dynamic reality of place. Similarly, Brenner’s scalar fix has suffered critique for connoting rigidity and hierarchy (e.g. Marston et al., 2005).

Inasmuch as abstract treatments are more susceptible to criticism – especially in a discipline turning away from universal understandings – the fix is better mobilized as part of a set of approaches that constitute ‘a necessary pre-condition for analyses of “actually existing capitalisms”’ (Hudson, 2004: 417). Harvey (2003: 135) himself commented on the ‘sinister and destructive side of…fixes…[which] becomes just as crucial an element within the historical geography of capitalism’. To that end, empirical operationalizations exemplify the contested, contingent reality of fixes in material conditions of crisis, fleshing out social differences to cut across diverse conceptual concerns (e.g. Glassman, 2007; Goodling et al., 2015; Rosenman and Walker, 2016). Demonstrating the embodied politics that exceed metaphorical thinking, they are vital reminders that the fix does more-than-metaphorical politico-ideological work. Abstract and concrete engagements with fixes sit on a shifting continuum (see Sayer, 1991); the discipline needs both to remain critically relevant.

Beyond the churn of crisis, though, the fix becomes a somewhat inert metaphor. Ekers and Prudham (2015: 2442, original emphases) aptly note that the fix is ‘fundamentally concerned with how capitalism survives, not how it might be “disassembled”’ (see Mann, 2013). Oriented towards crisis-tendencies, the fix is analogous to a spiral locked into the deepening contradictions of capitalist reproduction, for the certainty of escalating breakdown-response-breakdown is built into the internal logic of the metaphor itself. Its conservative character reinforces circular thinking, which explains why accounts of fixes tend to be repetitive and unsurprising. The conclusion of crisis rarely amounts to anything transformative. Interestingly, Castree and Christophers (2015) attempt to transcend this by evaluating the (financially) progressive possibilities of ecological fixes to reconfigure built environments. And if the metaphor of the fix writes the (capitalist) world as it presently is, then Cameron and Gibson-Graham (2003) look to more radical metaphors of ‘feminising the economy’ to write the (postcapitalist) world as it could be.

Still, this circularity reflects larger risks of functionalism (see Gough, 2004). The mechanics of the fix are couched in Marx’s biological metaphor of reproduction; this assumption of rationality leaks into the notions of equilibrium that underpin the fix. Harvey (2006: 14) relies on ‘equilibrium’ as a ‘convenient means’ to identify the ‘disequilibrium conditions to which capitalist society is prone’. Smith’s (2008: 177) seesaw pivots, quite literally, on the question of spatial equilibrium as ‘an integral necessity, and a measure of the limits of capital’. Jessop’s (2013: 9) fixes rest on an ‘institutionalized and unstable equilibrium of compromise’. Brenner’s (1998a: 470, original emphasis) fix results from Lefebvre’s state mode of production, which ‘preserves the conditions of a precarious equilibrium’. The fix is consistently viewed as an outlet for overaccumulated capital to facilitate the return to equilibrium conditions, albeit one which inescapably exacerbates underlying contradictions, existing largely in reaction to crisis-tendencies. Perhaps the metaphor could be said to perform a strategically functionalist purpose to illustrate important structural dimensions of capitalism.

As a product of neo-Marxian political economy, fix thinking is entangled with the main enterprise of economic geography. Susan Christopherson’s (1989: 88) provocation decades ago surrounding questions of participation and privilege in this intellectual endeavor – ‘the construction of power through theory’ – remains powerfully pertinent in redirecting the analysis to bring into view those on the margins of the ‘project’, and the questions at stake for geographical knowledge. Community-building around root metaphors entails a form of inclusivity which inescapably begets exclusivity, raising deeper questions of social relationships of consensus-building and power that structure disciplinary theory-cultures (Barnes and Duncan, 1992). Much like wider (economic) geographical scholarship, fix thinking is dominated by select Anglo-American male geographers and Northern empirical locales (noteworthy exceptions include Mullings, 2009; Potts, 2018; Werner, 2016; Zhou et al., 2011). Economic geography may profess a heterodoxy of knowledge-cultures, but its scholarly make-up is far less diverse. These ‘limits to heterodoxy’ signal hierarchies of geographical knowledge production (MacLeavy et al., 2016), particularly the privileging of theoretical and political-economic research, serving to deepen racialized and gendered striations of knowledge (Werner et al., 2017). Insofar as metaphors are rhetorical inventions, this also foregrounds the ‘limits of language’ (Hubbard, 2012: 334) in a discipline where English remains the dominant linguistic vehicle of communication and interaction (Barnes and Sheppard, 2010).

The politics of knowledge also manifest in the palpable absence of the fix within certain realms of the cultural turn. Other than the rare utterance of the (spatial) fix being ‘narrowly Marxian’ (Anthias and Radcliffe, 2015: 257), locating the (im)mobilities of metaphor is not easy. Presumably the overtones of fixity and historical-structural determination sit uncomfortably with post-Marxist approaches, which are animated instead by fluidity and emergence. This silence speaks to the paradoxical, ambiguous state of Marxism in contemporary economic geography, which has largely declined since the 1990s, but lingers through ongoing appropriations of the fix and its taken-for-granted roots in historical-geographical materialism. The mechanics of metaphor facilitate strategic extractions-and-implantations, allowing geographers to invoke the fix without definitively aligning themselves with neo-Marxist positions or directly engaging central tenets of fix thinking. Emboldened by critical geography’s citational cultures of ‘easy borrowing’ (Walker, 2004: 437), the fix circulates without being fixed, resulting in a persistent-yet-diluted strain of neo-Marxian political economy in economic geography. This quality of elusiveness, after all, is crucial to the metaphor’s appeal. If geographical political economy is indeed ‘haunted by Marx’ (Sheppard, 2011), then fix thinking is one illustration of Marx’s ‘nonidentity’ (Mann, 2009) in the field, periodically manifesting through fragmented forms of Marxism in (sub)disciplinary motion. In this sense, fix thinking is tinged by economic geography’s solitudes of ‘fragmented pluralism’ (Barnes and Sheppard, 2010), at times more divided than diverse, marked both by receptive engagement and casual (re)appropriation.

This section concludes by outlining key characteristics of fix thinking. First, the creative deployment of the metaphor in diverse geographical contexts that emphasizes the variegated materiality and deepening crises of capitalist reproduction. Second, its origins in geographical political economy that unfold through uneven engagements with neo-Marxian political economy. Third, its limits to heterodoxy in the social politics of knowledge production that privilege some forms of theorization over others. Fourth, its suggestiveness of a functionalist mode of thinking that is oriented towards the stabilization, rather than transformation, of capitalist regimes. This latter point is voiced not as a criticism, for such studies remain invaluable in illustrating the political labor that is invested in capitalism’s reproduction, but it does evoke the deeper question of whether fix thinking is capable of understanding capitalism in more transformative ways.

V Concluding comments: For reflexively approaching root metaphors

By critically excavating the fix as a root metaphor of geographical political economy, the paper surfaces several conclusions. First, it shows how the fix functions as a signifier of disciplinary histories and theory-cultures, as well as a root metaphor of the discipline that emphasizes historically recurrent theoretical commitments. Second, it identifies a historically successive stream of fix thinking in the field, and the politics of this mode of thought formulation, that challenges economic geography’s self-presumed heterodoxy. Third, it reinforces the need for reflexivity regarding continued usage of the metaphor, echoing Barnes’ (1991: 118) point regarding how geographers ‘must continually think critically about the metaphors we use’ – one that bears repeating considering the pervasiveness of the fix and the assumptions bound up in fix thinking. To this end, the metaphor possesses a symbolic, generative traction – and an irreplaceable status – that has taken hold in the minds of (economic) geographers. It is the fix of geographical political economy in more ways than one.

The present political moment of the fix rides the crest of the populist wave sweeping across the Global North. Phenomena such as Brexit and the Trump electoral victory partly stemmed from deep-seated territorial imbalances that contributed to widespread sentiments of having been ‘left behind’, manifested through voting patterns as ‘the revenge of places that don’t matter’ (Rodríguez-Pose, 2018). Those were older spatial divisions of labor entrenched in the legacies of spatial and Fordist institutional fixes, but which remain very much part of the socio-political landscape, as expressed through present struggles over past regimes of accumulation. The fix remains a useful analytical device to parse such (crisis) dynamics, but it must be exercised with cognizance of its limits, and best merged with plural theoretical approaches and mobilized in diverse empirical locales for a multifaceted, comparative understanding of (the afterlives of) capitalist accumulation across the Global North and South. The next step forward is to remain aware of how the fix functions as a carrier of particular geographical sensibilities, but is nonetheless an indispensable reminder of the invaluable role geographers and geography have to play in critiquing capitalism. To do any less risks dulling the critical capacities of one of the discipline’s most emblematic metaphors.

Footnotes

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Jamie Peck for encouraging me to further develop this piece, and for his consistently careful and critical comments on previous drafts. Thanks also to Trevor Barnes and Erica Schoenberger for their insightful remarks; to the five reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions; and to Christian Berndt for his editorial guidance and support. I alone, of course, bear responsibility for the arguments made.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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