‘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.