European Union to illustrate how the scale at
which the capitalist flux of cooperation and com-
petition is mediated can ‘jump’, at a tremen-
dously general and systemic level, from the scale
of the nation-state to that of the continental state
(see also Swyngedouw, 1992; 1997a). Through
such examples we can gain a vivid sense of how
scale is reproduced and transformed through
dynamics of political-economic change. Indeed,
one of the epistemological advantages of an
analytical focus on scale-jumping is that it actually
helps to make more clear what scale in fact is: the
temporary fixing of the territorial scope of par-
ticular modalities of power. In the same way,
scale-jumping enables us to theorize the framing
effects of particular scales without ignoring the
general fluidity of scale and resorting to the old
fixed assumptions. It enables us to describe the
moments at which boundaries are reconfigured
and struggles rearticulated. Because such moments
of scale-jumping are also often moments when
cultural landscapes are redrawn or reimagined,
the resulting cultural geographies register the
jumping of scales. This is the basic insight that
guides our approach to the case studies presented
in this chapter.
All of the above is not to say that the notion of
scale-jumping in the abstract makes the sub-
stanceof scalar configurations transparent. Such
ontological questions of substance relate to the
particular objects of research under examination,
and these can range from economic concerns to
other dynamics as diverse as the sexual, the
ecological and the racial. In Smith’s analyses of the
EU’s development and of gentrification (Smith,
1995) it is economic (including class) relation-
ships that are foregrounded, and thus scale comes
to name the territorial scope of particular political-
economic power relations. However, the notion
of using scale-jumping remains useful as an
epistemological entry point into investigating the
territorial scope of other power relations too,
others that are interarticulated with those of
capitalism but in such a way as to remain relatively
autonomous. In this chapter we seek to widen our
analysis to encompass such variant power rela-
tions through a focus on the cultural geographies
of ideology and resistance. This does not move
us all that far from the basic Marxian attention to
capitalism and its discontents, but it does bring
into focus the ways in which economic transfor-
mations are mediated and sometimes contested
by the production of new visions, new ideas, new
feelings and new ways of being in the world, all
of which remain just as profoundly geographical,
in their shifting territorial scales, as the brute
economic geographies of capitalist creative
destruction.Linked with the territorial reconfiguration of
economic coordination is the representational
question of how such reconfigurations are
framed ideologically. Corporate elites, for exam-
ple, often shift the scales at which production is
represented in order to avoid regulation and
accountability. Sometimes they stake their claim
to a national scale of operations, claiming the
protection of national sovereignty against threat-
ening international laws. However, at other times
they present their operations as footloose and
global in order to discipline national govern-
ments and labor movements by threatening the
loss of local jobs. Such neoliberal ideological
maneuverings are one of the concerns raised by
the case studies in this chapter, which we examine
through the lens of cultural politics.
Following work in cultural studies that has
reinterpreted ideology through the conceptual
apparatuses of Gramsci’s concept of ‘hege-
mony’, Althusser’s concept of ‘ideological inter-
pellation’ and Foucault’s concept of ‘discourse’,
we invoke ideology to describe hegemonic dis-
cursive formations in which people’s subjectivi-
ties are formed and through and against which
counter-hegemonic resistance is enabled (see, in
particular, Hall, 1988; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985;
Smith, 1988; Spivak, 1988). In a similar way, we
follow the post-Freudian/post-Althusserian use
of ‘overdetermination’ to signal our understand-
ing of ideological representation (including land-
scape representations) as being constitutively
founded on moments of ideological condensation
and displacement (see Silverman, 1983: 62, 90;
Sparke, forthcoming). In this register, any parti-
cular cultural geography needs therefore to be
understood not only as the geographic condensa-
tion of diverse cultural, political and economic
determinations, but also as a certain form of dis-
placement which, in geographic terms, takes the
form of a reterritorialized placement, a particular
if still transient understanding and experience of
place that at first sight hides its ideological
underpinnings.
Much of the best recent work in cultural
geography has already drawn on such expanded
and culturally nuanced understandings of ideo-
logy and overdetermination (Anderson and Gale,
1991; Brown, 2000; Gregory, 1996; Henderson,
1999; D. Mitchell, 2000; K. Mitchell, 1996;
Moore, 1997; Sharp et al., 2000; Wright, 2001).
Our main goal here is to explore how such
widened analysis of cultural geographies can
both inform and be informed by the study of
scale-jumping. As well as seeking to make a
contribution to cultural geography in this way,
our reciprocal aim is to expand the conceptual
relevance of scale-jumping beyond its traditional486 GEOPOLITICAL CULTURES3029-ch26.qxd 03-10-02 11:05 AM Page 486