Abstract
Since its geographic inception, the concept of scale has been at the forefront of some of the most vibrant theoretical, methodological, and empirical debates in Human Geography and has facilitated transactions across a diverse range of other disciplines. As a relational, nested hierarchy, geographic scale is a conceptual tool that allows us to grapple with questions of size, level, extensivity, boundaries, space, time, and the ontological nature of reality itself. However, disagreement between political economy and poststructuralist approaches to scale has focused upon the ontological dichotomy of scalar being: namely, is scale a material being or epistemological ordering frame constructed through discursive practices? Arguably, the inability of theorists to move beyond this question has meant that the scalar debate has ground to a halt over the last decade. I argue that moving through this impasse demands a different ontological approach to the concept and reinvigorate scalar theorising. To do this, I engage with Deleuze and Guattari's ontology of immanence because its anti-essentialist, process-based approach to metaphysics, allowing us to re-ground the concept of geographic scale within the real and deal with its tendencies towards reification. As such, this thesis develops a conceptual inventory of ontological concepts and an affirmative orientation to theorising that has experimented with the real to create an immanent conceptualisation of scale. In this, scalar relations and scaling movements are prioritised over scales and operate within the concept and extensive spatialities to fold aggregations of individuals together in asymmetric double becomings. Resultantly, this thesis presents a new image of scale in which scalar relations conceived as spatiotemporal rhythms give the individual an absolute standing at the centre of their relative horizon and constructs this horizon as a panorama of spacetime that moves with them as their here and now. It is hoped that this work can bring forth new horizons of scalar theorising and reignite the Human Geographers' scalar imagination.