Nothing-much geographies, or towards micrological investigations

As part of a wider ‘geographical’ reading of writings by Theodor W. Adorno, the Frankfurt School critical theorist, energised by a wish to discern possible lineaments of an ‘anti-fascist geographical imagination’, this paper engages in detail with Adorno’s aphoristic ruminations gathered together as Minima Moralia (2005 [1951]). With its close-grained attention to ‘minimal’ or ‘minor’ things - a bewildering diversity of objects, practices and events that might normally be reckoned of little account - this text exemplifies what Adorno elsewhere frames as a concern for the ‘micrological’, as well as signposting many dimensions of what he will later present more systematically as ‘negative dialectics’ (Adorno 1973 [1966]). This paper reconstructs the multiple geographies integral to many passages in Minima Moralia, working towards an exegesis of what is claimed there about ‘distant nearness’ and ‘space enough between them’, at the same time inspecting Adorno’s austere opposition to ‘affirmationism’ but also readiness to be a phenomenologist - even one with occasional leanings towards a more ‘romantic’ celebration of objects, however unpleasant - of the nothing-much.