Geographies of the Good Life: Tuan, Adorno, and Curious Affinities

In 1986 Yi-Fu Tuan, humanistic geographer, published The Good Life. In 1951 Theodor W. Adorno, pioneer of the early Frankfurt School, published Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, concerned with ‘the teaching of the good life’. Two ostensibly so very different authors: one a geographer, humanist with a positive, optimistic, and ‘sunny outlook’; the other a critical theorist, Marxist of sorts, negative dialectician, a pessimistic curmudgeon. Yet they hold similar concerns: both addressing the grander themes of philosophy, aesthetics, and morality; both consistently shuttling between the ‘light’ and the ‘dark’; both worrying away at the tangled onto-epistemological relations between the universal and the particular; and, specifically, both querying the dangerous ‘transactionalism’ of modern human life. In this paper, Adorno will be deployed to read Tuan against the grain, from which a bleaker, less cheery, more critically attuned Tuan may be glimpsed. This assessment comprises a contribution to current debates about ‘negativity’ and ‘criticality’ in and beyond human geography, including the challenge of meeting and responding to the current conjuncture of a world ‘lived wrongly’.