Adorno\'s Atlas

Adorno’s Atlas: When method is a ‘Relic of the Disciplines of Geography’

Abstract What is the next terrain in geographic information science? What is a new topology of Kant’s ‘territory of experience'? In a changing world, Adorno’s comment comparing geography and sociology is still relevant.

Recently

academic and popular writing has forested the landscape by concepts of space, geographic relationships, geopolitics, and production of space. Maps of

disciplines of geology and geography with terms like atlas, territory,

boundary, orientation, coordinates, topography, topology, proximity, and scale appear in philosophical texts. Those geographic science terms inform philosophical works in Kant, Borges, and Adorno. The borders thought to separate philosophy and literature become porous, ironically, by the use of scientific terms. Their twisting rapids confound the discipline of geography itself. dilemmas posed by the success of exploring

A

Borges fable illustrates

geographic information science.

By

Adorno’s micrology of geographical remarks, one can discover

fractures among society and oneself.

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Adorno’s Atlas: When method is a ‘Relic of the Disciplines of Geography’ The subject of social science dreams of a society to which it could apply theories.

As such, social science is teleological in nature. However, a

contradiction of social science is that the more precise it grows, the practice of the field of politics and administration exceeds its grasp.1

Geographic

information science similarly assumes that it is already master of the earth, and, by in large, it has become so. This is especially true when we try to do more than locate physical objects and try to also statistically measure their relationships through geostatistics.

This use of geographic information

science technical terms applied to philosophical and literary texts is not fatuous, facetious, or facile. The main point is that society does not coincide with the sum of its parts as a totality, which social science would be able to grasp, nor to the pieces on map.

Perhaps it is time to ask about the

philosophical ramifications of this readily available locational precision.2 ‘…No social atlas, either in the literal or in a figurative sense, represents society.....’ (Adorno, 1976b:81). Adorno broaches the possibility that a total ‘social atlas’ could encompass or bridge dialectics and empiricism. He wants

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to elaborate through this

point that adequation of a totality of social

relationships could not be captured in a ‘social atlas.’ This comment occurs in the context of an analysis of the reach of empirical social science. The gist of the phrase is that even if empirical science applied itself to analysis of a system, it could neither figuratively nor literally shape it into a totality on the model of an atlas. Thus, even if empirical social science conceived the system as a static set of puzzle pieces, empirical social science method is inadequate to do the task which is of relating the parts to the whole. While using atlas or ‘map’ figuratively, it is assumed that the trope of synecdoche binds the separate pieces together. A social system may be like a map in which its pieces somehow make up a whole. Neither the literal nor figurative

application

of

the

geographic

concepts

is

adequate

to

comprehending a social system. However, narrowing down the location of where to look precisely for the confluence of philosophy and geographic information science is not obvious. The area of interest lies outside the traditional territory of philosophy and is oriented towards the ‘micrology’ of works of art. (Nuzzo, 2012:79, 80) Kant (1974: 52,54). defines micrology as a ‘ruminating fastidiousness and useless exactitude in matters of form’ and ‘subtlety in small things.’

Adorno hardly finds this fastidious or useless.

Adorno (1973:407) describes micrology as ‘a place where metaphics finds a

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haven from totality.’

Attending to the figure of ‘atlas’ in Adorno’s work,

examines the micrology in his work when the technical terms of geographic information science reveal more of a deeper chasm under social science rather than shallow crack.. An oscillation between metonyms and mathematical formulas for these terms is mind boggling. When literary or philosophical texts are interpreted in a reverse manner by applying technical definitions to figures and rhetoric, there can be interesting intersections, but not parallelism or imbrications of the terms. I will use standard geographic information science terms and constructs in this way such as orientation, direction, scale, topology, and proximity. Orientation Thought’s orientation is used as a metaphor for a direction for movement within a landscape and one of the tools used is of course, a compass. The compass itself is a folded akmolith of uncertainty in its origin (Aczel, 2001). The orientation leads in some direction, but not necessarily without an idea of the terminus desired, assumed, conjured, imagined, or known. An orientation for thought sets it moving in line with logical deduction from definitions.

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The orientation of thought is used as a metaphor for a direction for movement within a landscape and one of the tools used is, of course, a compass. The orientation leads in some direction, but not necessarily without an idea of the terminus. An orientation for thought sets it moving in a particular way. Orientation in geographic information science is about direction, distance, area, shape, scale, proximity, topology, and elevation. Even with the benefit of the way-points of GPS, accuracy of the direction is still relative to its awesome technological infrastructure. The boundedness of reason entails freedom of thought and unfettered public expression, which is openly addressed by Kant in ‘Orientation in Thinking’. According to Kant (1991, 240), “To orient oneself in thought means to be guided, in one’s conviction of truth by a subjective principle of reason where objective principles of reasons are inadequate.’ In a friendly and humble letter to Moses Mendelssohn, Kant (2002) explains a theme behind this and other associated essays and letters and states, ‘Here we must decide whether or not there are real boundaries established by the limits of our reason or rather of the experience that contains its data’ In this context, Kant illustrates ‘orientation’ in three ways. There is much more about examining this as well as about Kant’s lectures on geography in reading Elden’s (Elden and Mendita, 2011) 'Kant’s Geographies', but I want to concentrate on concept/metaphors

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associated with technical terms of geographic information science . First, there is the obvious orientation of direction based on observation of the sunrise. Cardinal directions can be deduced assuming that one knows and sees that the sun rises in the East. Second, even in darkness, one can find the way home assuming that one remembers the feel of the buildings habitually passed. Of course, the fable is that Kant always left home at exactly the same time, except, as legend has it, when reading Rousseau But there seems to be no tales about when and in what state he returned home. In this example, Kant writes that he can find his way home in the darkness and in case the familiar buildings were on the opposite sides of the street then they should be by a feeling of orientation, almost as though he were walking backwards. He writes that in spite of all the objective evidence in the sky, ‘I orient myself geographically purely by means of a subjective distinction…’ Disorientation could come about by relying only on what is seen rather than ‘felt’. Third, Kant ends these thoughts by analogy to ‘signify any orientation within a given space; i.e. mathematically, but also in thought, i.e. logically’. But pressing on with a logical orientation is a need which is felt as well. Nevertheless, it is possible to subjectively orient oneself in thought and go beyond what ‘reason cannot presume to know on objective grounds.’ Without bounds for reason, this subjective need sets us adrift in ‘the

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immeasurable space of the super-sensory realm which we see as full of utter darkness …’ (1991, 241). In his intrepid and compassionate pursuit of Kant’s philosophy of morality, Adorno points to Kant’s orientation towards directions that lead only to failure and danger. For Kant, reason binds itself through the body, experience, observation, moral judgement, aesthetic judgement, freedom of thought, and critiques itself. The dangers to the conduct of reason beyond its bounds are superstition, enthusiasm, atheism, hypochondria, fanaticism, melancholia, just plain old being wrong, and perhaps most of all, war. If we were to use an eight direction compass to orient these directions, one might describe this in the following ways: This results in a situation where enlightenment is left behind and disorientation arrives. What is left at the center of the compass is an abstract reference surrounded by a desert labyrinth. This leaves a compass with an abstract center because it is a formal center which cannot be described otherwise. Adorno argues that this leaves intact the philosophies, sciences, and practices of a commercial class’s orientation towards the domination of nature and the subjection of everything to function and exchange. Orientation towards the status quo of concepts, methods, and reification brings reason to

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a standstill. These orientations only lead to an empty center, a ‘blank’ to be filled, according to Adorno, with domination. Scale The concept and measurements of scale are paramount to geographic information science and without this abstraction location, size, and direction in maps would not be possible. The scale sets some middle distance (based on an acceptable ratio for a specific purpose) of geographic pattern recognition. Scale ratios for cartographic purposes -- either too small (1:1 billion) or too large (1:1) – to render patterns visible.5 The ratio of scale first covers too large an area (a small scale) and the latter too small an area (a large scale) to be visualizable. Relationships which are measureable can be used with geostatistical or tabular statistical methods. Any perception of relationships would be impossible, and their meaning as geographic patterns lost. There is somewhere an applicable middle distance between macrological and micrological analysis. Unexpectedly, from a strictly geographic information science perspective, Borges’s parables orient readers towards the limits, if not irrationality, of that perspective. Borges

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A parable about the logical consequences of scale precision can be found in Borges' writings.

This is about construction of map so precise that it

duplicates everything that it is supposed to be represented. In terms of geographic information science, this describes a cartographic scale of 1:1 where every foot corresponds to every ‘ground-truth’ foot and every topographic detail, at least, must be reproduced. In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, while the map of the Empire occupied the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps could no longer produce satisfactory results, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that the vast Map was useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it that they delivered it up to the clemencies of the Sun and the Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography (Borges, 1998: 325).

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At the heart of understanding geographic precision is the evidence of the scale that a map represents. Borges creates this parable of a passionate pursuit of exacting precision in cartography. Three events happened here. First, a perfect rendering of cartography in a single map of the province was commanded. Second, the map was inscribable because it was not precise enough for the administrative purposes of the Empire. Third, following their mandate to the letter, they produced a map of the entire empire at a scale of 1:1; however, the size of the map rendered it useless, if not redundant. Following generations did not revere the discipline of cartography and casted it into a desert only to become the ‘Tattered Ruins of that Map.’ Every desiccated piece is still at a scale of 1:1 because it is identical to where it was once located. The precision is inescapable no matter how useless it became. The pieces became the ruins of cartographic expertise. Cartographic perfection was preserved in each fragment, but what the map represented could not be discerned. No matter how much the Guild of Cartographers (read the disciplines comprising geographic information science itself until the present, when cartography alone is no longer the sine qua none of the geographic profession) was respected, subsequent generations found it worse than anachronistic. In this case, the passion for precision exceeds the limits through which geography is comprehended. The utility of cartography in

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its geographic and historical scale contradicts its own foundation. Verification and verisimilitude are oriented to the ruination of the discipline of geography. The ruins of the geographic profession rendered it irrelevant. A reader of Borges’ parable, who is sympathetic with, if not a member, of the Cartographers’ Guild, is likely to wonder what replaced geographic information science. Something must be replaced of course! Nevertheless, geographic information science became a relic due to its own striving for perfection. With its perfect resolution, ‘field tested’ or ‘ground truthed,’ the map was no longer valuable because it represented nothing while representing everything. It was only a simulacrum of the location of things or the topography.6 There was nothing of interest left to interpret. Atlas The reason as to why in the social sciences one cannot progress as in the natural sciences from a single segment to the whole, is that, in the case of the former, the whole is constituted by a conceptuality completely different from the logical compass and characteristic unity of any of its individual elements. Similarly, because of its mediated conceptual nature, this whole has nothing in common with the ‘totalities’ and configurations which have always been presented as immediately given; society is more like a system than an

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organism. Empirical social research, which when devoid of theory and budgeting with pure hypotheses, it screens itself off from its true object which is – society as a system. Since its object does not coincide with the sum of all the segments, it does not subsume them, and cannot even be constituted by juxtaposing them all simultaneously to form an entity like the geographical map’s “country and its inhabitants”. No social atlas, either in the literal or in a figurative sense, represents society (1976a, 251). Empirical research, which is devoid of theory and which gets by with mere hypothesis, is blind to society as a system; which is its self-understood object. Since its object does not coincide with the sum of all its parts; it does not subsume the parts nor is it made up like a geographical map of their juxtaposition of “country” and “people”. No social atlas in the literal and figurative sense represents society (1976b: 81). Regardless of our blindness to the metaphysical assumptions required for the construction of maps in particular, the social construction of maps is a product of the politics, economics, and technology that make its production possible (MacEachren, 1995; Monmonier, 1993). However, as with the Guild of Cartographers, the importance of geographic information science is measured more by its relationship to society and social theory. On the one

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hand, it is evident that the natural science approach to geodesy can be of great scientific value, but the real payoff is, currently, for the war. This search for totality according to Lukacs and Adorno, as they individually understand such a concept, is not an orientation towards reason but is a search leading to a dead end. Third, society is not without constitution and mediation of time and space. Certainly Marx was well aware of this as he has described in his descriptions of the geographic expansion of capitalism and the increase in the velocity of exchange (the overcoming of space by time). Adorno (2001:169) remarks about this: ‘The creation of a concept of time – and by analogy, of course, the same thing holds good for the concept of space – is something that takes place within history and depends, therefore, on social conditions.’ While Adorno uses ‘atlas’ somewhat metaphorically, an atlas today uses more complex concepts, practices, and technologies, which still remains a collection of maps in a book. The questions of an atlas as a book and of an atlas as an anthology are important here. Adorno’s point is that an atlas cannot depict a social system and hence there can be no social atlas. Adorno’s has a very naïve outlook on geography. However, geographic information science can confirm his viewpoint of an atlas in another way.

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What maps cannot convey consist of the dynamic or variable relationships that underlie geographic, geological, or geopolitical structures. Maps are arbitrary over two areas: (1) they purport to confine the dynamics of people within a national system without shifting exchanges of capital, labor, and war; and (2) national boundaries are shifting historical constructs that confine peoples – even for decades – to symbolic polygons. One might argue that such polygons are frames for staging nationalistic dramas. Topology Based on the simplest definition whether being used for set theory or geographic information science, topology requires a point and a region with strictly demarked boundaries. ’A sentence is true/false if the point representing the actual state is in/out of the region which represents that sentence. The logical truths (the tautologies - are the sentences which are true no matter which point in the rectangle represents the actual state. These are the sentences represented by the whole rectangle, to which every point belongs.’(Jeffery, 1967: 39). In the work of maps (which should be taken to including making and interpreting what appears to be a map), put in another way, MacEachren (1995:49, emphasis added) states that a ‘key factor in the map schemata and

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legend understanding will be the basic human facility for categorizing the world. Since this facility probably does not usually result in precisely delineated categories has significant implications for map understanding’ In its most strict sense, topology requires a region with closed polygonal boundaries and at an acceptable scale, accuracy, and precision. Of course, the surrounding is the universal polygon (circle or sphere in a drawing, or the universe itself), of which the set or area of interest is a part. What is true in this case is the location of the point or other polygon plus any correct attribute value associated with the polygon for modal logic and geographic information science including: determining what is inside or outside the borders the work of topology; correcting for any errors among those closed boundaries is part of the work of geographic information science; preserving and correcting topology is a critical function of geospatial software, and is often presumed to be quintessential to reasoning. (Elden, 2009) Borges (1998) describes a fable of two labyrinths with maddening boundaries in ‘The Two Kings and Two Labyrinths.’ One king, the ‘king of Babylonia,’ builds an intricate labyrinth in order to protect his palace from invaders. The king invites his competing king, the ‘king of the Arabs,’ to visit him and entraps that king in the labyrinth. He escapes and tells the king of Babylonia that he also has a labyrinth that one day the king would see it in turn. The ‘king of the

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Arabs', wreaks havoc across the land in the path of his return to his empire. In the process, he captures the king of Babylonia and takes him to that other labyrinth in his kingdom. The king of Babylonia is deposited in a desert only to die of hunger and thirst in the labyrinth with no walls. Paradoxically, a maze with or without boundaries, is still a prison. The impenetrable and inescapable boundary of a maze is like topology, encapsulating its object in rigid boundaries. The desert has no boundaries, but is, nevertheless, a labyrinth where orientation is impossible. The original king is no less captured in a prison or maze where there is no sense of direction or of what lies beyond any horizon. Regarding the importance for geometry, Adorno writes against about the assumption that there is not co-existence of contradictory propositions. Furthermore, Adorno interprets Kant’s theories of time and space by arguing that the topology of the excluded middle does not follow from logic, but instead follows from concepts of space. In his analysis of Husserl, Adorno states that the logical, philosophical, and experiential separation of objects leads to the concept of the excluded middle. "…if one inquires about the origin of thought, ‘the primal history of logic,’ then the possibility of the coexistence of contradictories in factual

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judgements is no longer irrelevant. The psychological thesis of the impossibility of the coexistence naively imitates the law that the same spatial location cannot be simultaneously occupied by two bits of matter. Such a ‘point’ in the life of consciousness is fictive, as the critique of the punctual interpretation of pure presence has long since shown. Thought of the contradictory seems to proceed from individuation…The law of noncontradiction is a sort of taboo wish hanging over the diverse’ (Adorno, 1983) At its edge a conceptual firm such as, ‘…totality is structured to accord with logic, however, whose core is the principle of the excluded middle, whatever will not fit this principle, whatever differs in quality, comes to be designated as a contradiction…As the heterogeneous collides with the limit it exceeds itself’ (Adorno,1973: 5). What appears as a contradiction to the accepted logic of identity and totality reveals a divide, frontier, barrier, limit, abyss, aporia, scar, etc. Proximity The idea of ‘proximity’ is the foundation of measures of geographic relationships. It is a fundamental assumption that whatever is nearer is more similar. Just as distance matters, the rule of geographic information science is that proximity matters even more because closer things are more alike.

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Geoprocessing operations and geostatistics calculate the probability that this is true. Additionally, geoprocessing mathematical functions can be used to extend or approximate missing geographic data. The presupposition of geostatistics is that proximity and autocorrelation are evidence of an important pattern or clustering; ‘Spatial statistics differs from classical statistics in that observations analyzed are not independent, this single assumption violation is the crux of the difference.’ (Griffith, 1996, 2, (emphasis added). Or, put more in the language of traditional statistics: ‘…the lack of independence among observations can affect the outcome of t-tests, ANOVA, and correlation… a desire to remove the complicating effects of spatially dependent observations, spatial analysts also seek to learn whether geographic phenomena cluster in space’ (Rogerson, 2001:179). In another striking phrase, the spatial mean is defined as an ‘intuitive balance point for the weighted surface.’7 I want to briefly follow the notion of the balance point (ignoring whatever ‘intuitive’ means in this context) in the following philosophical texts. Topology entails the concepts and measures of proximity. Of course, proximity can only be conceived by the concept of or metaphor of borders. The discipline of geography creates borders only to measure the features

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defined, created or represented by borders. Calculations of inside/outside are not sufficient for geospatial techniques, e.g. kriging, construction of Theisian polygons, or geostatistical analysis. Interpolating the shape, elevation, or correlation of values among such geographic features are functions of geographic information science. Polygons and their characteristics expressed as,

for

example,

by

seemingly

random

points,

mountains,

urban

neighborhoods, nations, economic regions, ecologies, etc. The disciplinary premise is that geospatial analysis must consider the neighbors of objects in order to extract useful knowledge. Three of the mathematical geospatial relations that represent proximity are ‘mean distance’, ‘nearest neighbor’, and ‘autocorrelation’. This is necessary because the attributes of the neighbors of some objects of interest may have a significant influence on the object itself (Ester, 2001). This, when simply put, premise is a root of geoscience.

Mathematically evaluating possible correlations of the

locations of several points is the work of geostatistics. ‘Mean distance is a product of analysis where the average distance is among places. This is a calculation of the average distance found between two or more points. ‘Autocorrelation’ is a quantitative measure of the validity of the statistical method itself. In philosophy, the traditional value of identity of all sorts is

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supposed to be the measure of accurate adequation. For Adorno (1973, 35), this becomes the ‘social insurance’ of near certainty. Examples of this concept of proximity in geographic information science are ‘mean distance’, ‘nearest neighbor’, and ‘autocorrelation’ that probably measures the degrees of separation and similarity. These measures promise reference and verisimilitude. Attempting to capture countries and people on an atlas depends on these assumptions and concepts as well. They can be transcribed for the terms: center, neighbor, friend, and, the closest of all, ‘double’. I want to use these technical geographic information science terms to reveal more details about spatial metonyms in otherwise seemingly different disciplines. Nearest Neighbor Calculation for image analysis has a method of extrapolating from the position of the nearest neighbor. The assumption made is that proximate places will have similar characteristics that can be statistically correlated. In geographic information science, the calculation of the interdependent statistical effects is based on the weighted measures of the nearest neighbor polygon. Adjacent polygons are considered nearest neighbors but the number of neighbors considered for that calculation can vary depending on the analyst’s method.

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Not just two adjacent polygons, but four, eight, sixteen, etc. can be used to increase the confidence of the estimation of the topography. Groups of polygons, a whole neighborhood, can be brought into the calculation. Again, the measurement of the effect of nearest neighbors is used to correlate clusters of values whether of polygons, points, or cells in raster data (Rogerson, 2001). The function is to estimate the topography, where empirical measurement is not available, by an algorithm for a series of close points. What resembles this relationship of nearest neighbor in philosophy more than close friends? A nearest neighbor may be a friend or a fiend. Proximity alone does not make necessarily good neighbors or friends. The method of calculation of similarity based on proximity is an assumption of geographic information science and philosophy. Any statistical calculation of similarity or correlation is an approximation.

Some theories and stories of friendship

points to its difficulty even in the nearest proximity of similarity and distance. Among his extensive theories of the importance of friendship, Aristotle (1984:1920 (1213a)).makes the following strong statement in Magna Moralia: "The friend is, as we assert, a second self. If, then, it is pleasant to know oneself, and it is not possible to know this without someone else for a friend, the self-sufficing will require friendship in order to know himself.” Kant addresses those he deems to be his friends. Those are the friends of the

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human race who recognize the value of reason against libertinism, superstition, and enthusiasm (Schwarmerei). "Friends of the human race and of all that it holds most sacred…do not deny reason that is prerogative which makes it the greatest good on earth, namely its right to be the ultimate touchstone of truth." (Kant, 1991: 249) Kant’s apostrophe is more optimistic than Aristotle’s to friends of reason in the address: ‘Oh, friends, there are no friends.’ (Derrida, 1997). For Kant, these friends guard Enlightenment, which is a ‘negative principle in the use of one’s cognitive powers'. Those friends authorize the rights of reason and they legislate the authority of reason to assert its prerogative as the touchstone of truth. However, for Adorno (as well as Aristotle), friends and neighbors are hard to sustain. For Adorno, this is not intrinsic to relationships, but to its difficulty under a reified world of capitalism, administration, fascism, and war. Adorno’s Friends However, Adorno does list very significant friends. With little exaggeration, one might point out that Minima Moralia (1974) begins and ends with a discussion of the demise of friendship similar to Aristotle’s long dissection of the types, threats, and requirements of excellence in friendship. Adorno addresses many friends in his work and lectures besides Max Horkheimer:

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Walter Benjamin, Fredrick Pollock, Hans Magnus Eisenburg, Eduard Steuerman, Jurgen Habermas, and many others (Muller-Doohm, 2005). The Dialect of Enlightenment is dedicated to Friedrich Pollock on his 50 th and 65th birthdays. The dedications to Horkheimer and Pollock suggest that they are Adorno’s closest friends. The deliberate dedications suggest that they represent not just fellow refugees from Germany, but the relationships form a refuge from the the powers of reification and culture industry and the minimization of the individuals and subjectivity. In that context, Adorno (2006: 264) remarks: "The fact that the gulf between individual and society is so small, but on the other side they are equally never reconciled and it is essential to moral philosophy. That is the supra-individual element of truth in the critique of morality…The question of freedom does not call for a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No,’ but a theory that rises above the society as well as above the individuals existing in it…." Autocorrelation In standard mathematical statistics, any correlation of a variable with itself makes a formula or measure suspect. Significant difference and degrees of

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probable association matter. In geostatistics, autocorrelation is a measure of proximity, not difference or distance, and tends to indicate stronger association of proximate locations and their attribute values (Griffith, 1987). In geographic information science, ‘autocorrelation’ is a good measure of the strength of association between proximate or adjacent locations. If autocorrelation is a quantitative measure of proximity and similarity, it approaches unity or identity of features and attributes. That is, the more something is related to something similar close to itself, the more they have values in common. ‘The spatial autocorrelation propert implies that the clusters should vary gradually in physical space.’8 (Chawla, et.al., 2001:161; Vasiliev, 1996) The more two things are alike, the larger the value of autocorrelation and the nearer they are in location. Rogerson (2001:15) provides a concise statement of the meaning of autocorrelation: ‘Spatial autocorrelation refers to the fact that the value of a variable at one point in space is related to the value of the same variable in a nearby location’ . For Rogerson, this is an igneous fact and not a presumption. Is there a closer double than a friend (or a fiend. or a simulacrum of either)? Borges’ friend, the ‘double’

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There are many doubles that haunt Borges’ stories; some murder each other, some do not, one is an emperor and the other a heretic who die in similar ways under similar circumstances. The emperor finds himself in hell and the heretic in heaven. The double of a walled labyrinth is a desert. The same character in one story murders a known outlaw, and in another story he sees the outlaw as his double only to walk away. The narrator of the first story is a bystander, and in the other story the narrator is the murderer. Doubles, even if seen at a small distance, confound each other or torment each other about whether they share the same fate. Using a simplified expression, a duplicate of an original that is still regarded as a representation, if not an illusion, is a simulacrum (in Spanish: simulacra). A man emerges from his boat that is stuck in the mud of a river and drags himself to a circular enclosure left in ruins and charred by fire. The setting is a jungle, not a desert island. The man devotes himself to dreaming about a man like himself who would be his double and son. The man compels himself to sleep as much as possible. This is more than a friend; the simulacrum in story is to be a duplicate that is educated in the secrets and rituals of the gods of the circular ruins, the horse, and the tiger.

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Calling upon these gods, after several failures of his own skills of shaping his dreams, the man builds his likeness, organ by organ, from the inside out. He brings him into reality separable from the dream state and a malleable independent duplicate. Circles widen as the duplicate youth sets off to another circular ruin in order to repeat the process. The gods, named Fire, set fire to the circular ruins again after hundreds years. The man, becoming aware that he is not being consumed by the fire, realizes that he too is a simulacrum dreamed by another man of unknown location or origin. Failure to identify an origin itself is a ruination of narrative. The circle widens to encompass the narrator of the story for which its characters are simulacra. Each generation of simulacra is the simulacrum of the narrator. And what of the narrator, whose dreamer is the author? Adorno’s other self ‘I have never denied that I have considered myself a European from first to last,’ Adorno states (2006b: 215). However, generally taking a biographical orientation to thinking Adorno would protest in many ways. Adorno’s approach invites picking out words, sentences, paragraphs, themes, and models that seem to question his own limited acknowledgement of suffering and oppression beyond what touches Europe. When it comes to specific

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experiences that set him from others apart, he repeatedly asserts his own autobiographical experiences at the hands of the Gestapo one morning at 6 am. That ‘terror’ was indelible and, to him, stands as a symbol, if not a quintessential experience of persons experiencing the ultimate threat under fascism, its return, or other situations. A different reader, other than Adorno himself, may comprehend this as the basic human experience of fear and breakdown of all possibility of freedom or as an allegory of that. Adorno mentions self-preservation innumerable times. The constellation of individuals, friends, humanity, and society does not eliminate the choice of self-preservation. On the one hand, the need for and strategy of selfpreservation are the marks of individual experience. On the other hand, selfpreservation is mediated too by context. In a sweeping and abstract point, Adorno (2006 41, 43) introduces history and the context of individual selfpreservation: ‘…history can be called rational only if we know for whom it is rational. If rationality, which is a concept based on an understanding of the self-preservation of the individual, ceases to have a human subject for whom it exists, it will lapse into irrationality…once reason has lost its relation to the individuals who are concerned with self-preservation, it degenerates into unreason.’ Frequently, Adorno mentions his personal experience and thoughts about the arrival of the Gestapo at his home at 6 am one day. His

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attention to detail in recounting this event is supposed to be the evidence of what terror and domination can be like in general.

Parenthetically, an

additional interpretation which I would like to offer is that, like Hobbes, this serves as an example of the ‘state of nature’ of fear, threats, force, and possible death that is delayed only by a desire for self-preservation. That is only superseded by the Holocaust and World War II. Even then ‘it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz, you can go on living -- especially whether one who escaped by accident on who by rights should have been killed, may go on living’ (Adorno, 1973: 363). Occasionally, Adorno implies that those are only superseded by the threat of global nuclear war. In many places in his works, Adorno describes or mentions a moment in his life when having a strategy for self-preservation was of paramount importance. In revealing a threat to him, Adorno touches on his own experience with the Gestapo. As he recounts the fact that the police arrived at his door. About the ‘6 am’ confrontation he stops short of describing it as a matter of life and death. In its sociological context, the event could be seen as perhaps as ‘two relatively harmless officials belonging to the old police force’ were investigating a crime, this would be of lesser importance and maybe a relief. Yet, ‘…no one can appreciate the terrors of a totalitarian regime if he has not

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personally experienced that ominous knock on the door and opened it to find the police waiting outside’ (Adorno, 2006: 20,181). This experience of police terror takes place within the context of ‘special conditions obtained in Germany between 1929 and 1933’ In Negative Dialectics, he expresses a story without the personal identification. In the epistemological context, Adorno is sketching the line (edge, topology, and hinge) of mediated and immediate facts (1973:301,363). In a detached mode, Adorno writes that ‘Of course, when the Gestapo knocks on a dissenter’s door at 6 a.m. under Hitler’s fascism, it would be foolish to use epistemological refinements….’ The line is crossed between epistemology and sociology or between the mediated and immediate with the ‘brute fact of government onslaught which fascism looses on the individual…’ The fact is that a police force showed up at his door. In context, perhaps, if ‘two relatively harmless officials belonging to the old police force’ were investigating a crime, this would be of lesser importance and maybe be a relief. Yet, ‘…no one can appreciate the terrors of a totalitarian regime if he has not personally experienced that ominous knock on the door and opened it to find the police waiting outside’ (Adorno, 2006a: 20).

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This experience of police terror takes place within the context of ‘special conditions obtained in Germany between 1929 and 1933’. This individual experience erupted in a need for self -preservation in a context structuring the event itself. The two accounts of confession and narration are linked by the fact of the arrival of the Gestapo. A pivotal text is that in both cases this happened at ‘6 A.M.’ In the case of an autobiography, ‘6 A.M.’ would mark a plausible fact. In a story, ‘6 A.M.’ can be used for its dramatic affect to create an imaginary scene of urgency, panic, and terror. ‘6 A.M.’ is a sharp dividing line of time in the autobiography or in the allegory. In this reduction to the desire for self-preservation, Adorno laments the distance and coldness and guilt set in motion by detachment from friends and other people. Does slippage of time and identity matter? Adorno is actually unclear that time is of paramount importance in his time.

Elsewhere Adorno (2006:140)

identifies the time of the knock at the door at ‘6:30.’ The story changed by thirty minutes. Is this slippage in time inconsequential? Is the distance in this fault significant? This points to questions of the scale of and proximity in time. The ‘knock at the door’ interpretation of proximity illustrates how the immediately ‘real’ is not a suitable explanation of the real that operates as a totalitarian. Thresholds are breached between time and space, ethics and self-preservation, or individual and society. The gap in time throws mud and

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makes murky the proximity of Adorno’s experiences. Between 6:00 am and 6:30 am, many events and thoughts must have changed. Was Adorno even the same person across these proximate times? Where did Adorno go after he escaped the Gestapo? This is not a necessarily biographical question. There is no doubt that his own autobiographical remarks and his biographers’ interpretations reveal the serious repercussions of this event. Adorno seems to have left another self behind to face torture and death, with or without unknown friends plotting to assassinate Hitler. Adorno’s double might have been his better moral self, he believes, who did not succumb to the temptation of self-preservation. Conclusion Adorno’s comment that there is no social atlas is accurate for several reasons, which within themselves seem contradictory. His notion of geography, cartography, and topology lead to the conclusion that this is based on the dualism that characterizes traditional philosophy. The bound polygons of countries shown in an atlas are indicative of what Kant calls the ‘mechanical’ view of objects.

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As such, we are witnessing how an atlas becomes a ‘relic of the discipline of geography’. The quest for geographic certainty and cartographic accuracy has become of victim of its own success. In the process of the geoscientific correction of errors, the range of error is exposed to be infinitesimal. The contradiction is that geoscientific precision cannot mitigate the human error in the judgment of who is a target. Just when the hypothetical reliability of maps is overpowered by near real time locational services, such criticism is somewhat of a historical relic itself. Understanding political power revealed by maps is necessary to anticipate the technological, political, or moral jeopardy that geographic information science reveals. Precision in the representation of location (the images and instantaneous data streaming) seems to take interpretation and contextual analysis and textual analysis out of the picture. Being accustomed to the errors in maps, we still are wary of the infallible exactitude of science. Precision gives us anonymous war and trivial commerce. After millennia of use to master geometry, dominate territory [terrortory], and colonize people, the globe and the chronometer, but not atomic clocks, are now museum pieces.

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The frame or framework of a map itself institutionalizes its perspective but in two dimensions. However, flows of capital, labor, political domination, human trafficking, and war are the markers that know no boundaries. Borges warned that the technology of mapping or writing still leaves us with a labyrinth. But again this is a labyrinth without walls. As with any social science. interrogating geographic information science is a matter of questioning the means, methods, or morality of its premises. questioning the proximate disciplines.

Doing so today, requires even Success in constructing walls, like

futile attempts to construct walls between nations, preserves the porosity which

cartography

cannot

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mask.

Notes: 1. Horkheimer (1993) and Adorno (2002, 29) provide a context for this. There is much to be clarified and criticized about Horkheimer’s position in this early work. This is one source where the idea of rationally guided public policy is questioned. This is not because the theory is not perfect, but because administrative practice always exceeds the theory altogether. That too is outside the logic of applied social science or public administration itself (Adorno, 2001b:45). Adorno (2012:68-71) addresses this directly, but in abbreviated form, among his lectures on negative dialectics. 3. In her excellent book, Angelica Nuzzo (2005) remarks on how Kant brought together two metaphoric fields often encountered in critical philosophy, namely geographic and juridical metaphors. However, the question is whether and when geographic concept/ metaphors structure such a text and verge toward the concept of topology. 6. Jean Baudrillard begins ‘Precession of the Simulacrum’ with comments about Borges’s ‘Exactitude in Science.’

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If once we were able to view the Borges' fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly (the decline of the Empire witnesses the fraying of this map, little by little, and its fall into ruins, though some shreds are still discernible in the deserts - the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction testifying to a price equal to the Empire and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, a bit as the double ends by being confused with the real through aging) - as the most beautiful allegory of simulation; this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra. ‘Exactitude in Science’ is apropos of obvious geographic problems. However, ‘The Circular Ruins’ is more apropos of Baudrillard’s point about simulacra.

References: Aczel, A. (2001) The Riddle of the Compass. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Inc. Adorno, T. W. (1973) Negative Dialectics. trans. E.B. Ashton. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd: 407

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Adorno, T.W. (1974) Minima Moralia. trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. London: New Left Books. Adorno, T. W. Bartram.

(1976a). ‘Sociology and Empirical Research, trans. G.

In P. Connerton (ed.) in Critical Sociology. London: Penguin

Readings Modern Sociology. p. 251 Adorno, T. W. et al. (1976b) Sociology and Empirical Research, trans. G. Adey and D. Frisby. in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. New York: Harper & Row Publishers.: 81 Adorno, T. W. (1983) Against Epistemology. trans Willis Domingo. Cambridge: MA: Adorno, T. W.

(2005)

‘Scientific Experiences of a

European Scholar in America’, trans. Henry W. Pickford. in Critical Models. New York: Columbia University Press. Adorno, T. W. (2006) History and Freedom. trans. Rodney Livingstone. Rolf Tiedemann (eds.) Malden, MA: Polity Press: 143 Adorno, T. W. (2012) Lectures on Negative Dialectics. trans. Rodney Livingstone. Rolf Tiedemann, (ed), Malden, MA: Polity Press.

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Aristotle, (1984) Magna Moralia. The Complete Works of Aristotle. volume two. trans. St. G. Stock.

Jonathan Barnes (ed), Princeton: Princeton

University Press. Arlinghaus, S. (1996) Practical Handbook of Spatial Statistics.

Boca

Raton, FL: CRC Press. Baudrillard, J, ‘Simulacra And Simulations - I. The Precession Of Simulacra. Tran. Sheila Faria Glaser. The European Graduate School, URL

(consulted

October,

2014):

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-

baudrillard/articles/simulacra-and-simulations-i-the-precession-ofsimulacra/ Borges J. L. (1998) On Exactitude in Science.

trans. A. Hurley. in

Collected Fictions. New York: Penguin Books. Borges J. L. (1998) The Circular Ruins, trans. A. Hurley. in Collected Fictions. New York: Penguin Books. Borges J. L. (1998) The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths. trans. A. Hurley. in Collected Fictions. New York: Penguin Books. Chawla, S., Shashi S., Weili W. and Uygar O. (2001) Modeling spatial dependences for mining geospatial algorithms and applications for spatial

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data mining, in H. Miller and J. Han (eds) Geographic Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery. London: Taylor and Francis Press. Elden, S. and Mendieta, E. (eds) (2011) Reading Kant’s Geography. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Ester, M., Hans P. K., and Sander, J. (2001). Algorithms and applications for spatial data mining, in H. Miller and J. Han (eds) Geographic Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery. London: Taylor and Francis. Griffith, Daniel A. (1987). Spatial Autocorrelation: A Primer. Washington, DC: Washington, DC: American Association of Geographers, Resource Publications in Geography. Griffith, D.A. (1996) Introduction: The Need for Spatial Statistics. in S. L. Arlinghaus (ed) Practical Handbook of Spatial Statistics. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. Horkheimer, M. (1993) The Rationalism Debate in Contemporary Philosophy, trans. G. Frederick Hunter, Matthew S. Kramer, and John Torpey. in Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. pp : 205, 237, 242, 244

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Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. (2002) The Concept of Enlightenment. trans. Edmund Jephcott and Gunzelin Schmidt Noerr (ed) in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jeffery, R. C. (1967) Formal Logic: Its Scope and Limits.

New York:

McGraw-Hill Book Company. Kant, I. (1974) Logic. trans. R. S. Hartman and W. Schwartz. New York: Dover Publications, Inc:. 52,54 Kant, I. (1991) What is Orientation in Thinking? in Kant, Political Writings, (ed) H.S.

Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press. MacEachren, A. M. (1995) How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design. New York: The Guilford Press. Muller-Doohm, Stefan, (2005) Adorno: A Biography. Livingstone, Malden, MA: Polity Press

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trans Rodney

Biography: Biography: Dennis Crow is an Adjunct Instructor in Geography at Park University in the United States. With an extensive background in political theory and critical theory, he has published two anthologies on urban planning, geography, postmodernism, as well as articles on critical public administration and numerous reviews on social theory. He has taught public administration and geographic technology management at several universities. While continuing his scholarly research, he has worked in geospatial analysis and geographic systems management for 30 years in the U.S. federal government.

Nuzzo, A. (2012) Kant and the Unity of Reason. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press.125 Rogerson, P. A. (2001) Statistical Methods for Geography. London: Sage Publications. Tucker, P. (2013) Mapping the Future with Big Data. URL, (Consulted Ictober 214): http://www.wfs.org/book/export/html/3562. Vasiliev, I. R. (1996 ) Visualization of Spatial Dependence: An elementary view of spatial autocorrelation. in S. Arlinghaus (ed) Practical Handbook of

spatial

Statistics.

Boca

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Raton,

FL:

CRC

Press

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