1 Adorno and the Difficulties of Tradition Today 1 Aaron Bell “There is no tradition today and none can be conjured, yet when every tradition has been extinguished the march toward barbarism will being.” It is hard to imagine what Adorno’s corpus would look like without the deep scars left by his period of exile in the United States during the Second World War. Despite its catastrophic genesis, his exile played a constitutive role in the development of his thought, and made him, among many other things, a savagely insightful commentator on American life. This commentary on America is marked by a dialectic of fascination and disgust with his new found home, perhaps the most “radically bourgeois country” (75) in the Western world. In particular, he was fascinated by America’s lack of cultural tradition. In his essay “On Tradition,” America serves as a model of a society ravaged by bourgeois rationalization, proudly celebrating its lack of tradition by rejecting “old world” values as archaic, irrational, and pompous. The relatively short history of the nation compounds the problem, further disconnecting us from any substantial sense of tradition or historical consciousness. We are proudly the country of the nouveau riche, possessed of power and wealth bereft of tradition and culture. This literal lack of history and evaluative rejection of tradition places America at ground zero of the crisis of tradition. Tradition survives in America in its most degraded and mutilated forms, manufactured in artificially aged consumer products and conservative “traditional” family values. The recent wave of gauche typographical décor emblazoned with the actual world “tradition” seem designed to confirm Adorno’s worst accusations. To situate his discussion of tradition, Adorno begins with an etymological note on the origin of “tradition.” A German-English cognate, tradition is derived from tradere, “to hand down.” Adorno begins the essay with this etymological note in order to locate the concept within the kind of concrete historical continuum that he saw lacking in American culture. According to Adorno, tradere’s central metaphor of “handing down” precious items from generation to generation is illuminating, because it relies on a way of life and a mode of production that has been historically surpassed–“the category of tradition is essentially feudal.” (75) The provincial familial communities doing the “handing down” and the handicrafts that produced such valued objects to hand down between generations have both been rendered obsolete by bourgeois society and the rise of capitalism. Even more so now in our digitalized age then in 1968 (when Adorno first published “Über Tradition”), the moment of immediacy and proximity supposed by tradere’s metaphorics is largely gone. The fragmentation of society, propelled by the industrialized division of labor and the splintering of familial and cultural community, has imperiled the very possibility of enjoying these traditions, starting with the disruptions in the handing down of valued practices and artifacts from one generation to the next. Tradere, and, according to Adorno, tradition itself, is out of joint with the times, making it an anachronistic 1 Published at http:/www.telospress.com/adorno-and-the-difficulties-of-tradition-today/