> Having had my mind steamrollered by too much training
> in analytical philosophy and probably law, I am
> reminded once again of what a frustrating experience
> it is for someone like me to read Adorno and get the
> point. There are several themes sloshing around in
> here, but I do not see how they are related or where,
> exactly, Adorno is going. He seems to be saying, among
> other things
Well, the Jephcott translation is a bit dated, and has an unnecessarily academicized tone which is absent in the original. Try this newer version:
32 Savages are not better human beings. – One can find in Black [i.e. African] students of national economy, in Siamese [Thai] students at Oxford, and in devoted art-historians and musicologists of petty bourgeois background generally the inclination and readiness to combine the appropriation of what is new and to be learned with a boundless respect for what is established, validated or recognized. An unreconciled inner sensibility [Gesinnung] is the opposite of wildness, neophyte status or “non-capitalist zones”. It presupposes experience, historical memory, the lability of the intellect and above all a thorough share of the social surplus. It is observed time and again that those recruited young and innocent into radical groups defect the moment they become aware of the force of tradition. One has to have this latter in oneself in order to hate it properly. That it is the snobs rather than the proletarians who have a taste for avant-garde aesthetic movements sheds light on politics, too. Latecomers and newcomers alike have a worrisome affinity for positivism, from the devotees of Carnap in India to the bold defenders of the German masters Matthias Grünewald and Heinrich Schütz. It would be poor psychology to presume that what one is excluded from arouses only hate and resentment; it also awakens a possessive, impatient sort of love, and those who repressive culture keeps at a distance can turn, easily enough, into the latter’s most narrow-minded partisans. This resonates even in the overcompensating High German of the worker who as a socialist wants “to learn a bit”, to take part in the so-called cultural heritage, and the banality of the Bebels consists not so much in their foreignness to culture than in the enthusiasm with which they presume it as a fact, identifying with it and indeed thereby inverting its meaning. Socialism is in general as little immune from this transformation as the theoretical slippage into positivism. It can happen easily enough that in the Far East Marx takes the place vacated by Driesch and Rickert. At times it is to be feared that the interrelationship of the non-Occidental peoples in the antagonisms of industrial society, in itself long overdue, will primarily benefit the rational increase of production and transport and the modest raising of living standards, rather than those to be emancipated. Instead of expecting miracles from pre-capitalist peoples, the mature capitalist ones ought to be on their guard against their own sobriety, their slipshod affirmation of what is traditional, and the successes of the West. (http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/MM1.html)
> 2) There is the observation that one has to know a
> tradition -- what _is_ a tradition, btw?
Everything from the Superbowl to the US Constitution.
> 3. Socialism (by which he means what? Marxism?
> Marxism-Leninism?) among workers
No, any of the mass Left social movements of the 1900-1940 period -- social democracy, trade unions, Leftwing parties.
> Does he want workers and "savages" to hate the
> socialist tradition?
His point is that there is no socialist tradition, and the illusion that there was some magical socialist period we can return to is a pernicious myth. There are great works of art, which may be genuinely radical, but the ability to decode that radicality, grasp it as something concrete, is as unequally distributed as money, education, social power, etc.
> 4. What is is shit about improved communications and a
> modestly raised standard of living
Try the new translation. Adorno is warning First World intellectuals not to hitch their cart to Third World revolutions they don't understand anything about. In the context of 1944, when the anti-colonial movements of the Bandung era were just beginning, that was pretty far-sighted.
-- DRR