My Adorno Tattoo.
William G. Pilgrim.
It’s that bloody conversation again. You know the one I mean because we’ve all had it. The one where you talk about the tattoo you’d get if you weren’t such a cowardly, yellow-bellied, lillie-livered, ‘carpe-diem’-ignoring, conform-o-bot. I had that conversation yesterday, only this time by the end of it I’d hoodwinked myself into getting the name ‘ADORNO’ tattooed across my strapping chest in blood red ‘chiller’ font. It all started on one mild night in February last year, when I went to the cinema with some friends. We arrived without having checked what was on and were confronted with a tough choice. The exact details escape me but I believe we chose some sort of slasher movie. I think it starred Neve Campbell or Jennifer Love Hewitt or Gina Phillips or Paris Hilton or Sarah Michelle Gellar. It was that one where the teens are stalked by some kind of masked/disfigured villain, and witness their peers being brutally picked off one by one until they themselves come staggeringly close to death, but somehow miraculously manage to defeat the villain (although the villain’s mortality status remains ambiguous at the end.) Anyway, I digress. The crux of this anecdote is found in the toilets, where I happened upon none other than my favourite lecturer, Professor Whelpdale. Here is an account of what went down:
I came out of a toilet cubicle freshly-watered, and saw him drying his hands. He saw me and competed with the drone of the noisy hand dryer to ask me how I was.
I said ‘I’m good, how are you?’
He said ‘sorry?’
Assuming he’d misheard me because English is his second language and I talk with a broad North Eastern accent, I said, slightly louder ‘I’m good, how are you?’
He made his face into a squinting-smile, tilted his head and said ‘sorry, what did you say?’
The noise of the now automatically flushing urinals coupled with the hand dryer was somehow echoing in the centre of my brain. ‘I’M GOOD, HOW ARE YOU?’ – I was now practically bawling at him.
He shook his head and replied confusedly ‘YOU’RE COLD?!?’
At a loss for words I just silently agreed. To the soundtrack of pissing piss-pots and hot air I left the gents finally, returning to screen 3 to watch the movie with my buddies.
As I showed my ticket to the usher (‘favourite film: the matrix:reloaded’), I contemplated the ordeal I’d just gone through. I wasn’t cold at all. I was perfectly fine, I’m usually very fussy about temperature, but this place was just right and yet I’d lied to Professor Whelpdale. I took the easy route.
“He must think I’m a cold blooded freak” I absent-mindedly muttered under my breath, as I struggled to find my friends in the auditorium. Aldous Huxley once wrote: “facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored”. But to Professor Whelpdale, I would forever be the strange kid from his Thursday Tutorial, who was cold in a perfectly well heated and comfortably seated cinema complex. On second thoughts, I think it was a rom-com staring Hugh Grant alongside Julia Roberts or Matthew McConaughey alongside Jennifer Lopez or John Cusack alongside Kate Beckinsale or Billy Crystal alongside Meg Ryan or Tom Hanks alongside Meg Ryan. It was that one where there are the two people who love one another and then they encounter some difficulties related to this, but eventually get together at the end. Anyway, after the film, we went into Newcastle to go round a few bars. It was a frosty night, and my genuine feelings of chilliness were making me most uncomfortable on both a physical and meta-physical level. It was slowly dawning on me that the lie I had told was not part of a one way process. The relationship was symbiotic; in choosing to lie, I had accepted that lie into existence. The fact that he had first suggested the premise of the lie wasn’t an excuse, in fact it made it worse. I had told him what he wanted to hear. The white noise filled my head and I gave in and took the easy route.
We got to a club called The Basement, the taller doorman was very friendly, the short one was completely unreasonable. We got downstairs and my friends all ordered ‘Skittles’ (a brightly coloured vodka based cocktail). I was driving, so naturally I didn’t buy anything. This was probably for the best given my mental anguish.
At some point I got talking to my friend about the band Murder By Death. He told me that he’d read in Kerrang magazine that their new album would be based on the first book from Dante’s ‘Inferno’. For whatever reason I knew that Dante’s ‘Inferno’ wasn’t strictly speaking a book in its own right but was the first of three chapters in his Divine Comedy. I would have corrected him, but given the loud music and the fact that he appeared to have procured the grand sum of his knowledge of 12th Century Italian literature from a glossy weekly alternative music publication, I let it be. To be honest I was just glad to be able to think about something other than the filthy liar that I had mutated into in the Odean™ bogs.
Poor Whelpdale.
When I got home I really needed to sit and think about things. I needed to really sit and think about things. I needed to sit and really think about things. I really needed to really sit and really think. I flicked through the channels and through the pages of the magazines and through the pages of Myspace. I just kept seeing the same show over and over again, the same band with the same 6 guys in black T-Shirts, playing the same songs, (yet parting their floppy black hair in a variety of different ways). I heard the same jokes. The same set-ups and the same pay-offs. At one point I was literally watching a repeat. This pseudo-individualism pacifies me.
The distinction between the truth and lies, if ignored, becomes meaningless. The more passive I get, the more likely I am to accept lies, of any kind. I don’t question authority, because I know it won’t achieve anything. In a world where only the ends matter, the means mean nothing.
Even when I feel inspired, the feeling soon passes. I get a text and lose my strand of thought. Everything blends into everything else. Since beginning writing this article I have already watered all the plants in my house, raced my friend’s dog up the stairs, and alphabetised my socks (first by colour and then by thickness). My attention span is… Where the hell was I?
The ideas formulated by Theodor W. Adorno and the Frankfurt School provide me with hope for my own sanity. As a Jew who lived in Germany in the 1930s, Adorno was well aware of the devastatingly manipulative power of mass-media propaganda. To him the mainstream media was a Culture Industry – ‘bread and circuses’ for the industrial generation – in which all the commodities are ‘unique’ on the surface and yet comfortingly familiar. This pseudo-individualism pacifies us. The Culture Industry has the power to flatten the potential of those things out there which do present us with a challenge.
Kerrang does Dante, The Muppets do Dickens, Anti-Flag do Chomsky. Dante -flattened, Dickens -flattened, Chosky -flattened. In merging high and low culture for commercial gain, we may destroy that which is valuable in each.
I am rarely challenged or taken out of my comfort zone. I become passive, and learn to accept more and more; after all what is the point in protesting when it never achieves anything anyway? With my eyes focused solely on the destination, the beautiful journey passes me by. I know it doesn’t have to be like this, Adorno knew this too.
I had all but repressed any memories of that trip to the cinema until just the other day when, on a warm March morning, I glimpsed Professor Whelpdale in the distance, merrily striding through the centre of Durham… In shorts. It hit me like a sack full of door knobs. I dropped everything, threw my head back and fell to my knees. The tears streamed down my face and joined the oranges rolling out of my shopping bags and together they let gravity take them on a one way tour of the cobbled streets of Durham, only to be trampled by mindless consumers. With their eyes fixed solely on the destination (Topshop™), the journey was passing them by (to the extent that they didn’t even notice several satsumas bobbling towards them at high speeds).
It wasn’t a cold day, it was probably the warmest day of 2007 so far, yet there I was, face in hands, weeping on saddler street in a giant padded coat and wooly hat. The lie had won. Professor Whelpdale stopped in front of me and asked me how I was.
I lifted my head and peered through my fingers with teary, bloodshot eyes. I could see his almost messaic silhouette there in front of me, hand outstretched.
I sniffed, took his hand and whispered delicately, ‘I’m cold. How are you?’
* * * * *
I’ve had a few days to think about things and I feel a lot better now. I really feel like my life is back on track. I don’t let the TV get to me as much, because I put my foot through it yesterday and then hurled it out of an –albeit very slow- moving car. On the way home from the cemetery my housemate told me he was almost definitely going to get ‘MARX’ tattooed on his arm and in place of the ‘M’, he’ll almost definitely be getting the McDonalds™ Golden Arches™. I told him that ‘ADORNO’ was good enough for me. Hopefully, now you might take an interest in Culture Industry theory too (in spite of the cheap ‘attention span’ gag I used earlier).
But please don’t take my word for it, make up your own goddamn mind.
NB. William does Adorno. Adorno- flattened.
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