So when Warhol says “so forget it” about the person you find attractive on the street whom you think might be your fantasy, he is not advising you to forget your attractions or to refrain from picking up the person who looks like your fantasy. Rather, what you need to forget is the idea that you can ever have or be your fantasy object, because you never are a subject without some internalized object you are imitating, and we only like those objects that look like ones about which we have already fantasized. (“People’s fantasies are what give them problems”; Phil, 55.) Warhol is encouraging us to forget the sense that we must relate to others by way of either identification (“being”) or desire (“having”), which itself relies on the opposition between same and different. Instead, he seems to be reminding us, since our selves are formed from a process of imitation, so too our likes are always repetitions of past likes, “transferences,” as Freud called them, of earlier attractions or past emotional ties onto an object in the present.33 The new object need only be perceived as similar to the old one, and the similarity can be slight (more important is that our capacity for perceiving that similarity remain active and robust). In this sense affects and attractions never occur for the first time. They always appear as (what Freud called) “facsimiles or new editions” of old emotional ties.34 We are, each of us, going back to the Marilyn or Elvis or James Dean model (which we may see as themselves repetitions of earlier “imagos” of our parents) and reprinting it on new material. The fact that in our mass-mediated society plenty of other people will be repeating the same models means that there are going to be people out there who look like your fantasy, and that there is a good chance someone will like the look that you bought too. (One can imagine how, for Warhol, who did not see himself as attractive, this may have been a comforting insight.35)
What makes us all “look and act alike,” then, is a shared relation to and reliance on consumption (going to “the store and [buying] the look that you both like”), which banks on and repeats the basic (melancholic) structure of human relationality, ever and again offering the promise of being like the object you did not get and could not be. But, whereas for Girard the fact that we all want the same objects only ratchets up the competitive nature of mimetic desire (we are all trying to keep up with the Joneses),36 for Warhol, if we are able to follow his advice to “forget” the being-having fantasies (a not inconsiderable “if,” to be sure), our mass culture–produced similarity makes it easier for us to imagine imitating and also liking each other.
Happily, Warhol is a gifted forgetter. (Indeed, he bragged, “my mind is like a tape recorder with one button—Erase.”37) He is especially good at forgetting reified or ideologically freighted oppositions and instead noticing or creating resemblances across them. Such resemblances then make a hospitable site for nonhierarchical analogies. As Kaja Silverman reminds us (in her reading of Gerhard Richter’s work), “An analogy brings two or more things together on the basis of their lesser or greater resemblance,” a relation that neutralizes our habitual “identity-antithesis” mode of thinking.38 So, for instance, in the Swenson interview, where Brecht wanted to pursue thinking alike “under Communism,” Warhol notes that it is “happening here all by itself,” since “everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we’re getting more and more that way.” Casually puncturing the celebratory rhetoric of American “individuality” and subverting the Cold War logic that opposed it to Soviet homogeneity, Warhol reminds us that industrial modernity in both places involves the proliferation of similarities, at the level of work (in the Fordist factory) and of consumption.39 Even if cars and soups and celebrities mostly differed across the Cold War divide, people were shaped in both places by the experience of sharing with millions of others common objects of emotional attachment in their everyday lives.40 People in the United States and Soviet Union were alike precisely in their experience of likenesses.
Warhol replaces the opposition between capitalism and communism with a commitment to “commonism,” an early neologism (reportedly favored by Warhol) for what would become known as Pop Art.41 At the time, it referred to artists’ representation of common things, the “comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles—all the great modern things that the abstract expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all” (POP, 3). But it also aptly names Warhol’s focus on the being-in-common enabled by the compellingly mutual relations of resemblance. The “like-being” (semblable), Nancy writes, “resembles me in that I myself ‘resemble’ him: we resemble together, if you will.”42
Warhol’s commonism also has a certain leveling effect, which is described in an oft-cited passage from his Philosophy:
What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it. (100–101)
Overlooking the differences in lived experiences between the “richest” and the “poorest” (of which he was keenly aware), Warhol asserts a commonality achieved through a shared consumption of Coke. Indeed, Warhol points out that this Coke-commonism’s negation of difference in particular experience is the source of its charm; in fact, it is the appeal of consumption (and spectatorship) more generally.43 This attraction, as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner have argued, mimics the way citizenship also offers one access to a self-abstracted space of the “person in general,” where bodily particularity can be left behind (and seen as if from a distance) and matters of common concern can be deliberated. (As such, it is especially appealing to minoritized subjects who have been denied access to the abstracted personhood promised by citizenship.)44 And even as (or to the precise extent that) Warhol knew and resented the fact that certain bodies—such as female ones, or queer ones, or nonwhite ones—had a difficult time accessing that sphere of abstracted “personhood” (the “stock role” par excellence), and even though he knew that the promise of transcendence into a realm where everything is good serves to cover over the inequalities of access to that goodness, Warhol all the more avowed and directed our attention to those sites of commonality that did exist. For it was precisely here, as Muñoz powerfully suggests in Cruising Utopia, that Warhol sought to illuminate the potential of a different lifeworld, a “restructured sociality.”45 Thus, Warhol approved when college student Suzy Stanton described what he was “saying” in his Campbell Soup paintings in this way: “I love soup, and I love it when other people love soup too, because then we can all love it together and love each other at the same time.”46 Stanton’s reading of Warhol may sound naïve, but it is worth remembering that it accurately, if optimistically, describes one of the structures of feeling supporting the social movements of the 1960s. Many of the struggles of the civil rights movement—for example, at lunch counters—were about asserting similarity in the face of its denial at sites of consumption.47
In fact, despite the language of universality Warhol sometimes invokes, his commonism is organized, on the level of content, precisely around the experiences of marginalized or devalued subjectivities. For instance, not only does Warhol depict celebrities well known for their queer fans (James Dean, Troy Donahue, Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor, Jackie Kennedy).48 But, as Anthony Grudin has shown, his interest in all the “great modern things” is also an interest in objects—from comics to Coke, Brillo Pads to Campbell’s soup—that “were deployed and widely understood as class-specific images, explicitly targeted at a working-class audience.”49
0.2 Andy Warhol, 200 Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962. Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on canvas, 72 × 100 inches. © 2016 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rig
hts Society (ARS), New York.
The persistent focus of Warhol’s work was the world of common objects as a world of common feeling, one that contributed to the sixties mood in which, as Warhol said, “everybody got interested in everybody else” (Phil, 26). But then, he added, “drugs helped a little there.” They helped first of all because amphetamines, marijuana, and LSD were themselves common objects sought out because they increased one’s ability to “get interested” in other people. For instance, Warhol describes kids on acid staring at each other for hours at the Central Park Be-In.50 But also, since each drug changes perception, sensation, affect, and experience in specific ways, using a given drug is a quick way to become like other people whose perception and experience have also been altered by it.51 Taking amphetamines (as Warhol and many of his friends did in the 1960s) was a technique Warhol valued because the drugs created magic circles of “lived similarity.” In Warhol’s Factory, this magic circle formed a particular collectivity of “A-men” or “Mole People” with its own protocols and tendencies. Although “the Factory A-men were mostly fags,” along with a “notorious dyke” (Warhol’s longtime friend Brigid Berlin) (POP, 62), membership in this collectivity was not defined by pregiven or stable identities so much as it was created by a shared decision to take amphetamines and in so doing become like the others.52 In this, the A-men constitute a kind of paradigm for Warhol: voluntary practices of becoming-alike that create a way to belong and be with others without depending on existing norms or on one’s capacity to be an identity.
Anti-Likeness
As we know, there was also a world outside these magic circles where liking and likeness were not valued, which is precisely what made Warhol’s techniques for noticing and producing resemblances attractive. What he posits in his interview with Swenson as a self-evident or given historical fact—that we are all already thinking and acting alike, that imitation and likeness already abound—was, at best, underappreciated at the moment Warhol was speaking (in the context of the Cold War and the civil rights movement) and, at worst, actively discouraged or ignored. If the imitation of others and the experience of a mimetic “we-centric” space that allows for affective attunement and relationality is in some sense basic, even automatic, it is nonetheless the case that this shared space can be negated.53
Indeed, as Walter Benjamin argued, we need not look far to see ways in which modernity has suppressed the mimetic faculty, and how this suppression can have negative implications for the possibilities of emotional attachment and engagement. As Susan Buck-Morss emphasizes in her important essay “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: The Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” Benjamin’s analysis of modernization’s impact on the mimetic faculty centers on the experience of shock. Benjamin generalized Freud’s analysis of traumatic “shell shock,” arguing that “in industrial production no less than modern warfare, in street crowds and erotic encounters, in amusement parks and gambling casinos, shock is the very essence of modern experience.”54 In the factory, workers must adapt their movements to a dangerous, automated process indifferent to the particularities of distinct bodies, sensations, and feelings; to be affectively open to this compulsory mimesis would be nearly suicidal. To survive the factory setting, the mimetic response becomes a defensive reflex: imagination is paralyzed, memory replaced by conditioned response, learning by “drill,” skill by repetition—“practice counts for nothing.”55 Outside the factory, the mimetic faculty is challenged even by the simple experience of riding on a bus or train, which puts people “in a position of having to stare at one another for minutes or even hours on end without exchanging a word.”56 We would be emotionally drained, to the point of collapse, if we were affectively open to all the people we encounter on city streets or public transportation, never mind the wars, murders, floods, earthquakes, terror alerts, and bombings we see on the news. In response to this affectively demanding sensory assault, the primary function of consciousness, Benjamin argues, is to insulate us from disruptive emotional experiences. Thus, “rather than incorporating the outside world,” mimetic capacities “are used as a deflection against it. The smile that appears automatically on passersby wards off contact, a reflex that functions as a mimetic shock absorber.” Instead of affective attunement or mimetic correspondence, our faculties are increasingly oriented toward anaesthetization.57 The drug trade correspondingly expands. Everybody can relate to Joey Ramone’s plea: “I wanna be sedated.”
Yet the dulling of the mimetic faculty, the distance from the world that an etherized life entails, gives rise to a newfound pleasure in the experiences that manage to break on through to the other side, which the modern subject finds on offer in the phantasmagoria, the total spectacle designed to overwhelm the senses. Borrowing from Buck-Morss, Miriam Hansen observes that the hyperstimulation offered by Wagner’s total work of art and the Luna Parks’ rollercoasters, as well as the blockbuster Hollywood action film, was “designed to pierce the defensive shield of consciousness in the momentary experience of shock, awe, or vertigo,” but this piercing instead “further contributed to the thickening of the protective shield and thus effectively exacerbated sensory alienation.” In a negative feedback loop, the pleasurable piercing of the defensive mimetic shield only amplifies the need to fortify the shield, which requires that the stimulus become yet stronger, which ratchets up the defenses again. “By the 1930s,” Hansen writes, “this dialectics of anaesthetics and aestheticization had impaired human faculties of experience, affect, and cognition on a mass scale, thereby paralyzing political agency and the collective ability to prevent the deployment of technology toward self-destructive ends.”58
It was toward overcoming this paralysis and figuring out how to stimulate collective affective involvement in a shared world that much of Benjamin’s thought is directed.59 That is, Benjamin’s aim is not to lament the mimetic faculty’s “dying out” so much as to try to figure out how “the gift for producing similarities … and therefore also the gift of recognizing them, have changed in the course of history.”60 How might we discern “a transformation that has taken place” in our ability to see and produce similarities? “In the course of the centuries both the mimetic force and the mimetic mode of vision may have vanished from certain spheres, perhaps only to surface in others,” Benjamin suggests.61 The task, shared by Benjamin and Warhol, is to find where the mimetic force has surfaced and help it to flourish. Benjamin well describes the world Warhol also saw—one where, in general, one feels that “it would be so much easier not to care”—and sought to change through a pointed and constant attempt to stimulate and awaken a slumbering mimetic faculty. In so doing, Warhol is also showing us how we might disrupt, short-circuit, or otherwise circumvent the discourses, institutions, and practices that discourage or inhibit our mimetic faculties and our imitative behaviors.
For it is not only this anaesthetizing dynamic that has made the mimetic faculty “increasingly fragile,” so that the similarities we are now capable of perceiving “in buildings and plant forms, in certain cloud formations and skin diseases, are nothing more than tiny prospects from a cosmos of similarity” (SW2, 684). The promulgation of any number of equivalences and incommensurabilities tends also to distract us. For starters, “identity,” the idea that some things are “equal,” lies at the basis of logic itself but, as Nietzsche wrote, suppresses similarity because it requires that we “treat as equal what is merely similar” (“an illogical tendency, for nothing is really equal”).62 The universal standard of equivalence established by money is then only “logical,” as is the compensatory valorization of the “genuine” and “authentic. The related ideology that holds that we should be independent, self-owned individuals (a version of which is found in the art world premium on originality) disparages imitation as a sign of weakness and dependence. Only “logical,” too, is our personal “identity,” which we must guard against theft and stand ready to “prove”—to the state, to the police, to our employer. In many everyday contexts, a fixed and verifi
able personal identity is compulsory: whether signing and cashing checks, crossing the border, driving a car, signing a lease, filing taxes, reporting to work, signing a work of art, or authoring a text, there must be no confusing you and your likeness; playing someone you are not invites all kinds of trouble (trouble Warhol actively courted). The discourses, institutions, and norms regarding gender, sexual, and racial identity are also crucial sites where, as we grow up, we are schooled quite carefully and deliberately concerning the proper objects of imitation and correct modes of mimetic comportment.
In response to these anti-likeness, anti-liking forces, Warhol (like Benjamin) “envisions a regeneration of affect by means of mechanically produced images, that is, the possibility of countering the alienation of the human sensorium with the same means and media that are part of the technological proliferation of shock anaesthetics-aestheticization.”63 As Warhol told an interviewer in the mid-1960s: “Mechanical means are today, and using them I can get more art to more people. Art should be for everyone.”64 Like Andy Warhol is an examination of Warhol’s various strategies for combating this alienation of the human sensorium and nourishing and stimulating the mimetic faculty. For the most part, Warhol engaged in this project “less by demonstrating found similarities than by replicating the processes which generate such similarities” (SW2, 694).
Like Andy Warhol Page 2