The Johns-Rauschenberg rejection seems an instance of what Erving Goffman called “identity ambivalence,” a concept Heather Love puts to illuminating use in Feeling Backward. “The stigmatized individual,” Goffman writes, “may exhibit identity ambivalence when he obtains a close sight of his own kind behaving in a stereotypical way, flamboyantly or pitifully acting out the negative attributes imputed to them.”95 Precisely because they are (or may be seen to be) like the “fruity” and “effeminate” Warhol, Johns and Rauschenberg are repelled and embarrassed by him.96 Even as Warhol sometimes responded to such rejections with paranoia of the why-don’t-they-like-me sort, he refused to give in to the double-consciousness-like identification with dominant norms that animates identity ambivalence. Here, Warhol’s efforts to like and be alike did not lead to an attempt to “blend in” or fade into the background, as in Roger Caillois’s famous analysis of mimicry.97 Instead, like his brightly colored camouflage paintings, which invoke the workings of mimicry while dynamically (even expressively) standing out from the white gallery walls, Warhol insisted on being the “right thing in the wrong space and the wrong thing in the right space” (Phil, 158).98 “I certainly wasn’t a butch guy by nature, but I must admit, I went out of my way to play up the other extreme” (POP, 13). Where Johns and Rauschenberg sought to disavow their similarity to Warhol so they could feel better about “looking straight” and fitting into the role of “the major painter,” Warhol wanted to make such disavowals less necessary (and less possible) by seeing everybody as similar to everybody else, precisely inasmuch as they cannot fit in. If Warhol held that “no person is ever completely right for any part, because a part is a role is never real,” then he directed his swishy aggression at those who pretended to be real “viable” subjects, the people who made it seem like we should all be able to fit the stock roles. It was fun just to “watch the expressions on people’s faces,” he wrote, as they reacted to his fey self-presentation (POP, 12). Warhol wanted to embarrass Johns and Rauschenberg for refusing to recognize their similarity to him, for pretending to be above such abjection. In this, we might see an effort at what Sara Ahmed calls “queer pride,” a “refusal to be shamed by witnessing the other as being ashamed by you.”99 This refusal, however, does not necessarily abolish shame so much as signal a desire to pluralize it, and thereby mitigate its isolating effects. One might also see Warhol’s flamboyant swishiness as an invitation to be embarrassed (and stigmatized) together.100
Warhol’s flamboyant performance of the “wrong” identity with Johns and Rauschenberg, his embrace of leftovers and fags and amphetamine users, his celebration of the “stars of the out-take,” were all efforts to “care about all the miserable people who just can’t fit into stock roles”—not least himself. His was an attempt to create not only a “federation of the shamed, the alienated, the destitute, the illegitimate, and the hated” (as Love compellingly describes the dream of queer studies at its most expansive101), but a commonist space where shamed, alienated, and illegitimate ways of being and feeling could be repaired, rewarded, and valued. To the precise extent that some found this exciting or restorative, others found it disturbing and threatening, all the more so because Warhol was not at all “covert” in his efforts, instead determinedly promoting himself and his friends in the public eye.
As a reparative response to his avowed failure to fit into stock roles, Warhol not only valued misfitting as such but actively mocked and subverted “fitting in.” If he could not play the role of major painter, why not get one of his friends to perform it in his place? In 1967 Warhol found himself having committed to speak at a number of colleges and universities. Since he was “too shy and scared” himself, as he explained in POPism, he would bring along a group of friends, including Viva, Ultra Violet, Brigid Berlin, Paul Morrissey, and Allen Midgette, and they would answer questions while he sat quietly on stage. Warhol was not exactly playing the role he was supposed to play—“it was more like a talk show with a dummied-up host”—but at least he was present at the events. This was not the case later in the year when Warhol decided it would be better just to send Midgette to lecture as Warhol. “Allen was so good-looking,” not to mention younger, “they might even enjoy him more.” Moreover, Warhol reasoned, “we’d been playing switch-the-superstar at parties and openings around New York for years, telling people that Viva was Ultra and Edie was me and I was Gerard—sometimes people would get mixed up all by themselves … and we just wouldn’t bother to correct them, it was too much fun to let them go on getting it all wrong—it seemed like a joke to us. So these antistar identity games were something we were doing anyway, as a matter of course.” Unfortunately, when “somebody at one of the colleges happened to see a picture of [Warhol] in the Voice and compared it to the one he’d taken of Allen on the podium,” Warhol got caught, and soon realized that what for him had been a classic Pop “put-on” was “what some people would call ‘fraud.’” Warhol was surprised at how upset people got at the identity games he had the habit of playing, but recognized their powerfully unraveling effect when he was on “the phone with an official from one of the other colleges on that tour, telling him how really sorry I was when suddenly he turned paranoid and said: ‘How can I even be sure this is really you on the phone right now?’ After a pause while I gave that some thought, I had to admit, ‘I don’t know.’”102 Warhol had to refund the lecture fees; a verifiable identity is required where money and contractual obligations are involved. He realized that it might be a good idea to stop playing his identity games and “start acting more grown-up,” at least in some contexts, even if he tried to treat “grown-up” as just another not-real role.
Warhol’s identity games are an apt example of the mimetic and reparative practices “that emerge from queer experience but become invisible or illegible under a paranoid optic,” as Sedgwick puts it.103 If your concern is finding a way to be sure about who Warhol “really” is, his mimetic confusions and identity deflections become interference, noise to cut through. Sometimes, in their attempt to figure out the real Warhol, his critics seem to echo the paranoid college official, who, after all, models the critical and suspicious mode of attunement to which we are most accustomed in the academic profession. What was Warhol’s “real” sexual identity? Are his paintings a critique of consumer capitalism or a cynical affirmation of it? Was he as naïve as he appeared to be in interviews or was he “actually” smart?104 During his life, in interviews, Warhol regularly and brilliantly deflected such questions and the modes of knowing they presume, as Wayne Koestenbaum and Nicholas de Villiers have each shown, often turning attention back to the interviewer’s line of inquiry itself or producing what Koestenbaum calls an “ambient destabilization.”105 For the most part, the attempts to find stable ground from which to determine the real Warhol obscure his actual practices, whose queer appeal and queer effects vanish under this identificatory gaze.106
Warhol’s Affect Theory: How to Like More
I think we could like a lot more people than we do.
Adam Phillips, “The Value of Frustration”107
When Warhol talks about “liking things” or “liking everybody,” what understanding of liking, and of affect and feeling more generally, is he working with? What kind of a feeling is liking? While we have an abundance of theories of love at our disposal, like the “minor feelings” Sianne Ngai examines in Ugly Feelings, liking has tended to fly below the theoretical radar. This is not to say that one does not find it in some key locations. For instance, in his translation of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Werner Pluhar uses “liking” for Wohlgefallen, Kant’s “most generic term for positive rather than negative feeling.”108 Kant’s frequent reference to “the liking that determines a judgment of taste,” which may or may not be devoid of interest, which may or may not be universal, makes it hard to ignore the need for a term to refer to this most basic level of feeling, although his primary interest is in distinguishing between different kinds of liking rather than co
nsidering the nature of the feeling in itself.109 In American psychology, “liking” has often similarly referred to a basic, mostly automatic reaction that guides humans (and other animals) to either approach or avoid a given stimulus. Robert Zajonc and Jonathan Haidt, for instance, have made efforts to understand how liking might be manipulated and how it appears to function independently from the processes that guide knowledge and recognition.110
But on the whole, even where liking is presumed to be basic and fundamental, it rarely receives critical attention as such, as if it were so basic as to be beneath analysis. And where liking is not taken for granted, it is regularly treated as unimportant, weak, or even degraded, often in contrast to other, more serious feelings. For instance, in describing the way most photographs either “please or displease” him in Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes writes that the “studium is that very wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interest, of inconsequential taste: I like/I don’t like.” Setting up the more complex and affecting punctum, which ruptures the studium by “pricking” or “piercing” the viewer, Barthes writes that “the studium is of the order of liking, not of loving; it mobilizes a half desire, a demi-volition; it is the same sort of vague, slippery, irresponsible interest one takes in the people, the entertainments, the books, the clothes one finds ‘all right.’”111 Even though (or precisely because) it describes the general or “average affect” that he feels most often, the vague, ambient, passive liking remains for Barthes not only uninteresting as a feeling (either to have or to think about), but an “irresponsible” path of least resistance, complicit with the manipulations of consumer culture, indeed with “culture” itself as a means of social control.112
Where Barthes seems mainly uninterested in liking, the writer Jonathan Franzen is firmly opposed to it. In his 2011 commencement speech (which became an opinion column), “Liking Is for Cowards, Go for What Hurts,” Franzen makes an ethical case against liking, which he sees as “commercial culture’s substitute for loving.”113 It names the feeling we have about new purchases, especially technological devices which seek to compensate for an indifferent world of “hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts” by offering in its place “a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.” Unlike his Blackberry, “serious art and literature” (like “jet engines [and] laboratory equipment”) is “simply itself,” since its makers “aren’t fixated on your liking it.” The dominance of liking and likability in the world of consumer goods, Franzen suggests, may also tempt one into seeking to be likable, an undertaking that leads down a slippery slope to a life “without integrity, without a center,” indeed to “pathological narcissism,” a danger typified by Facebook and its “Like” button.114
In opposition to this culture of liking, Franzen makes a case for “actual love,” which involves feeling “bottomless empathy” for another person, an identification with “his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own.” Loving a specific person requires that you “surrender some of your self,” risking rejection, disappointment, or loss. “To expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful. The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking.” Liking is superficial and safe. It is lazily complicit with the worst consumerist and narcissistic aspects of our culture. So, Franzen advises, don’t be a coward; be tough and have integrity and don’t care so much about what other people think and give yourself over to loving that one special person, even though that risks the pain of rejection or loss.
Franzen’s familiar romance of serious and authentic individual feeling, opposed to the debased, narcissistic world of commercialization, but deeply committed to the virtues of love as it is experienced in the couple form, was already well-worn if hegemonic in the early 1960s. Warhol’s enthusiastic embrace of what Franzen calls “the world of liking,” his liking all “the great modern things” that the abstract expressionists “tried so hard not to notice at all” (POP, 3), presents a forceful rejoinder to Franzen-style moralizing.
Where Franzen presents liking as a weak and debased feeling that could and should be avoided, and Barthes sees liking as “inconsequential,” I think Warhol used the word to refer to the simplest judgment—“I like this”—essential to any engagement with the world. As I suggested above, for Warhol (as in some psychological uses of the word), liking is not so much an emotion as a force propelling us toward something instead of away. As such, it is the condition of possibility for being affected by something. Like interest, it prepares us to pay attention. And it is a basic affirmation: like me, this is here, and it is here with me. As a form of attraction, it is also anticipates pleasure. Warhol suggests that, for him, liking is an open-ended way of being “affectionate.”115 As Stephen Burt points out, it is a transitional feeling. In discussing the way children and teenagers say, “X likes Y,” Burt suggest that this “‘like’ is more than, or other than, friendship, but it is not exactly love.” Instead, it is “something liminal, undefined, ‘transitional’ in Winnicott’s sense: the word ‘like’ can do so much work … only if, and only because, nobody insists on knowing everything that it can mean.”116 Like Winnicott’s transitional object, liking is an opening into the world more generally: it indicates potentiality. In this sense, liking is not a debasement of love (as Franzen would have it); it is its precondition. Yet Warhol does not promote liking as a preliminary step toward love (“first comes like,” as the online dating site Zoosk has it), but as a feeling that is valuable in itself. “I don’t really believe in love; I sort of believe in liking” (IBYM, 226).
Where the (so-called) social media instrumentalize and financialize liking, Warhol’s project aimed to deinstrumentalize, proliferate, and maximize it to a well-nigh universal scale: like everything, like everybody. (Perhaps, as I mentioned, this allowed him to imagine a world in which it is possible to like Andy Warhol, too.) He sought to do this by directing us right to the apparently debased places—the commodity, celebrity, mass entertainment, pornography—where our liking is already stimulated and instrumentalized, in order to reclaim, pervert, and expand this liking. This approach to liking is more disruptive and less passive than it may at first appear. Think, for instance, of the function of the Like button on Facebook, which has based its algorithms on the (correct) presumption that most people (unlike Warhol) are not trying to like everything. Liking is selective. The person who likes everything on Facebook no longer provides information that is useful to advertisers.117 Liking everybody and everything—especially if everybody did it—would not only disrupt Facebook’s financial model, it would challenge the basic model for mass culture more generally, where the audience attention that is sold to advertisers is valuable only to the extent that it is selectively exercised, indicating preferences that could be directed toward a purchase.
Or consider the way that, as Pierre Bourdieu has famously argued, “taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.”118 If, like Warhol, we all tried to like as much as we could, taste could no longer serve this invidiously classificatory function. Of course, Warhol’s departure from “good taste” was read by many as an embrace of “bad taste,” if a disorienting one. But Warhol’s efforts to like everything and encourage others to like like him actively imagines a world where taste ceases to function as a means of marking and making class positions.
Even if we are unable to achieve Warholian levels of liking (and not even Warhol managed to like everything and everybody), and see that in our everyday lives liking is manipulated and financialized, it does not logically follow that we should somehow try to like less, or give up on liking as a feeling tout court. That could only lead to an increasing reification of the private world of authentic emotion and a further withdrawal from the world. Disdain for liking is itself an expression of alienation from those other—weaker, stupider, duped or deluded—people who
cannot resist giving in to (what Franzen terms) the debased “world of liking.” If liking things is the basic affective openness necessary for any kind of engagement with the world, and if the Benjaminian analysis of the dulling and withdrawal of the mimetic faculty is correct and we therefore need more ways to experience and care about the world and other people rather than fewer, then the question of liking and its vicissitudes should be at the center of our critical concerns.
Warhol’s promotion of liking is an effort to increase our capacity for affecting and being affected in general. In principle, this risks a range of feelings, not only “positive” ones (on which more in a moment). And while I think Warhol’s liking welcomes this risk, I think it also aims, on the whole, toward what Spinoza (and Gilles Deleuze following him) call the joyous affects, the ones that increase what Spinoza calls the “power of acting or force of existing.”119
For Spinoza, when one body encounters another, its capacities are altered; this is the moment of being affected. This process is continuous and ongoing (sometimes dramatically, other times subtly) in what Deleuze calls “a melodic line of continuous variation,” a line that constitutes “what it means to exist.”120 Of this melodic line constituted by affect, Deleuze explains, “Spinoza will assign two poles: joy-sadness, which for him will be the fundamental passions. Sadness will be any passion whatsoever which involves a diminution of my power of acting, and joy will be any passion involving an increase in my power of acting.”121 Affect is thus not a “psychological” category (something that happens “inside” a “me”) nor is it reducible to the subject, or ego (both preceding and exceeding it, which is also what makes it different from an “emotion”).122 Instead, affect is a “passage,” less a feeling that one has than an event that happens. Warhol’s “liking” is an affect in this sense. Like Spinoza’s joy, it is one way of encountering things in the world.123 One can prepare for liking and try to maximize it. But one does not “choose” to like something at the moment of encounter.
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