The trick to living a life in which one maximizes liking, suggests Deleuze, is not just to avoid things that do not “agree” with one (while nonetheless trying to occupy the limit or edge of one’s capacity for being affected), but also to actively seek for points of correspondence and commonality, “to form the idea of what is common to the affecting body and the affected body.”124 This itself requires attunement to what Benjamin called the “active mimetic force acting expressly inside things,” the “mimetic centers … numerous within every being” (SW2, 684). Warhol’s liking is an attempt to “form the idea of what is common” in what he encounters, and so to compose a melody that brings him into maximal correspondence with the things he finds in the world. In such a world, “you can imitate everyone you know,” as John Lennon put it. Warhol’s project of liking things is thus an instance of taking what Brian Massumi describes as “practical, experimental, strategic measures to expand our emotional register” so that we might “access more of our potential at each step, have more of it actually available.”125
However, as I mentioned, liking things is not done consciously at every encounter; it is not a simple question of volition or decision. Agency regarding one’s liking is exerted in a mediated, tactical fashion. In his book on happiness, Jonathan Haidt offers us one metaphor for understanding this mediation, something he calls the “like-o-meter,” a kind of automatic internal machine that constantly directs our attention one way or another. In relation to any stimulus, the like-o-meter offers a quick response: approach or avoid.126 (“Liking is like being a machine, “Warhol says, because “you do the same thing every time. You do it over and over again.”) I understand Warhol’s range of aesthetic practices as (not always successful) attempts to manipulate this like-o-meter machine in order to make it like more things than it otherwise would, to allow it to overcome barriers put up, say, by racism or misogyny or homophobia that might discourage us from liking and feeling alike. We can understand this shift, setting the like-o-meter at the highest level possible, to operate at the level of mood. One exercises agency in relation to one’s liking by developing practices for getting in the mood for liking.
By mood I am thinking of Heidegger’s Stimmung, which has a musical connotation and may also be translated as “attunement.” For Heidegger, Stimmung is the overall atmosphere or medium in or through which our thinking, doing, willing, feeling, and acting occurs. It establishes the conditions for our encounter with the world before cognition and volition.127 Although our moods often escape notice, it is only through mood and by way of mood that we encounter the world: “the mood has already disclosed, in every case, Being-in-the-world as a whole, and makes it possible first of all to direct oneself toward something.”128 Mood discloses the world in the sense that mood constitutes our openness to the world; it is the situated directionality of that openness and as such shapes the totality of things that we see and that can “matter” to us. As Charles Guignon puts it, “Moods enable us to focus our attention and orient ourselves,” and as such they themselves exert a broad but foundational form of judgment.129 One’s mood, moreover, sets the situation in which our particular affects come into being, allowing certain affects, which are more punctual and object-oriented than moods, to attach to certain objects, while foreclosing other affective attachments and relations.130 If “affect” refers to the transformation or “passage” that occurs in a particular encounter, moods are the force shaping the melodic line of that shifting affect. Where affects tend to be about something in particular, moods are usually about everything in general. Indeed, using the same metaphor as Deleuze (if rather loosely), Heidegger writes that Stimmung is the “melody” that “does not merely hover over” our being, but that “sets the tone for such being, attunes and determines the manner and way [Art und Wie]” of that being.131 It attunes us to some things and not others; it is by way of mood that we come to value something, to “care” (sorgen), an important word for Heidegger and Warhol alike.132
Warhol sought to exert agency first of all over his own mood in order to attune it to likenesses and correspondences, the better to maximize his capacity for having “liking” encounters. But he also sought to arouse liking in his audiences. He put on display the various mechanisms one might use to get in the mood for liking, teaching us how to recognize what is common. Engaging these mechanisms—imagining oneself as a machine, or a celebrity, allowing oneself to relax into boredom, relating to the world as a collector—is itself a kind of affective labor. In this, it is related to the various tactics employed by the flight attendants and other affective laborers examined by Arlene Hochschild in her landmark 1983 study The Managed Heart.133 But instead of being directed toward dealing with disgruntled fliers or sustaining a smile so as to keep the clients happy, Warhol is interested in an expanded liking, in which as many things as possible might be encountered as “great” or “exciting.” Of course, this project is a compelling one precisely to the extent that one’s everyday life is not characterized by liking, where one feels the need (like Hochschild’s flight attendants) to alter an existing affective atmosphere.
The direction of one’s mood toward liking and likeness is not only a kind of work; it also entails its own theory. In attuning himself toward likeness in order to maximize his openness to liking, Warhol creates what Silvan Tomkins calls an “affect theory.” Summarizing Tomkins, Sedgwick notes that “all people’s cognitive/affective lives are organized according to alternative, changing, strategic and hypothetical affect theories.” This “largely tacit theorizing all people do in experiencing and trying to deal with their own and others affects” is a mode of “selective scanning and amplification,” where certain affects and relevant information are prioritized.134 Based on accumulated experience, such affect theories are, among other things, “highly organized way[s] of interpreting information so that what is possibly relevant can be quickly abstracted and magnified, and the rest discarded.”135 In Warhol’s affect theory, prioritizing the information that is relevant for liking means first of all setting aside the opposition between the same and the different, scanning instead for similarities, which are then “abstracted and magnified.” Instead of asking, Is this person the same as me, or different? Warhol’s is an affect theory that wonders, How am I like this? How is this like other things? How can I relate to this thing as somehow imitable? In what way are we alike? How do we (mis)fit together?
For instance, as another way to increase one’s powers of acting and feelings of correspondence, Warhol’s affect theory looked for, amplified, and promoted experiences that produced sexual arousal or excitement, and not only for that “special person” for whom one has (par Franzen) “bottomless empathy.” In response to the characterization of his Blue Movie (a three-hour depiction of a sexual encounter between Louis Waldron and Viva, who do not appear to be in love but who do seem to like each other) as “hard-core pornography,” Warhol (who in POPism remarked that “personally, I loved porno”) offers a offers a defense of arousal as an aesthetic value and prurience as an aesthetic mode:136
I think movies should appeal to prurient interests. I mean, the way things are going now—people are alienated from one another. Movies should—uh—arouse you. Hollywood films are just planned-out commercials. Blue Movie was real. But it wasn’t done as pornography—it was an exercise, an experiment. But I really do think movies should arouse you, should get you excited about people, should be prurient. (IBYM, 189)
Instead of Hollywood’s “planned out commercials,” which elsewhere in the interview he calls “uncaring” (perhaps to the degree that they presume normative identities and affects and instrumentalize our affects toward a narrative goal within the film that reinforces its commercial function), Warhol understands himself as experimenting in an effort to find an alternative to “the way things are going now.” The arousal that a prurient movie might produce is another way to counter alienation, to “get you excited about people.” Warhol’s openness to this kind of arousal is
also evident in his depictions of sexual encounters and naked bodies in his Sex Parts and Torsos series from the mid-1970s, which registered the ways such an excitement flourished in the expanded, experimental sex scenes of post-Stonewall New York.137
0.3 Andy Warhol, Sex Parts, 1978. Screenprint on Ragston S-N paper, 40 × 26 inches. © 2016 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Insofar as Warhol’s liking is an affective openness that seeks to create correspondences without instrumentalizing them toward a predetermined goal, inasmuch as it is based not on lack but on plenitude (from Campbell’s soup, which we can all love together, to the collections of cock drawings and Polaroids I discuss in the next chapter), and insofar as his liking is a promiscuous mode of affection based on acting and looking alike (and, as such, not fitting a stock role), rather than being an identity, it is guided by an affect theory compatible with what Douglas Crimp called “the ethos of gay liberation regarding the expansion of affectional possibility.”138 Echoing Foucault’s enthusiasm for the “new affective and relational virtualities” that might emerge along the “slantwise” lines that queers traverse in the social fabric,139 Crimp writes that this ethos supported “a great variety of forms of affectional and sexual relationships, a proliferation of variously organized friendships and community relations, which made for a great many options for obtaining pleasure and forming human connection and intimacy.”140 Within this affective world, which Crimp sees at work in the new disco scene of the 1970s,
coupling was newly seen not as a “happily ever after” compact, but as an in-the-moment union for sharing pleasure. Such pleasure sharing could, of course, lead to all kinds of longer-term relationships: now-and-again casual sex partners, regular fuck buddies, cruising comrades, bar and bathhouse companions, just plain friends, and combinations of any of these and many more. But it didn’t have to lead to anything at all. Pleasure was its own reward; it didn’t require redemption through “love” or “commitment” or even an exchange of phone numbers. Moreover, two stopped being a magic number: coupling could easily be multiplied to become a three-way, a foursome, group sex. Bathhouses had “orgy rooms,” steam rooms, and saunas for those who wanted more than one partner at a time and who might also want a little voyeurism and/or exhibitionism in the mix or the total anonymity of sex in the dark with bodies detached from personhood.141
In such a world, “the normative couple was only one of many possibilities, so if you weren’t inclined toward that form of connection, you didn’t feel weird, left out, and miserable.”142 In composing and promoting an affect theory that does not privilege the normative, monogamous couple as the organizing hub for sociality or the primary site of affective affiliation, comfort, or pleasure—unless that is, you count Warhol’s “marriage” to his Norelco tape recorder—Warhol’s is an effort to create an opening where nonmiserable, even joyous, plural queer singularity could come into being.143
Even as he deprivileges the romantic couple and love in aiming to maximize liking, so too Warhol (like Spinoza) “denounces a plot in the universe of those who are interested in affecting us with sad passions.”144 In POPism, recalling the moment after President Kennedy’s assassination, Warhol said, “I’d been thrilled having Kennedy as a president; he was handsome, young, smart—but it didn’t bother me that much that he was dead. What bothered me was the way the television and radio were programming everyone to feel so sad.” Warhol recounts trying to rally his friends by taking them out to dinner, but “you couldn’t get away” from the programming and so “it didn’t work, everyone was acting too depressed.” Henry Geldzahler wondered why Warhol was not more upset, and Warhol “told him about the time I was walking in India and saw a bunch of people in a clearing having a ball because someone they really liked had just died and how I realized then that everything was just how you decided to think about it” (POP, 60). On the one hand, Warhol here seems to be wishfully overstating the volitional quality of his affective life (which may have been especially attractive as he struggled to come to terms with his failed romance with Charles Lisanby, with whom he had been traveling at the time). But at the same time, he indicates the degree to which he is engaged in self-conscious affect theorizing and affective labor aimed at reducing the effects of mass-media-programmed sadness. This theory and labor involves an attempt to shift the mood by creating a way of being with others—“having a ball,” going out to dinner—in which a different set of things matter. Because, as Spinoza (and Deleuze and Massumi following him) emphasized, the sad are more docile, Warhol’s mood-shifting opposition to the given programming has clear political consequences.
0.4 Andy Warhol, Thirty-Five Jackies (Multiplied Jackies), 1964. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, 100⅜ × 113 inches. © 2016 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
We might see Warhol’s paintings of Jackie Kennedy (1964) and his film Since (1966) (in which actors reenact parts of Abraham Zapruder’s famous film of the assassination) as illustrations of how the depression-inducing media reactions to Kennedy’s death could be altered by finding points of correspondence within the experience of mass grief.145 The two paintings titled The Week That Was and several of the twenty-four works titled Multiplied Jackies present a chronologically misarranged montage of mass-mediated images of Jackie before and after her husband’s death on variously colored blue, gold, and white canvases: Jackie, in her pillbox hat, smiles broadly during her arrival in Dallas; her downcast face witnesses the swearing in of Lyndon Johnson; and at the funeral, with and without a veil, she stares ahead with martial grace. The temporal disorder relayed by the stutter from smile to sorrow and back offers a nonteleological series of affective images, one that orients the viewer’s apprehension of Kennedy’s death squarely toward Jackie’s visage and her powerful star persona. What had been an occasion for docile sadness thus becomes an opportunity for a collective mimesis of glamorous mournfulness. This changes the nature of the feeling not only because it allows the public to share a moment of affective intensity with “the most glamorous woman in the world.”146 In allowing one to feel like this powerful, famous, and beautiful woman, Jackie’s public displays of grief also provide one with a way to feel like all the others also feeling like her. In this sense, Warhol’s paintings of Jackie Kennedy are about the moment when everybody’s affect was keyed to Jackie’s face, which had made itself available as a site of mass-affective imitation and attachment. Inasmuch as she was, at this moment, the object of a nearly universal liking, Warhol could say that her performance of grief was “the best thing she’s ever done!”147
As Karen Beckman suggests in her brilliant reading of Since, the film also presents an actively mimetic nonprogrammed relation to the mass-mediated event of the assassination. Warhol’s characters, she writes, respond to the media spectacle “by mimicking the actions they see” through a kind of “watching and rewatching” that turns the Zapruder film strip into “a metaphorical social space of film spectatorship that encourages viewers to mimic and improvise on the content of the strip.”148 Such a spectatorship is a “a kind of doing,” one that itself allows for the imagining and enacting of “alternative forms, power relationships and subjectivities.” Most significantly for my argument here, the film puts on display (for viewers to study, imitate, or recognize) the process of a media event producing “queer media communities that are forged by idiosyncratic ‘inhabitations’ of and variations on media experiences.” For Beckman (making compelling use of Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of temporal drag), what is most important is the way this queer spectatorial community recasts our temporal apprehension of the mass-mediated historical event, but she also points out how this group of mimicking “rewatchers” sexualizes the scene of politics, fosters cross-gender performances (like Mary Woronov as Jack Kennedy), and opens up space for excessive and unanticipated affective investments. Most dramatically, we see Susan Bottomly mimic Jackie Kennedy’s crawl across the ba
ck of the presidential limousine as she falls “in and out of her different roles, experiencing herself in close corporeal proximity to Jackie Kennedy, ‘crawling nearby,’ without either becoming her or disavowing her presence.”149 Here, being like Jackie Kennedy allows for a collective queer repossession of an event that had, several years earlier, programmed everyone to feel so sad.
If Warhol’s affect theory, centered on liking and likeness, is also a way to be less depressed by the daily news, and by all the ways rulers seek to make the ruled sorrowful and incapable of action, that does not mean it is an attempt to block out an affective experience of the mediated events in question. In the Death and Disaster series from the early 1960s, Warhol depicts grisly car crashes, suicides, electric chairs, white supremacist police violence, and mushroom clouds.150 On the level of aesthetic experience, we are to “like” these images as well, in the sense that we are to be open to them, to allow ourselves to be affected by them, and to seek ways to correspond with them and with others in relation to them.151 By reproducing these images and printing them over decorative colors, Warhol removes them from the anaesthetizing negative feedback loop that Benjamin described. As Gerard Malanga remarked, “If you see a UPI photo, you’re going to grimace; but if you see it on a canvas with color, you might accept it.”152 One can like the image before the “shock value” of the image has consciously registered; because viewers “don’t have to think,” Warhol explained, they can “just sort of see the things and they like them and they understand them easier” (IBYM, 32). With these images, in some ways “the meaning going away” is a precondition for being affected by them.153
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