8 In Victor Bockris, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol (London: Fourth Estate, 1989), 415.
9 Lane Slate, “USA Artists: Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein” (1966), in IBYM, 81; he repeats the line in Gretchen Berg, “Andy Warhol: My True Story” (1966) in IBYM, 96.
10 “On the Mimetic Faculty,” SW2, 720–22, 720. Although a preoccupation with the mimetic faculty runs through his work (from “One Way Street” and “Berlin Childhood” to “The Image of Proust” and “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”), Benjamin’s most focused account occurs in a series of related and overlapping short pieces written in 1933, including also “On Astrology” (SW2, 684–85) and “Doctrine of the Similar” (SW2, 694–98).
11 Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 147.
12 Benjamin, “Experience,” SW2, 553. The concept of the mimetic faculty was central to Benjamin’s attempt to theorize the conditions of possibility for what he called experience “in the strict sense of the term” (Erfahrung), which he discusses in the opening sections of “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” On Erfahrung, see Hansen, Cinema and Experience, xiv, 81–82, 171–73, and Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 67–70.
13 Nancy, Inoperative Community, 33. Similarly, Hansen writes, “Benjamin’s similitude works on the order of affinity (Verwandschaft), rather than sameness, identity, copy, or reproduction” (Cinema and Experience, 147–48).
14 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 157. See Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
15 On the Time Capsules, see Andy Warhol’s Time Capsule 21, ed. John W. Smith and Matthew Wrbican (Pittsburgh: Andy Warhol Museum, 2003); Matt Wrbican, “Warhol’s ‘Time Capsule 51,’” in “Andy Warhol” (special issue, ed. Jonathan Flatley and Anthony Grudin), Criticism 56, no. 3 (Summer 2014); and Scott Herring, The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2014), chap. 2, “Pathological Collectibles.” I discuss Warhol’s collecting in chapter 1.
16 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 3.
17 Such a wish is embedded in the history of the word itself: the current usage (“I like it”) only gradually replaced an older, now obsolete sense: “to please” or “to be pleasing” (in effect, “it likes me”).
18 “Live Oak with Moss” (1860), in The Portable Walt Whitman, ed. Michael Warner (New York: Penguin, 2004), 208. On the utopian and compensatory quality of Whitman’s affirmative impulse, see Warner’s introduction to the volume, and Peter Coviello, “Intimate Nationality: Anonymity and Attachment in Whitman,” American Literature 73, no. 1 (March 2001): 85–119.
19 “I was reflecting that most people thought the Factory was a place where everybody had the same attitudes about everything; the truth was, we were all odds-and-ends misfits, somehow misfitting together” (POP, 219). See Douglas Crimp’s brilliant reading of the double screen Chelsea Girls as an allegory and instantiation of what this might mean: “Misfitting Together,” in Our Kind of Movie, 97–109.
20 I am borrowing here from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Foreword: T Times” and “Queer and Now,” both in Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). Among the writings in the large queer studies archive that have most influenced my usage of “queer” here and throughout the book are, in addition to Sedgwick’s essays in Tendencies, her “Shame, Theatricality and Queer Performativity: Henry James’s Art of the Novel” and “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay Is about You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); the writings of Judith Butler, especially “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York Routledge, 1991) (reprinted in Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin [New York: Routledge, 1993]), and “Critically Queer,” in Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993); Douglas Crimp, “Right On Girlfriend!” Social Text, no. 33 (1992), 2–18; Michael Warner, “Introduction,” in Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Lauren Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public,” in Intimacy, ed. Berlant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Cathy Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ 3 (1997): 437–65; José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) and Cruising Utopia; Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: A Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, Press, 2003); Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007) and “Queers _____ This,” in After Sex? On Writing since Queer Theory, ed. Janet Halley and Andrew Parker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Michael Snediker, Queer Optimism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Mel Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); and Ann Cvetkovich, Depression (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
21 “T Times,” viii.
22 Like a homograph, “like” is a word of the same written form as another but of different meaning; we discern which “like” is meant by its place in a grammatical structure and by its semantic context. But unlike a homograph, the different meanings seem to share an origin and may be confused with each other. On the homograph in relation to the reading of “homosexuality,” see Lee Edelman, Homographesis (New York: Routledge, 1994).
23 The body indicated could be dead or alive; thus, for instance, the Lichyard is the grave yard. See Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Burt, “‘LIKE’: A Speculative Essay about Poetry, Simile, Artificial Intelligence, Mourning, Sex, Rock and Roll, Grammar, Romantic Love,” American Poetry Review 43, no. 1, https://www.aprweb.org/article/quotlikequot-speculative-essay-about-poetry-simile-artificial-intelligence-mourning-sex-rock.
24 On Warhol’s “I” as an imitative effect, see his 1966 interview with Lane Slate, where he says, “It’s so exciting not to think anything. I mean, you should just tell me the words and I can just repeat them because I can’t … uh … I can’t … I’m so empty today. I can’t think of anything. Why don’t you just tell me the words and they’ll just come out of my mouth” (IBYM,80). He makes a similar comment to Gretchen Berg the same year: “The interviewer should just tell me the words he wants me to say and I’ll repeat them after him” (IBYM, 61). The matter of Warhol’s mode of self-presentation in his interviews, as well as the poetics of his interview performances, is a fascinating topic in its own right, smartly treated by Wayne Koestenbaum in his short afterword to IBYM, and Nicholas de Villiers, in his insightful Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes and Warhol (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
25 See Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965). Rosalind Krauss reads Warhol in terms of mimetic desire in “Carnal Knowledge (1996),” in Andy Warhol, ed. Annette Michelson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 111–18, and in chap. 6 of Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).
26 Phil, 53.
27 On melancholia and identification, see “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 243–58. Freud revised his understanding of melancholic identification in The Ego and the Id (1923; Standard Edition, 19:29). See also Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1959). I discuss this in Affective Mapping, esp. 41–50.
&nbs
p; 28 The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1978), 243.
29 “Identification is known to psychoanalysis as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person” (Group Psychology, 46). See also Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995), and Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis and Affect (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992). For another take on the relation between identification and desire, see Leo Bersani, “Sociability and Cruising,” in Is the Rectum a Grave? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
30 “The specular reflection never closes on itself; it does not appear before this possibility of mourning, before and outside this structure of allegory and prosopopoeia which constitutes in advance all ‘being-in-us,’ ‘in-me,’ between us, or between ourselves. The selbst, the soi-meme, the self appears to itself only in this bereaved allegory, in this hallucinatory prosopopoeia—and even before the death of the other actually happens, as we say, in ‘reality.’ The strange situation I am describing here, for example that of my friendship with Paul de Man, would have allowed me to say all of this before his death. It suffices that I know him to be mortal, that he knows me to be mortal—there is no friendship without this knowledge of finitude.” Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 28–29.
31 Borch-Jacobsen makes a similar point in The Emotional Tie: “To affirm that ‘the earliest emotional tie with another person’ is identification is, in effect, to assert that affect as such is identificatory, mimetic, and that there is no ‘proper’ affect except on the condition of a prior ‘affection’ of the ego by another. Another does not affect me because I feel such and such an affect in regard to him, nor even because he succeeds in communicating an affect to me by way of words. He affects me because ‘I’ am that ‘other,’ following an identification that is my affection, the strangest alteration of my proper autoaffection. My identity is a passion. And reciprocally, my passions are always identificatory” (73).
32 Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (1974; London: Verso, 2005), 191; Aristotle, Poetics, sect. 22, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1947), 1479.
33 See also Sandor Ferenczi’s writings on introjection, especially “Introjection and Transference (1909),” in Sex in PsychoAnalysis (New York: Dover, 1956). Ferenczi coined the term “introjection” to designate the opposite of projection; in this mode of transference, external objects are brought “inside,” inasmuch as they substitute for their (internalized) models. He argues that introjection is a strategy for “mollifying free floating affects by extension of the circle of interest.”
34 “What are transferences? They are new editions or facsimiles of the tendencies and fantasies which are aroused and made conscious of the progress of the analysis; but they have this peculiarity, which is characteristic for their species, that they replace some earlier person by the person of the physician.” Freud also refers to the transferences as “new impressions or reprints,” noting that in some cases there are “revised editions.” Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 138.
35 From the Diaries: “When I saw myself in those home movies we took on the Cape last weekend I hated myself so much. Every simple thing I do looks strange. I have such a strange walk and a strange look. If I could only have been a peculiar comic in the movies, I would have looked like a puppet. But it’s too late. What’s wrong with me?” (Saturday, May 30, 1981, 385). Or later, on seeing a tape he did for a TV show: “I was terrible. Reeeallly reeeallly peculiar. I’m just a freak. I can’t change it. I’m too unusual” (January 25, 1983, 481). See also Tony Scherman and David Dalton, Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 8.
36 Deceit, Desire and the Novel, esp. 223, where Girard asserts that in consumer society, “the value of the article consumed is based solely on how it is regarded by the Other… . More recently, David Riesman and Vance Packard have shown that even the vast American middle class, which is as free from want and even more uniform than the circles described by Proust, is also divided into abstract compartments. It produces more and more taboos and excommunications among absolutely similar but opposed units. Insignificant distinctions appear immense and produce incalculable effects.”
37 Phil, 199.
38 Analogy, Silverman writes, is Richter’s “name for a special kind of relationship, one that has become more capacious with each new development in his art making. An analogy brings two or more things together on the basis of their lesser or greater resemblance. I say ‘lesser or greater’ because although in some of Richter’s analogies similarity and difference are evenly balanced, in others similarity outweighs difference, or difference, similarity. But regardless of the form they take, these couplings neutralize the two principles by means of which we are accustomed to think: identity and antithesis” (Flesh of My Flesh, 173).
39 See Susan Buck-Morss on shared practices and fantasies of modernity in the United States and the Soviet Union in Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in the East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). On the basic logic and origins of mass culture, see Richard Ohmann’s indispensable Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets and Class at the Turn of the Century (New York: Verso, 1998), where he demonstrates that beginning around the turn of the twentieth century in the United States, modern mass culture, in the form of magazines (and later radio, film, and television), had created a situation in which, for the first time, thousands, even hundreds of thousands or millions, of people, could and did experience the same cultural objects simultaneously or nearly so.
40 For an interesting reading of Warhol’s “commonism” in relation to the visual modes of the Cold War, see John J. Curley, A Conspiracy of Images: Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter and the Art of the Cold War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), esp. chap. 2, “The Development of Andy Warhol’s Pop Eye.”
41 See Nathan Gluck in Smith, Conversations: “You know, at one time, when the movement first got started, he wanted to call his stuff ‘Commonist Painting.’ Meaning, it was common… . I know there was this plug about ‘Commonist Art’ because they were going to paint common things, but ‘Pop’ stuck and it never got off the ground, and of course it sounded like ‘Communist’” (67). Brief discussions of the term can also be found in Wayne Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol (New York: Viking, 2001), 63; Blake Stimson, “Andy Warhol’s Red Beard,” Art Bulletin 83, no. 3 (September 2001): 527–47; Caroline Jones, The Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), esp. 204–5; and Scherman and Dalton, Pop, 100–101.
42 Inoperative Community, 33.
43 He extends his point about Coke to include hot dogs, and then TV and film, noting that “rich people can’t see a sillier version of Truth or Consequences or a scarier version of the Exorcist. You can get just as revolted as they can—you can have the same nightmares” (Phil, 101).
44 See Berlant, “National Brands/National Bodies: Imitation of Life,” and Warner, “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject,” both in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). I write about the appeal of publicity and consumption in “Warhol Gives Good Face: Publicity and the Politics of Prosopopoeia,” in Pop Out: Queer Warhol, ed. Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, and José Esteban Muñoz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).
45 Cruising Utopia, 7.
46 Stanton wrote the essay for a college art class and sent it to Warhol, who liked it so much that he reprinted it in its entirety as an invitation to his first New York exhibition at the Stable Gallery. The archives at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh have an original copy of the essay/invitation. Cited in CR1, 70. Stephen Burt’s observation echoes Stanton’s: “The more often I like what you like, the more likely it becomes that you are like, and that you will like, me” (“
LIKE,” n.p.).
47 One might also consider that the antiwar movement and the countercultures that surrounded it were in part formed through shared incorporation of and attunement to “a market mediated form of popular expression (rock music) inflected with the rebellious sentiments of the working class and oppressed peoples, particularly African Americans.” Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2000), 114.
48 On James Dean (of whom Warhol made at least two drawings in the 1950s) in particular, see Roy Grundmann’s excellent “Andy Warhol, James Dean, and White Gay Men,” in Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 132–63.
49 “‘Except Like a Tracing’: Defectiveness, Accuracy, and Class in Early Warhol,” October, no. 140 (Spring 2012), 139–64, 141. Grudin demonstrates how this is evident in Warhol’s source images, especially for his earliest Pop works, which were usually “the cheapest and most accessible images available—images marketed to and associated with a working-class demographic.”
50 Discussed in chapter 3.
51 See Juan A. Suárez, “Warhol’s 1960s Films, Amphetamine, and Queer Materiality,” and Chelsea Weathers, “Drugtime,” both in Criticism 56, no. 3 (Summer 2014; Warhol special issue).
52 See Mary Woronov’s compelling memoir, Swimming Underground: My Years in the Warhol Factory (Boston: Journey Editions, 1995). On the A-men, see Scherman and Dalton, Pop, 203–7. For a related discussion of queer imitation and initiation, see Michael Moon’s brilliant A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).
53 Paolo Virno makes an argument along these lines in “Mirror Neurons, Linguistic Negation, Reciprocal Recognition,” in Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation (New York: Semiotext(e), 2008), 175–90. This is also a persistent focus of Jean-Luc Nancy’s writing, in Inoperative Community, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), and elsewhere.
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