54 Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered” October, no. 62 (Fall 1992), 3–41, 17.
55 Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” SW4, 329.
56 Georg Simmel, “Excursus on the Sociology of Sense Perception” (1911), in Sociology, Inquiry into the Construction of Social Forms, vol. 1, trans. and ed. Anthony J. Blasi, Anton K. Jacobs, and Mathew Kanjiranthinkal (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2009), 573; cited in Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 341. See also Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”(1903), in Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Form, 324–39 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).
57 Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics,” 17. In such a situation, Buck-Morss argues, our assemblage of cognitive, affective, and perceptual systems for interacting with and processing the world reverses its role. Instead of mimetic openness, “its goal is to numb the organism, to deaden the senses, to repress memory: the cognitive system of synaesthetics has become, rather, one of anaesthetics” (18).
58 Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 79–80.
59 Hansen helpfully summaries Benjamin’s position: “The alienation of the senses that abets the deadly violence of imperialist warfare and fascism can be undone only on the terrain of technology itself, by means of new media of reproduction that allow for a collective and playful (that is, nonfatal) innervation of the technologically transformed physis” (ibid., 80). At the same time, Benjamin was interested in how Baudelaire responded to this situation by becoming a traumatophile, actively seeking to break through the anaesthetic defense, dramatizing for his readers the lengths to which one had to go to have an experience, and showing us why we usually do not. In this way, Benjamin suggests in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” we could at least experience the loss of our ability to have an experience.
60 SW2, 720.
61 SW2, 684.
62 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 171. On the suppression of similarity in logic, and on identity and nonidentity, also see sections 510–12 and 515–17 of The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), 276–80.
63 Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 153.
64 Andy Warhol, “Underground Films: Art or Naughty Movies,” interview by Douglas Arango, Movie TV Secrets (June 1966); cited by Benjamin Buchloh in “Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art: 1956–1966,” in Michelson, Andy Warhol, 1–46, 5.
65 Warhol made the reproduction remark in his 1985 interview with Benjamin Buchloh (IBYM, 323). Apropos simulation, Jean Baudrillard writes, “Here it is a question of a reversal of origin and finality, for all the forms change once they are not so much mechanically reproduced but conceived from the point-of-view of the their very reproducibility, diffracted from a generating nucleus we call the model.” Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 100 (also, for comments on Warhol specifically, 136, 144, 158–59).
66 Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 54.
67 Somewhat ironically, because photographs of money cannot legally be reproduced, these first silkscreens were based on Warhol’s drawings of money. Shortly thereafter, Warhol began to work mainly with photo-based silkscreens. On the twists and turns in production methods during this period, see the fascinating discussion in CR1, esp. 131–50 (on the Dollar Bills) and 205–6 (on the first photo-silkscreened paintings). For an extended reading of these paintings and drawings, see Printz, “Making Money/Printing Painting: Warhol’s Dollar Bill Paintings,” in Criticism 56, no. 3 (Summer 2014; Warhol special issue).
68 Gerard Malanga observes, “When you’re working with a silk screen, you don’t get everything worked out totally in advance in what you’re going to do, in terms of what you want the effect to be. So, everything is going to come out chancy. I mean, sometimes we’d make a mistake, and there’d be a slight space between the image here, let’s say. It wouldn’t be a seamless thing. And that was an accident! We missed it. Andy took all of those accidents into account, as being part of the art.” In Smith, Conversations, 170. See also Malanga’s description of the process in Scherman and Dalton, Pop, 127.
69 I think Buchloh here is probably referring to seriality as a repetitive structuring principle in the most general sense, not to serialism (as developd by Arnold Schoenberg) in the sense of twelve-tone music, which orders the twelve notes of the chromatic scale, which is then used as the basis for composition. Thanks to Charles Kronengold for pointing this out.
70 For a brilliant reading of these fantastic early Pop paintings, see Michael Moon, “Screen Memories, or, Pop Comes from the Outside: Warhol and Queer Childhood,” in Doyle, Flatley, and Muñoz, Pop Out, 78–100, reprinted in Moon, A Small Boy and Others, 95–116.
71 For the emphasis on liking and likeness as itself a point of similarity, also see Dan Graham’s 1969 Likes: A Computer Astrological Dating-Placement Service, an advertisement placed in a local newspaper that used a set of “like relations,” based partly on astrological categories, to “define what you are like” and “what you would like your date to be like.” Also see his Like (1971), a performance in which “Two performers have been instructed to convince the other (the ways in which) he is like him (and him is like the first performer).” It is designed to “communicate parts of likenesses: gesture, verbal dialogue, hand or skin manipulation,” ideally producing a “continuous, gradual coming together until a point where this development is arrested and reverses is reached (perhaps at boundaries of self).” Both works are documented in Garry Neill Kennedy, The Last Art College: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1968–1978 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 20, 94–95.
72 As Judith Butler put it, borrowing from Derrida (but referring to the imitation of sexual identities), such an “imitation does not copy that which is prior, but produces and inverts the very terms of priority and derivativeness” (“Imitation,” 313).
73 Epistemology, 87. Sedgwick is here borrowing from Christopher Craft, “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Representations, no. 8 (FaIl 1984), 107–34, esp. 114. Foucault influentially placed this psychological/medical model of “contrary sexual sensations” at the origin of the idea of sexual identity as such (a placement that Sedgwick complicates in Epistemology). The new homosexual identity is characterized, Foucault wrote, “less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself” (History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction [New York: Random House, 1978], 43). This discourse of inversion, central to any account of modern sexuality, finds early, influential articulations in the works of Karl Ulrichs, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Havelock Ellis. For one historical account of this discourse, see George Chauncey, “From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine and the Changing Conceptualization of Female Deviance,” Salamagundi, nos. 58–59 (Fall 1982/Winter 1983), 114–45. On the centrality of the idea of inversion, and the related concept of the “intermediate sex” to the “fairy,” a relevant identity formation for Warhol, see Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), esp. 47–63.
74 See Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990) and The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), including Adam Phillips’s response to Butler within that book; Borch-Jacobsen, Emotional Tie.
75 Fuss, Identification Papers, 11, 12. This is not to say that the distinction is maintained even in Freud. The effort to reconceptualize gender and sexuality within queer theory (especially in the work of Judith Butler) has refocused attention on the precariousness of the opposition between desire and identification within psychoanalysis, especially around Freud’s attempts to understand affect and the “emotional tie.” While Freud himself would complicate the tension between identification and desire
in various ways (as he complicates so many of his theories and concepts), especially when he turns his attention to the emotional tie (of which identification is seen as the earliest instance) instead of “desire,” the opposition between desire and identification, especially concerning “same sex” object choice, persists.
76 Jason Edwards lucidly describes the incoherent logic of the inversion model in his excellent Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Routledge Critical Thinkers (London: Routledge, 2009), 26–28.
77 Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 101.
78 Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (1928; New York: Doubleday, 1990), 187. See Heather Love’s brilliant reading of this scene and its critical reception in Feeling Backward, 114–24. On Stephen’s masculinity, see also Esther Newton’s groundbreaking “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman,” Signs 9 (1984): 557–75. For an important reading of Stephen as transsexual, see Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
79 Hall, Well of Loneliness, 203.
80 “Imitation,” 312.
81 See Chauncey, Gay New York, chap. 2, “The Fairy as Intermediate Sex.”
82 For the radio appearance, see Jean Stein, Edie: American Girl (edited with George Plimpton) (New York: Grove Press, 1982), 203–4; for the “Mrs. Geldzahler” story, Emile de Antonio and Mitch Tuchman, Painters Painting (New York: Abbeville Press, 1984), 129–30. See also the powerful photographs by Christopher Makos of Warhol in drag, and Warhol’s assertion that as a little boy he wanted to be a tap dancer like Shirley Temple: “I never wanted to be a painter; I wanted to be a tap dancer” (IBYM, 89). On Warhol and Temple, see Blake Stimson, Citizen Warhol (London: Reaktion, 2014), 88–100. For critical commentary on Warhol’s identification with women, including his mother, see Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol, esp. chap. 2, “Pussy Heaven”; Neil Printz’s dissertation “Other Voices, Other Rooms: Between Andy Warhol and Truman Capote, 1948–1961” (CUNY, 2000); and Lucy Mulroney, “One Blue Pussy,” Criticism 56, no. 3 (Summer 2014; Warhol special issue). On his identification with his mother and on “Warholas-she” and “Warholas Mom,” see Hilton Als, “Basquiat and I,” in Andy Warhol Jean-Michel Basquiat Collaboration Paintings (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2002).
83 Foundlings (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 1.
84 Crimp, “Getting the Warhol We Deserve,” Social Text, no. 59 (Summer 1999), 49–66, 64.
85 Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 86. For Bersani, it is by way of the homoness of homosexuality, the love of “the same” (which inevitably fails to be or stay the same), that we might be “free us from an oppressive psychology of desire as lack” and move to a place where “the antagonisms between the different and the same no longer exist” (Homos [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995], 59). In contrast, Warhol’s promotion of similarity, precisely as distinct from sameness, more directly proposes an alternative to the discourses and institutions supporting the same-different binary and the logic of identity.
86 Homos, 146.
87 Such identity categories, Butler argues, “tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression” (“Imitation,” 308). But, she argues, while such identities may be dominant and compulsory, they are not in any sense natural; in fact their ontological status is precarious because they come into being as an effect of the repeated performances of them: “How and where I ‘play’ at being [a lesbian] is the way in which that ‘being’ gets established instituted, circulated and confirmed” (311). Nevertheless, such categories exert a regulative function on these performances, which are, as Butler emphasizes, more or less compulsory, the entry ticket for being a subject at all.
88 “Imitation,” 309–10. Like Warhol, Butler makes the case for “de-instituting” (315) re-performances of those identities, performances that avowedly fail to achieve a proper identity. For a related examination of the suggestion in popular representations of gay men that “there is something hypermimetic about our behavior,” see Moon, A Small Boy and Others, 9–14.
89 Litvak, personal communication, cited by Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 147
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid.
92 SCUM Manifesto (San Francisco: AK Press, 1996), 41–42. Because it encouraged identity failures, the Factory was a place where a misfit like Solanas, who refused to play the “Daddy’s girl” role she vehemently critiqued in SCUM Manifesto, could imagine finding room to pursue the “absorbing, emotionally satisfying, meaningful activity” she saw as the “actual female function”: “to relate, groove, love, and be herself, irreplaceable by anyone else … to explore, discover, invent, solve problems, crack jokes, make music—all with love. In other words, create a magic world” (6, 14). Inasmuch as it suggests a capacity for correspondence and connection, Solanas’s emphasis on the female ability to “groove” and female “grooviness” forms an interesting point of analogy with Warhol’s liking.
93 This rejection echoed his earlier rejection by the Tanager Gallery, which refused to show his homoerotic drawings in 1956, underscoring the point that Warhol’s fey self-presentation and depictions of male-male eroticism were persistent obstacles to his ascent to the role of “artist.” In You Got to Burn to Shine (New York: High Risk Books, 1994), John Giorno writes, “The art world was homophobic, and an ever-present threat. Anyone who was gay was at a disadvantage. An artist overtly with a boyfriend was at a complete disadvantage, and could ruin his career. De Kooning, Pollock, Motherwell, and the male power structure were mean straight pricks. No matter their liberal views, they deep down hated fags. Their disdain dismissed a gay person’s art. On top of it, those guys really hated Pop Art” (132–33). See Trevor Fairbrother’s groundbreaking “Tomorrow’s Man,” in “Success Is a Job in New York”: The Early Art and Business of Andy Warhol, exh. cat., ed. Donna de Salvo (New York: Grey Gallery, 1989), on the Tanager Gallery episode and on his homoerotic drawings from that period, which were exhibited in the (less prestigious) Bodley Gallery. Gavin Butt considers the centrality of gossip (between de Antonio and Warhol) to the episode in Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948–1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 112–15.
94 De Antonio noted that Rauschenberg and Johns “opened up another world and different sensibility which Warhol thought he could latch on to or identify with. And this is why he not only wanted to meet then, but be like them” (Smith, Conversations, 192).
95 Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York; Touchstone, 1986), 107–8, cited in Love, Feeling Backward, 102.
96 These are de Antonio’s words, from Smith, Conversations: “Andy was too effeminate for Bob and Jap” (189), “he was just too fruity for them” (192).
97 See Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” October, no. 31 (Winter 1984), 16–32. For a fascinating analysis of seriality and mimicry that draws on Caillois—and does not lead to liking everybody—see Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death And Life in America’s Wound Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998), esp. 48–52 on the “mimetic compulsion.”
98 For a different view of these works, see Brenda Richardson’s very helpful “Hiding in Plain Sight: Warhol’s Camouflage,” which argues for seeing these paintings, and his camouflage self-portraits in particular, as documents of Warhol’s desire to blend in. In Andy Warhol, Camouflage (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 1998). For a queer reading of Warhol’s camouflage self-portrait, see Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 138–40. And see Magda Szcześniak’s smart reading of camouflage in Jack Smith, Warhol, and elsewhere in “Blending In and Standing Out: Camouflage and Masking as Queer Tactics of Negotiating Visibility,” View: Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 5 (2014).
99 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 116. This pa
ssage is quoted to powerful effect in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015), 18. See also Michael Warner’s proposition in The Trouble with Normal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) that queer scenes are the true “salons des refuses”: “A relation to others, in these contexts, begins in an acknowledgment of all that is most abject and least reputable in oneself. Shame is bedrock. Queers can be abusive, insulting, and vile toward one another, but because abjection is understood to be the shared condition, they also know how to communicate through such camaraderie a moving and unexpected form of generosity. No one is beneath its reach, not because it prides itself on generosity, but because it prides itself on nothing. The rule is: Get over yourself. Put a wig on before you judge” (35).
Along such lines, one of the things Warhol allowed himself to not like were assertions of normative individuality that pretend to be above any similarity with everybody else, and artists who seem not to like what they paint. See, for instance, his remarks about Edward Kienholz: “I don’t think I really like him … he seems kind of moral to me… . I don’t think he really likes the things he does like he doesn’t really like—greasy hamburgers” (IBYM, 138).
100 On the vital topic of queer shame and queer embarrassment see, among many others, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer Performativity: Henry James’s Art of the Novel,” GLQ 1, no. 1 (1993); Warner, Trouble with Normal; Crimp’s discussion of queer shame in Screen Test No. 2 (starring Mario Montez), in Our Kind of Movie, esp. 35; and Heather Love (on both) in Feeling Backward, esp. 13–14.
101 Love, “Queers ____ This,” 183. See also Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens,” for a related vision of queer politics.
102 POP, 247–48. For Midgette’s later recollections of these events, see Scherman and Dalton, Pop, 394–96
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