103 “Paranoid Reading,” 147.
104 See Kelly Cresap’s smart Pop Trickster Fool: Warhol Performs Naiveté (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004) on Warhol’s performance and the critical preoccupation with his apparent stupidity.
105 Koestenbaum, “Afterword: Warhol’s Interviews,” in IBYM, 395–97; De Villiers, Opacity and the Closet, esp. chap. 3, “‘What Do You Have to Say for Yourself?’ Warhol’s Opacity.”
106 In a way, the most reparative and nonparanoid Warhol criticism has been accomplished by the two major recent catalogue raisonné projects: Callie Angell’s work on Warhol’s films, which showed how careful and considered his choices were, how he was constantly trying out new techniques and exploring the possibilities of the medium, and Neil Printz’s careful scholarship on the paintings and sculpture, which demonstrates Warhol’s assiduous move toward the silkscreen method and the explosion of activity that resulted from its discovery. In their precise descriptions of Warhol’s practices, Warhol’s weird and surprising specificity can be apprehended. Although quite distinct from these publications, Douglas Crimp’s “Our Kind of Movie” engages in a reparative description of Warhol’s specific filmic practices that allows their queer aims and effects to be apprehended as such; the chapter titled “Spacious” is especially ambitious and effective in this regard.
107 “The Value of Frustration,” an interview with Adam Phillips, Jane Elliot, and John David Rhodes, World Picture 3, 2009; http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_3/Phillips.html (accessed October 2, 2015).
108 Robert Hullot-Kentor, translator of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), also uses “liking” for Wohlgefallen. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, translators of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), explain their different choice thus: “Kant’s many terms connected with pleasure and pain also presented problems. Meredith’s ‘delight’ for Wohlgefallen, which Kant uses as his most generic term for positive rather than negative feeling, seemed dated and too specific, and Pluhar’s use of ‘liking’ as a noun seemed unnatural. We have chosen to translate the nouns Wohlgefallen and Mißfallen as ‘satisfaction’ and ‘dissatisfaction’ respectively, using ‘pleasure’ and ‘displeasure’ for Lust and Unlust, ‘enjoyment’ for Genießen, and ‘gratification’ for Vergnügen” (xlviii).
109 Thus, for instance, chapters 2–5 of Pluhar’s Critique of Judgment (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987) are “The Liking That Determines a Judgment of Taste Is Devoid of All Interest,” “A Liking for the Agreeable Is Connected with Interest,” “A Liking for the Good Is Connected with Interest,” “Comparison of the Three Sorts of Liking, Which Differ in Kind.”
110 Zajonc, “Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences,” American Psychologist 35, no. 2 (February 1980): 151–75; Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (New York: basic Books, 2006). Zajonc describes a set of experiments that show that “mere exposure” to a stimulus increases the chances we will like it, even if the exposure was so brief that it did not produce recognition; liking is thus autonomous from knowledge and recognition.
111 Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1981), 27. Barthes uses the English “like” in the French as well, as if the very concept and feeling is named best by the English and is even, perhaps, somehow fundamentally American. “Le studium, c’est le champ très vaste du désir nonchalant, de l’intérêt divers, du goût inconséquent : j’aime/je n’aime pas, I like/I don’t. Le studium est de l’ordre du to like, et non du to love; il mobilise un demi—désir, un demi—vouloir; c’est la même sorte d’intérêt vague, lisse, irresponsable, qu’on a pour des gens, des spectacles, des vêtements, des livres, qu’on trouve « bien».”
112 For another interesting critical comment on liking, see Adorno: “If one seeks to find out who ‘likes’ a commercial piece, one cannot avoid the suspicion that liking and disliking are inappropriate to the situation, even if the person questioned clothes his reactions in those words. The familiarity of the piece is a surrogate for the quality ascribed to it. To like it is almost the same thing as to recognize it. An approach in terms of value judgments has become a fiction for the person who finds himself hemmed in by standardized music goods.” Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regressions of Listening,” in Essays on Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002): 288–317, 288.
113 New York Times, May 28, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/opinion/29franzen.html?_r=0 (accessed May 31, 2015).
114 Franzen describes Facebook’s Like button as “the transformation [of] a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice.” Of course, Facebook (like all forms of mass culture) sells its users’ attention to advertisers: when one “likes” something on Facebook, one is generating income for Facebook by producing data that helps advertisers learn about its users’ tastes, turn-ons, anxieties, and emotional ties and how these may be directed, indeed manipulated, as in Facebook’s notorious mood experiment. “For one week in January 2012, data scientists skewed what almost 700,000 Facebook users saw when they logged into its service. Some people were shown content with a preponderance of happy and positive words; some were shown content analyzed as sadder than average. And when the week was over, these manipulated users were more likely to post either especially positive or negative words themselves.” Robinson Meyer, “Everything We Know about Facebook’s Secret Mood Manipulation Experiment,” Atlantic, June 28, 2014.
115 See Lucie-Smith, “Conversations with Artists”:
ELS: Do you ever feel affectionate about people, or is that against feeling too?
AW: Well, no, I like everybody, so that’s affectionate.
ELS: What … that the great thing is to feel affectionate toward everybody in the world.
AW: Yes.
116 Burt, “LIKE,” n.p.
117 The connection between Facebook liking and advertising was dramatized by Mat Honan, who wrote that when he indiscriminately “liked” everything on his Facebook “newsfeed,” the feed was transformed from updates about friends and colleagues into nothing but advertisements. “I Liked Everything I Saw on Facebook and Here’s What It Did to Me,” Wired, August 11, 2014, http://www.wired.com/2014/08/i-liked-everything-i-saw-on-facebook-for-two-days-heres-what-it-did-to-me/?mbid=social_fb (accessed May 13, 2015).
118 Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 6. In paintings of Campbell’s soup cans or Coke bottles, Warhol also reconnects the apparently or ideally disinterested character of sophisticated artistic taste with what Bourdieu calls “the elementary taste for the flavours of food” (1).
119 Spinoza, Ethics, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (New York: Penguin, 1996), 113 (II, 204). See Deleuze, “L’affect et l’idée,” course lecture at the Université de Paris VIII, Vincennes, January 24, 1978; available at www.deleuzeweb.com in the original French and in English translation. See also Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. M. Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1992), esp. chap. 14, “What Can the Body Do?”
120 The subject, then, is something like the set of relations among the parts of a body, which affect each other according to their own melodies, even as they encounter and are affected by objects in the world. Deleuze elaborates on Spinoza’s understanding of the body as constituted by the relation among its parts: “A body must be defined by the ensemble of relations which compose it, or, what amounts to exactly the same thing, by its power to be affected [pouvoir d’être affecté]” (“L’affect et l’idée”). Michael Hardt expands on this: “We need to shift perspective so as no longer to consider a body as an entity (or even a cluster of entities) but instead as a relation. When a new relation is added, a larger body is composed, and when a relation is broken, the body diminishes or decomposes. All this simply means that the border between the in
side and outside of bodies, and hence between internal and external causes, is fluid and subject to our efforts.” Hardt, “The Power to Be Affected,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 28, no. 3 (September 2015): 215–22. See Mary Zournazi, “Navigating Movements: An Interview with Brian Massumi,” for a lucid gloss on Deleuze’s concept of affect, http://www.international-festival.org/node/111 (accessed May 31, 2015); also in Zournazi, Hope: New Philosophies for Change (New York: Routledge, 2003).
121 Deleuze, “L’affect et l’idée.”
122 The distinction between affect and emotion has been much discussed, with Silvan Tomkins and Brian Massumi offering two influential accounts. For both, affect is irreducible, the more basic kind of feeling, operating according to an “autonomous” logic, not reducible to the logics of cognition, memory, will, or perception, though constantly interacting with those other logics. Tomkins sees a distinct number of basic affects (shame, interest, surprise, joy, fear, disgust, anger, distress, dissmell), each with its own internal, systemic logic and its own experiential quality (including distinct facial and bodily responses). An emotion, as Tomkins defines it, involves the combination of affects with ideas, with memories, with other affects, to create a kind of composite. Where emotions are widely variable across cultures and historical periods for Tomkins, affects tend to be more or less consistent. Borrowing from Deleuze (and his work on Spinoza), Massumi argues for affect as an unqualified intensity, a kind of presubjective nonconscious energy that the body experiences in relation to stimuli. Emotion is what happens to the affect once it has been “owned” or captured and named in language by the subject as “mine.” An emotion is a personal feeling. Until it has been owned in this way, it remains a potentiality. Massumi: “Emotion is the way the depth of that ongoing experience (described by Spinoza) registers personally at a given moment” (Zournazi, “Navigating Movements”). Where does Warhol’s liking fit in here? As should be clear, I do not think that liking maps onto Tomkins’s affects, although it bears some similarities to his understanding of the affect interest in the way that it prepares us to pay attention and become engaged with something, and with the surprise (or startle) affect in the way that it can mark a transition from one feeling or orientation to another. Liking seems to be more basic and less specific than any of Tomkins’s affects. As an opening and a transition, it seems closer to the understanding of affect that Massumi borrows from Deleuze. Yet, even if Warhol’s liking may be mostly precognitive and unconscious, it is not an unqualified pure potentiality. There is a subject—Warhol’s “I”—doing the liking, even if that “I” is more of a semblable than a liberal individual. On the affect-emotion distinction, see also Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), esp. 22–30, and Flatley, Affective Mapping, 11–19.
123 In this it bears some similarity to Deleuze’s efforts to redefine desire (away from a psychoanalytic focus on lack): “For me, desire includes no such lack; it is also not a natural given. Desire is wholly a part of the functioning heterogeneous assemblage. It is a process, as opposed to a structure or a genesis. It is an affect, as opposed to a feeling. It is a haecceity—the individual singularity of a day, a season, a life. As opposed to a subjectivity, it is an event, not a thing or a person.” Deleuze, “Desire and Pleasure,” Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, trans. David Lapoujade, (London: Semiotext(e), 2006), 122–34, 130.
124 Deleuze, “L’affect et l’idée.”
125 Zournazi, “Navigating Movements.”
126 Haidt, Happiness Hypothesis, 12, 17, 26–27.
127 “Ontologically mood (Stimmung) is a primordial kind of Being for Dasein, in which Dasein is disclosed to itself prior to all cognition and volition and beyond their range of disclosure” (Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson [San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962], 175). I rely on both this translation and the newer Stambaugh translation (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), but unless otherwise noted, references are to the Macquarrie and Robinson text. In the German edition (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1979), pages of which are referenced in both English translations, the primary discussion of Stimmung is on pages 134–40.
128 Being and Time, 176; italics Heidegger’s. The best overall account of Stimmung in Heidegger can be found in Charles Guignon, “Moods in Heidegger’s Being and Time,” in What Is an Emotion? Classic Readings in Philosophical Psychology, ed. Robert C. Solomon and Cheshire Calhoun (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 230–43. But see also Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Atmosphere, Mood Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012); and Flatley, Affective Mapping, esp. 19–24, 109–13, and “How a Revolutionary Counter-Mood Is Made,” New Literary History 43 (2012): 503–25.
129 Guignon, “Moods,” 237.
130 Heidegger writes, “Under the strongest pressure and resistance, nothing like an affect would come about, and the resistance itself would remain essentially undiscovered, if Being-in-the-world, with its state-of-mind [Befindlichkeit], had not already submitted itself [sich schon angewiesen] to having entities within-the-world ‘matter’ to it in a way which its moods have outlined in advance” (Being and Time, 177).
131 The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 67. As Tavia Nyong’o emphasized (in a private conversation), perhaps melody is the wrong musical metaphor here, since melody stands out from the background; Stimmung may be more like the key, major or minor, that is more or less invisible but establishes what sounds good or right.
132 Warhol: “Well, I care … I still care, but it would be so much easier not to care” (IBYM, 81). Also: “I still think its nice to care about people. And Hollywood movies are uncaring” (IBYM, 188).
133 The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). For the best reading of affective labor in relation to aesthetic practices, see the chapter titled “Zany” in Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
134 Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 134, 135
135 Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, vol. 2 (1962; New York: Springer, 1992), 433; cited in Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 135. Sedgwick emphasizes the continuity between what we all do in our everyday lives and what academic or philosophical theorists of affect do. We should probably read any given “theory of affect” as, at the same time, an effort to create a workable everyday affect theory. In fact, we might understand the remarkable range of efforts in “academic” affect theory over the last twenty years or so as a response to the felt difficulty of developing workable affect theories in everyday life.
136 Thanks to Jennifer Doyle for the observation about Waldron and Viva liking but not loving each other. See her “Between Friends,” in A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies, ed. George Haggerty and Molly McGarry (New York: Blackwell, 2007). On Warhol’s love for pornography, see Tom Waugh, “Cockteaser,” in Doyle, Flatley, and Muñoz, Pop Out, 51–77. In POPism, Warhol (and Hackett) write, “Personally, I loved porno and I bought lots of it all the time—the really dirty, exciting stuff. All you had to do was figure out what turned you on, and then just buy the dirty magazines and movie prints that are right for you, the way you’d go for the right pills or the right cans of food. (I was so avid for porno that on my first time out of the house after the shooting I went straight to 42nd Street and checked out the peep shows with Vera Cruise and restocked on dirty magazines.)” (POP, 294).
137 On Warhol’s Sex Parts and Torso paintings and drawings, and the photo sessions from which they were derived, see Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 337–44.
138 Crimp, “Disss-co (A Fragment), from Before Pictures, a Memoir of 1970s New York,” in “Disco” (special issue, ed. Jonathan Flatley and Charles Kronengold), Criticism
50, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 1–18, 15.
139 In “Friendship as a Way of Life” (in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow [New York: New Press, 1997]), Foucault says, “Homosexuality is a historic occasion to reopen affective and relational virtualities, not so much through the intrinsic qualities of the homosexual, but because the ‘slantwise’ position of the latter, as it were, the diagonal lines he can lay out in the social fabric allow these virtualities to come to light” (138).
140 Tina Takemoto, “The Melancholia of AIDS: Interview with Douglas Crimp,” Art Journal 62, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 80–90, 86.
141 “Disss-co,” 15. See also Samuel Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: NYU Press, 1999), on the modes of conviviality that flourished in the porn theaters of Time Square.
142 Takemoto, “Melancholia,” 86.
143 See Benjamin Kahan’s reading of Warhol’s marriage to his tape recorder as an instance of his eroticization of objects, and as one of the effects of his “alloerotic celibacy” or “sexualized celibacy,” in Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 129.
144 This is Deleuze describing Spinoza in “L’affect et l’idée.”
145 On the Jackie paintings, see CR2A, 103–5.
146 Gerard Malanga observed that Warhol was attracted to Jackie as “the most glamorous woman in the world, or something like that” (Smith, Conversations, 166).
147 “She’s so fabulous!” John Giorno reports Warhol saying about Jackie’s “electrifying” walk with the black veil (You Got to Burn to Shine, 126).
148 Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 137–60, 142.
149 Ibid., 159–60.
150 Even though (or in part because) they did not sell at first, these are probably Warhol’s most critically praised works (as he predicted they would be), in part because it is easier to discern a critique of mass culture and the commodity in his focus on the negative. For two influential readings of these works, see Thomas Crow, “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol,” and Hal Foster, “Death in America,” both in Michelson, Andy Warhol.
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