Like Andy Warhol

by Jonathan Flatley

  On a societal level, “functional differentiation,” Luhmann writes, “leads to a condition in which the genesis of problems and the solution to problems fall asunder. Problems can no longer be solved by the system that produces them. They have to be transferred to the system that is best equipped and specialized to solve them.”14 Each subsystem has to be ready to deal with problems generated out of its sphere, even though, as we know, they often are not. In any case, life is less and less determined by local contexts, as the local system context—whether art, the family, the city, psychiatry, the school system, or the legal system—is always responding to problems produced elsewhere. While each system has increased “autonomy”—an ability to apply “specific rules and procedures to special problems”—it also has decreased “autarchy,” that is, less and less authority outside of its own subsystem, and less of an ability to decide what problems it will deal with.15 The increased autonomy can produce a false sense of confidence in the efficaciousness of its own operations. Modernism could be seen as the recurring moment of misrecognition whereby each system operates as if its autonomy means that it can and should solve the world’s problems. Modernist legal theory, economics, international relations (think of the League of Nations), linguistics (the invention of Esperanto), and of course literature and art—all are colored with a such a redemptive strain.

  There is a strong tradition wherein art is understood as a space that can redeem, repair, or at least offer a temporary hiding place (for artist and viewer) from a depressing world, from that thing in the world which one wants to escape: capitalism, means-ends rationality, reification, misogyny, homophobia, racism, or another oppressive social force. One critique of the idea of autonomous art has been that it is essentially compensatory, and therefore affirmative of the order of things.16 That “art develops its own strategies to satisfy needs that originate in other realms of social interaction” was seen as preventing people from trying to actually change these other realms of social interaction.17 It was against this idea of art as a separate sphere that the historical avant-garde—the Russian futurists, Dada, and surrealism—reacted.18 The idea was that if you destroyed art, then all those creative energies that were being wasted in the sphere of art would be released into the world. Hence the avant-garde slogan “Art into Life.”

  As a rejoinder to the avant-gardiste desire to sublate art into life, Luhmann might point out that there are not just two systems, “art” and “life,” but multiple systems, and dissolving one opposition does not overthrow the entire aggregate. Indeed, the differentiation of society makes opposition difficult: inasmuch as we are always seeing the world from within a system at any given time, it is impossible to have a total picture of all the systems. This is a major distinction from the whole-parts model of society; here, there is no holistic logic, no unified system organizing the systems. This means that there is inevitably a contradiction between “a phenomenological description of the life of an individual and a more properly structural model of the conditions of existence of that experience” because that overall structural model is impossible to attain.19 This contradiction between the experience of everyday life and the possibility of describing the transpersonal, historical forces that make that experience possible has become endemic. As such, it constitutes a basic problem for any attempt to represent the world. LeWitt and Warhol offer quite different responses to the problem created by this contradiction, but they are both, I argue, preoccupied with it. The attractions of their art as well as the significance of their differences make more sense when we presume that the world structured by what Luhmann calls “functional differentiation” is their context.

  It is widely recognized that Warhol’s Pop represents a move away from autonomous art.20 For Warhol, there is not going to be any redemption going on in any one system, art included. Instead, he ceaselessly focuses on moments of interface or connection between systems (the art world, the artist’s studio, cinema, advertising, mass culture), to increase his own capacities for affecting and being affected by the world and to show us how we might do so as well. In his art, Warhol reproduces the experience of negotiating between different social systems by setting up the transfer of an object of perception produced by one systemic logic—usually a medium—to another. So, for instance, photographic images are transposed onto a painted canvas by way a technology associated with mass printing in Warhol’s silkscreen paintings; a video recording playing on a television monitor is viewed through the medium of 16-millimeter film (in Outer and Inner Space); or a series of tape-recorded conversations are typewritten by various volunteers to make A: A Novel. My claim is that such “transactions of context” (I. A. Richards’s definition of metaphor) produce creative mistranslations that reorient our perception toward similarities and correspondences. Such a reorientation, I have been arguing, is Warhol’s principal tactic for getting in the mood to like things.

  Where Warhol is interested in this moment of system coupling or system interface as a way to produce similarities and stimulate our perception of them, LeWitt is concerned with the nominalistic pleasures of systematicity as such; his systems-based wall drawings and serial works reproduce in an abstracted form the moment of “functional simplification,” that “reduction of complexity that can be constructed and realized even though the world and the society where this takes place is unknown.”21 Within the aesthetic experience itself, LeWitt restages the above-mentioned contradiction between everyday experience and a structural model of the conditions of possibility of that experience. This aesthetic experience is characterized by a tension between the visual perception of his work and the cognitive comprehension of the structural concept organizing it. Much (although of course not all) of LeWitt’s work dramatizes this difference between comprehension and perception. LeWitt thereby takes the contradiction produced by autonomous, competing systems (that preclude a view of the totality of systems), abstracts it into an aesthetic feeling, and encompasses this feeling itself within a system. In Variations on Incomplete Open Cubes, LeWitt duplicates and defamiliarizes the social fact of this contradiction and at the same time shows us what the resolution of this contradiction would feel like, since the total organizing concept is there, even if it is in tension with its own material manifestation. This move takes on additional critical force, I contend, inasmuch as mass culture and the commodity present the world as if everyday life is more or less in harmony with the social order as a whole, as if the particular is always happily made meaningful by the universal. If LeWitt’s work interrupts this illusion of harmony between the particular with the general, it has a more utopian side as well, reproducing as an abstract feeling what Luhmann argues is the best we can hope for: to engage imaginatively and creatively with the possibilities of combination between different systems. This is what Luhmann calls “the unity of the imaginary space of [a system’s] own combinatory potentials.”22 After all, “and all of its combinations” is one of LeWitt’s favorite ways to build a system.

  “Liking things is like being a machine”

  Children’s play is everywhere permeated by mimetic modes of behavior, and its realm is by no means limited to what one person can imitate in another. The child plays at being not only a shopkeeper or teacher but also a windmill or a train.

  Walter Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar”23

  Warhol’s often-cited statement that he “want[s] to be a machine” has a simplicity of diction that belies the number of symbolic strands and social desires and anxieties it catches up. To begin with (as I suggested above), it provocatively departs from dominant ideologies of artistic imagination, composition, and creativity while appearing to affirm Max Weber’s “iron cage” of complete rationalization and to welcome consumer capitalism’s replacement of human feeling and imagination with automatic, standardized behaviors and patterns of mind. But more than anything else, Warhol’s assertion has been taken to refer to what Branden Joseph calls his “intention to render himself an affectless and uncaring mac
hine.”24 This personal disinclination or incapacity to have feelings or be affected is usually seen to extend to his works, which are thereby understood as illustrations of an effort to achieve emotional distance from the world. But then how do we account for Warhol’s observation that liking is machine-like? Isn’t liking an affect, perhaps even a way of caring in a world where “it would be so much easier not to care”?25

  In his 1963 interview with Gene Swenson, Warhol clearly associates being a machine with liking and being alike. He follows his assertion that “everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we’re getting more and more that way” by stating that “I think everybody should be a machine. I think everybody should like everybody.” So, “liking things is like being a machine?” Swenson asks. “Yes,” Warhol answers, “because you do the same thing every time. You do it over and over again” (IBYM, 16). Warhol elaborates this repetitive quality of liking later in the interview when he says that he painted Campbell’s soup cans because “I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years, I guess, the same thing over and over again” (18): the seriality of his paintings is an imitation of his repetitive liking.26 As habitual, repetitive practices of interest and attention, the paintings are themselves a way of “liking things.” In this sense, as Swenson remarked, “The paintings and boxes of Warhol are feelings, as much as paint in Abstract Expressionist painting is paint.”27

  Warhol’s everyday consumption of Campbell’s soup appears to be a perfect mirror of its mass production, as if Warhol has shaped his liking to match the ongoing seriality of the assembly line. “I like to be doing the same thing over again,” he said in an interview with Edward Lucie-Smith.28 However, I do not think that for Warhol the imbrication of liking with mass production and consumption implies that liking is therefore debased, or somehow not a feeling. (“I like everybody, so that’s affectionate.”29) Instead, I think Warhol understands liking, like affect as such, to be already essentially machine-like. In its tendency toward automatic or habitual repetitive actions, its independence of operation, its autonomous systemic logic, the complexity of its interlocking parts, and its ability to interface with other machines, “liking things is like being a machine.”30 This may contradict commonsense understandings of affect and emotion as the most human thing about humans, what a robot or android would have the most trouble imitating (like the character Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, for instance). But in his overall understanding of affect as machine-like, Warhol is generally in step with a number of influential twentieth-century theories of affect and feeling, from William James, Pavlov, and Freud forward.31 In fact, as Mark Seltzer has shown, the mechanical nature of feelings has been a central strand in the modern preoccupation with the logic and erotics of “the body in machine culture.”32

  Warhol’s sense of the body and of feelings as mechanical resonated in a different way with then-contemporary research in cybernetics, which saw the human organism as a complex set of interacting systems. This strand of cybernetic thinking influenced the affect theorist Silvan Tomkins, who argued for treating the affects as a “motivation system” or “assembly,” one that inevitably interacts (“coassembles”) with but is nonetheless distinct from the drives, from the “motoric system,” and from perception and memory and other elements of “cognition” such as belief, thought, and choice. Like visual perception or the reasoning mind, Tomkins proposed, the affects constitute a system with their own irreducible internal logic.33

  As a system with its own operating procedures, affect is predictably susceptible to manipulation by any number of forces, such as advertising, amphetamines, or aesthetic activity. And liking, as the most basic of affective responses, involving an elemental attraction toward a stimulus, may be especially susceptible. As experiments by Robert Zajonc and other psychologists have shown, “mere exposure,” even beneath the level of conscious recognition, is enough to substantially affect our liking, increasing our willingness to approach (rather than avoid) and pay attention to something.34 Warhol sought to use whatever tricks he could to position his machine of liking, what Jonathan Haidt called the “like-o-meter,” at its highest possible setting.35 In this sense, Warhol’s imitation of the machine was not at all an effort to escape from feeling or to be uncaring. Instead, it was an attempt to increase his capacity for liking, and thereby to exert agency over feelings he may have sometimes wanted to avoid but knew he could not.36 If advertising and mass culture can manipulate us into liking or not liking things, Warhol seems to be saying, why can’t we influence our own liking?

  Above all, for Warhol (as I have been arguing), “being a machine” represented an attempt to manipulate his like-o-meter by stimulating what Benjamin called the mimetic faculty (the human capacity for perceiving and producing similarities as distinct from identities or samenesses), which has its own affinity for the machine.37 For Benjamin, the child’s imitation of machines like windmills and trains indicates mimetic vitality; children are willing to imitate anything, across differences later policed, with little respect for what constitutes a proper or improper object of imitation.38 In fact, children’s mimetic impulses may be drawn to the repetitive motions of machines (the rhythm of a train’s chugga-chugga-choo-choo or the windmill’s spinning) inasmuch as mimetic behavior is itself machine-like, in “repeating” a model by forming its behavior in relation to it but also in its automatic and autonomic operation.

  Indeed, it has long been observed that children seem to be propelled by an automatic, involuntary compulsion to be-like.39 This is why Plato worried about poetry in The Republic (that foundational expression of anxieties about mimesis): children cannot help imitating what they perceive. Socrates describes the child as a malleable “thing” that “assimilates itself to the model whose stamp anyone wishes to give to it.”40 While children are presented here as tender and “plastic,” the metaphor of assimilation suggests that they are not merely passive; they are ready, even driven, to liken themselves, and this is what makes them so moldable.41 Children are imitation machines. While this tendency to be shaped and changed by imitation is most intense for children, Socrates worries that the tendency persists into adulthood, where the irresistibly mimetic quality of reading may lead even the virtuous man into improper practices of self-likening. To read Achilles’s grief-filled speech in The Iliad entails “acting like” (homoia poiein) Achilles in grief.42 And when we engage in these imaginative acts, Socrates asserts, we “get a taste for the being from its imitation,” and such tastes can lead to habits of being, especially if they are repeated.43 Mimesis, in this understanding, involves an ontological openness: at the moment of imitating something or someone else, one actually becomes someone else. And because acting like somebody else is how we get to be who we are, and since the ideal republic needs the right kinds of subjects for the different roles in a polis structured by a strict division of labor, mimesis must be tightly controlled. Plato thus offers an early articulation of a deep-seated anxiety about mimetic comportment and its ungovernability, one that led to a taboo on “uncontrolled mimesis” that Adorno and Horkheimer argue is foundational for Western “civilization” as such.44

  Like Plato, both Benjamin and Warhol see mimetic perception and behavior as a basic mode of apprehension of and interaction with the world, one especially fundamental to aesthetic experience, with directly subject-shaping and hence political consequences. But, in contrast to Plato, Benjamin and Warhol make the case for more mimetic behavior, which would be less policed and less subject to means-ends rationality, as a way to facilitate an empowering, collectively experienced, childlike affective receptivity and engagement with the world. Like Benjamin, Warhol sees new modes of mass production, and technological reproduction in particular, as resources for lubricating the mimetic machine; they both “envision a regeneration of affect by means of mechanically produced images.”45 Like Plato, Benjamin and Warhol understand that mimetic processes beget mimetic behaviors.46 Warhol sought to replicate such processes in his works in seve
ral different ways, first of all in his painting.

  Indeed, it is worth emphasizing that Warhol’s painting practice (and not his personal emotional life) was the primary context for his assertion that he wanted to be a machine. Asked by Swenson if he aims to “turn art history upside down” with his silkscreen technique, Warhol replies, “No. The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.” Warhol explains in POPism that he started silkscreening late in 1962 because “the rubber-stamp method I’d been using to repeat images suddenly seemed too homemade.” By contrast, “with silkscreening, you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different, each time. It was all so simple—quick and chancy. I was thrilled with it” (POP, 22). The silkscreens allowed Warhol to print an image based on a photographic model “over and over,” while eliminating (“homemade”) traces of the author’s hand. Moreover, by painting with silkscreens, Warhol replaced what had been thought of as a quintessential product of the human hand with an impersonal, autonomous mechanism that in principle could be used by anybody. “I think it would be so great,” Warhol said, “if more people took up silk screens so that no one would know whether my picture was mine or somebody else’s” (IBYM, 17). Mechanical and anonymous, capable of quantity and repetition: in these ways, the silkscreen method achieved the “assembly line effect” Warhol wanted.