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Jonathan Flatley Assistant Professor, University of Virginia
Взаимодействие с системой и взаимосвязь систем: Энди Уорхол и Арт-машина. Джонатан Флэтли, Ассошиейт проф. Отделения английского языка и литературы Университета Вирджиния.
Автор рассматривает нынешнюю историческую ситуациюее нарастающую гетерогенность, децентрированность, анти-иерархичностьсквозь призму эстетических взглядов Энди Уорхола. Знаменитого американского авангардиста увлекали возможности автоматизированного, бес-субъектного воспроизведения мира. посредством живописи, фотографии или кино, магнитофонной или видеозаписи. При этом машинность и автоматизм для него не тождественны бесчеловечности,парадоксальным образом, они-то как раз и служат (должны служить) средством обеспечения человеческой взаимосвязи, эмоционального контакта. Традициционная оппозиция человек-машина у Уорхола принимает вид их метафорического уподобления. В чем же человек подобен машине? В своей способности воспроизводить (миметически) явления окружающего его мира. В акте подражания-воспроизведения происходит не только отчуждение, в нем рождается также эмоциональный контакт, симпатия к предмету подражания,драгоценные, с точки зрения Уорхола. Как драгоценна для него и мысль о том, что полноценное понимание должно заключать в себе момент непонимания. Перевод (как способ контакта между разными языковыми или культурными системами), представляет собой не буквальную трансмиссию, а трансмутацию,предполагает сдвиг-несовпадение и в форме, и в содержании. Именно за счет этого сдвига, зазора, принципиально непреодолимого разрыва и обеспечивается, по мысли Джонатана Флэтли, гибкий, творческий характер общения индивидов и культур.
The reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.
Andy Warhol, What is Pop Art?
Interview with G. Swenson, 1963
One machine is always coupled with another.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
Anti-Oedipus, 1973
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, 19991
Andy Warhol's baldly proclaimed and widely publicized embrace of the
machine in the 1960s carried with it the danger of appearing to affirm post-war industrial
society, and the new forms of labor, organization, mass culture and the commodity that
characterized it. Everyday life, the argument would go, has already turned us into
machines, as consumers of mass produced commodities and culture and as workers. Art, then,
should help us reconnect with what is human and creative, not underscore our subjection to
the machine. The notion of the person-as-machine conjures up images of workers on the
assembly line. Marx summed up the position well: In handicrafts and manufacture, the
worker makes use of a tool; in the factory, the machine makes use of him... In the factory
we have a lifeless mechanism which is independent of the workers, who are incorporated
into it as living appendages.2 And modern designers of
the factory did, in fact, think of the human body as a machine. In his influential 1911
study, The Principles of Scientific Management, F.W. Taylor argued that a radical
increase in the efficiency of work processes could be achieved by conducting rigorous time
and motion studies of each part of the labor process. Once the most efficient bodily
movements were determined, they would establish a standard that the scientific manager
would teach and enforce.3 Henry Ford implemented and
expanded Taylor's insights in his automobile factories, more or less institutionalizing
the assembly line and the repetitive motions it required from workers as the basis of
modern industrial production.
However, it is worth remembering that before the 1960s, the main
contexts in which it seemed possible to bring the machine into art-making were the
explicitly anti-capitalist ones of Soviet Constructivism and the Bauhaus. In those
movements, the artist took the machine out of the Taylorized, Fordist factory and put it
in the context of art in an attempt to reinvent the machine, to insist that the machine
and mechanicalness were not inherently alienating. (The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, for
example, could speak of his machine-parts in proclaiming: I myself feel like a Soviet
factory, manufacturing happiness.4 Machine-like art and
poetry shared with the autonomous art that it paralleled the sense that art was a space
for saving subjectivity from the alienating forces of modernization, a space for
experimenting with alternative modernities. The Constructivist reconceptualization of the
role of the artist along technological lines was part of an effort to figure out how the
artist could play a role in the creation of a non-capitalist modernity. In her study of
the machine in the studio Caroline Jones makes the case that those political motivations
had more or less evaporated by the 1960s when artists like Frank Stella, Warhol and Robert
Smithson started not only to represent the machine but to imitate it.5
While it does seem clear, as Jones writes, that postwar industrial capitalism inhabited
the consciousness of these artists and motivated the making of their art,6 this inhabiting and motivation does not necessarily
imply affirmation. Neither Warhol nor LeWitt ever embraced the explicitly political stance
of a movement like Soviet Constructivism, not least because they lacked the revolutionary
social context. However, this lack of explicit alignment with a political movement does
not make their work any less critical a response to the world in which they lived. In
fact, both Warhol and LeWitt hold open a space for critique and opposition. For those who
experience the particular melancholy of the revolutionary in non-revolutionary times, the
artwork of LeWitt and Warhol, I will argue, offer two very different kinds of
assistance.
In my effort to understand what the art of Warhol is saying about the
world in which they lived, my central question will be: what is the emotional context, the
historical mood, in which the aesthetic experience offered to viewers in the work of
Warhol and LeWitt is attractive? My presumption here is that the affective nature of
aesthetic experience is always at least partly compensatory. In other words, the
experience of art has an emotional force because it offers us something in the space of
art that we do not get elsewhere. Art is, in this view, always partly utopian. Of course,
utopias are always also a critique of the world in which they appear. Every aesthetic
experience (in giving us something that is otherwise missing) provides a picture of the
world from which it has sprung. But it does so in reverse, like a photographic negative.
And each artwork has its own way of seeing (its own theory of) the world. Each has its own
relationship to the aggregate of shifting, competing and contradictory forces that shape
everyday life. The task of the critic, then, is to reconstruct this world which we might
also call history - in order to make sense of the attractions of the specific
experience that the artwork offers. This reconstruction must start from the aesthetic
experience that the art promotes because it is precisely here, on the level of affect,
I will contend, that we can most clearly see the residue of historicity. Subjective
affect is the shuttle on which history gets into art and also how it comes back. So when
I say (as I will) that Warhol's art contains within it an implicit theory of the
historical situation, by history, I do not mean historical events, or what is
sometimes called the linear history that is offered in textbooks. History in the sense
I am using it is not there in any immediately observable way. Rather, history is only
conceivable as an absent cause.7 It is the set of
problems in relation to which a given practice is attractive and interesting. My claim is
that one way to access Warhol's and LeWitt's critique of and utopian response to their
world is in their engagement with the machine and machine-ness.
I will argue that the idea of the machine provides the site
through which Warhol is able to mediateto represent and transform, to reproduce and
allegorize - two related historical processes. The first, mentioned above, is the
Taylorization of labor: the treatment of the human body as a machine, an instrument, in
order to increase the body's efficiency in the context of industrial labor. This
instrumentalization of the human body of course was not limited to the factory context,
and was broadly perceived by the post-war period to have penetrated many areas of American
life, including the life of the professional-managerial class. The second process (one
that is closely related to the first) is what the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann has
called the differentiation of society. By this he means (and here I simplify) the
division of society into different autonomous subsystems all of which have their own logic
and function: civil society, law, medicine, the economy, art, and so on.8 We might call this development the systematization of
the lifeworld, but a systematization that works not according to a single logic, but one
in which there are multiple systems each with their own logic. To live in this world not
only requires that we learn the internal logic and procedures of multiple systems, but
that we learn to negotiate among them as well. Before examining this idea further,
however, it might help to explore exactly what I mean by system here.
A system, Luhmann writes, is a way to reduce infinite to finite
information loads.9 The system achieves this through a
form of functional simplification... a reduction of complexity that can be constructed and
realized even though the world and the society where this takes place is unknown.10I propose that we understand the machine in both
LeWitt and Warhol to mean this moment of functional simplification. Systems theory,
Luhmann writes supplanted the classical model of a whole made out of parts and relations
between parts with a model emphasizing the difference between systems and environments.11 The foundational gesture of the system is to
distinguish an inside (the system) from an outside (the environment) and to setup a
feedback mechanism or feedback loop for dealing with that environment. Feedback describes
the process whereby the results of an act (output) are fed back (as input) to modify the
initial act.12 The thermostat is a common example of a
feedback mechanism. The thermostat is the mechanism by which the system regulates itself,
tests the results of its acts (the turning on or off of the furnace) and takes it back in
as information to determine what to do next (the turning on or off of the furnace).
The thermostat, like any feedback mechanism, does its work by seeing
everything else--the environmentonly on the terms relevant to the system; nothing about
the world matters to the thermostat except the temperature, which is indeed a reduction of
infinite information loads to quite finite ones. Systems are monologic: they see the
entire world in their own terms. Or as Deleuze and Guattari have put it, but speaking now
of human physiological systems: Doubtless each organ-machine interprets the entire
world from the point of view of its own flux, from the point of view of the energy that
flows from it: the eye interprets everythingspeaking, understanding, shitting, fuckingin
terms of seeing.13 Because the reason for the system's
coming into being is precisely to cope with an environment, to simplify it and make it
manageable, all systems are always interacting with other ones. By definition, although
the system is totalizing and monologic in its own space, it is never singular: one machine
is always coupled with another... a connection with another machine is always established,
along a transverse path, so that one machine interrupts the current of the other or sees
its own current interrupted.14 Here, I can
provisionally state my argument about Warhol: what he is interested in is this moment of
system coupling or system interface.
But if my claim is that systems are interesting to Warhol because they
allow him to mediate the historical situation, I need now to describe that situation.
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.15 Each
subsystem has to be ready to deal with problems generated out of its sphere. Life is less
and less determined by local contexts as the local system contextwhether it is the family,
or the city, or medicine, or a particular profession or the legal systemis always
responding to problems produced somewhere else. While each system has increased
autonomy - ie an ability to apply specific rules and procedures to special
problemsit also has decreased autarchy ie less and less authority outside of its
own subsystem, and less of an ability to decide what problems it would be dealing
with.16 The increased autonomy can produce a false
sense of confidence in the efficaciousness of one's own operations. Modernism could be
seen as the recurring moment of misrecognition whereby each system operates as if 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 artare all colored with a strong 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 from which one wants to escape:
whether it is means-ends rationality, reification, misogyny, homophobia, racism or another
oppressive social force. The critique of this idea of autonomous art has been that it is
essentially compensatory, and therefore affirmative of the order of things. That art
develops its own strategies to satisfy needs that originate in other realms of social
interaction17 prevents people from trying to actually
change these other realms of social interaction. 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 difficulty, because 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 wholeparts model of
society; here, there is no holistic logic, there is no unified system organizing the
systems. One thing this means is 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 experience19
because that overall structural model is impossible to attain. This contradiction between
the experience of everyday life and the possibility of describing the transpersonal,
historical forces that make that everyday experience possible has become endemic. As such
it constitutes a basic problem for any attempt to represent the world. I am
suggesting that the insights of systems theory provide us with the conceptual vocabulary
to reconstruct the world implied by Warhol's work. I contend that the attractions of
his art make more sense when we presume the world structured by what Luhmann calls
functional differentiation as its context.
Warhol's Pop represents a move away from autonomous art. For Warhol,
there is not going to be any redemption going on in any one system: art is not going to
save the world. Instead, Warhol poaches on already existing spaces (the art world, the
artist's studio, cinema, advertising, mass culture) to create alternative spaces in which
he can set himself to the task of learning how to imagine and inhabit system interfaces.20 The Warholian task is basically to study, to figure out
and work with the internal logic of each of these subsystems, and to imagine and to
experiment with different moments of system coupling. What I want to discuss next is
how this moment of interface was especially promising for Warhol because it enabled him
and his audience to perceive likenesses, which, I will argue, was for Warhol the
condition of possibility for liking things. That for Warhol to be a machine was to be
coupled with other machines, and that this was for him the locus of emotional attachment
and liking, is indicated by the fact that Warhol for many years carried around a tape
recorder he referred to as his wife.
Like many of Warhol's aphoristic assertions, his statement that he
wanted to be machine has a simplicity of diction that belies the number of symbolic
strands and social desires and anxieties that it catches up. Warhol is speaking first of
all about the way that he is painting the way he does. His painting is machine-like
because he uses the silkscreening technique, which employs a repetitive, mechanical method
and which relies on a mechanically-produced photograph-derived image as a model.21 The silkscreening process is automatic, predictable and
technologically mediated; it eliminates traces of the author's hand while
nonetheless preserving a kind of accidental mechanical variation. Silkscreening also means
that the paintings can in principle be produced by anybody: like products off an assembly
line, they are both anonymously and collaboratively produced. 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.22 The
assembly line effect of the silkscreens, along with the naming of his studio as the
Factory, together underscored the extent to which Warhol appeared to be referencing the
historical form of rationalized, Taylorized labor itself, and indeed to be colluding with
it.
Warhol was also painting in a machine-like way inasmuch as he tried to
paint without thinking or choosing: When I have to think about it, I know the
picture is wrong... My instinct about painting says. 'If you don't think about it, its
right.' As soon as you have to decide and choose, it's wrong. And the more you decide
about the more wrong it gets.23 The Do It Yourself
, which Warhol produced just before he started silkscreening, offers a self-reflexive
allegory of this desire. Not only is Warhol painting (or drawing) according to a preset
plan that involves no choice or thought, it is a preset plan that is mass producedthat is,
itself produced off an assembly line according to a preset plan. In a sense, all of
Warhol's paintings were Do It Yourself works inasmuch as they are paintings of
precisely those images that anyone could paint because everyone knows them, images that
were already produced. No one could accuse Warhol of creativity or subjectivity
when he painted commodity labels, celebrities, advertisements, newspaper photos or dollar
bills. Warhol painted the images that were already there in everyone's consciousness
automatically as an effect of repetition, without thinking - the things that everyone
saw everyday. In this sense Warhol's painting was indexical; he was like a machine for
recording what was around him. And his fascination with an automatic, non-subjective
recording of the world was by no means limited to painting: film, photography, audio
tapes, videoWarhol wanted to mediate his world through as many machines as he could as
frequently as possible.
While Warhol's clear affinity for the machine helped to solidify the
critical and popular perception that Warhol was affectless and asexual, I think that
it is precisely in and around the machine-like that we will find Warhol's emotions and
desires. For Warhol, the machine does not signal the negation of affect, but the condition
of possibility for affective attachment, pleasure and desire. In the area of affect and
desire we find Warhol's resistance to and perversion of the Taylorist body-machine system.
Take, for example, one of my favorite Warhol anecdotes from POPism: During this
period [1969] I took thousands of Polaroids of genitals. Whenever somebody came up to
the Factory, no matter how straight looking he was, I'd ask him to take his pants off so
I could photograph his cock and balls. It was surprising who'd let me and who
wouldn't.24 The mediation of the camera at once
emboldened Warhol to ask men to show their genitalia and allowed men to display them. It
allowed men to think that the display was after all not so much for Warhol the person so
much as it was for the camera. For Warhol, thinking about the world in terms of its
photographability opened up new worlds, quite literally changing what he saw and how he
saw it. And it changed how people related to him. The camera opens up new possibilities.
In short, for Warhol technological mediation would always be a huge turn-on.
That the point of Warhol's machine-like mediated world is not
detachment or emotionlessness, but sexiness and emotional investment is also suggested by
a work like Dance Floor Diagram. The diagram puts to use the same rationalization
of bodily movements that made the assembly line possible. But here the ability of the body
to move automatically according to a preset system is the condition of possibility not for
efficient work but for learning to dance, which suggests that work and pleasure are not
necessarily opposed.25 Both are machine-like. Indeed,
in the instance of the dance diagram, the imitation of the machine can lead to emotional
attachment to, and desire for, other people.
This is not to say that Warhol was unattuned to the ways that machines
were fundamentally indifferent to human life. In the context of the car crash and electric
chair paintings, Warhol's assertion that he wants to be a machine reads like an ironic
rewriting of Whitman's singing the body electric. Advocating a machine utopia he was not.
In a way, the car crash paintings are the flip side of the dance step diagrams. Each are
equally distant from an affirmation of the industrial factory, the one pointing to the
unexpected non-industrial uses and pleasures of bodily rationalization, the other to the
machineand precisely the machine that was produced on the Fordist assembly line - as
an instrument of death. Together, these paintings suggest that we pay more attention to
moments when we interface with machines and when we ourselves seem to be machine-like. The
message would seem to be that machine-nessindifferent to human life as it may be - can no
longer be thought of as the limit of the human, the opposite of the human.
Indeed, being machine-like is what enables us to do something so basic
as liking things and people. In the following 1963 interview, Warhol discusses his
affinity for the machine at some length.
Warhol: Someone said that Brecht wanted everybody to think alike. I want everybody to think alike. But Brecht wanted to do it through Communism, in a way. Russia is doing it under government. It's happening here all by itself without being under a strict government; so, if its working without trying, why can't it work without being Communist? Everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we're getting more and more that way.
I think everybody should be a machine.
I think everybody should like everybody.
Swenson: Is that what Pop Art is all about?
Warhol: Yes. Its liking things.
Swenson: And liking things is like being a machine?
Warhol: Yes, because you do the same thing every time. You do it over and over again. 26
Here, by playing with the slide between like in its transitive sense
(to like something) and in its intransitive, prepositional use (to be like something),
Warhol appears to be making the connection between three things: the perception of
likeness, the desire to be alike, and the act of liking. The logic is something like the
following. Brecht wanted everyone to think alike through Communism. In the United States
(like in Russia, under Communism), everybody looks and acts alike. Here, as if it follows
logically from everybody being alike, Warhol makes the key association of the
interview: Warhol wants everybody to be a machine and he wants everybody to like
everybody. The suggestion made through a chain of association (everybody being alike,
everybody being a machine, everybody liking everybody) is that being alike somehow
sets the stage for liking; to like something or somebody, one has to be able to
feel likeness at the basis of the connection. Liking is like being alike.
And liking things, that's what Pop is, which is like being a machine, because it is doing
the same thing every time. And here, repetition enters the scene with a kind of
explanatory promise: repetition, Warhol asserts, which we might think of as the production
of likenesses, is also like liking. The sets of associations are rather dizzying, if
pleasurably so. How can we make sense of the connections among likeness, liking,
machine-likeness and repetition?
Before examining the connection between being like and liking, it might
help to consider what it might mean to be like something else, to be similar to
something else rather than the same as it. Warhol's use of repetition shows us that
it is not identity in which Warhol is interested. Serial repetition itself destabilizes
sameness, producing instead what Foucault calls similitude. In the final lines of his
short book on Magritte, Foucault writes: A day will come when, by means of similitude
relayed indefinitely along the length of a series, the image itself, along with the name
it bears, will lose its identity. Campbell, Campbell, Campbell, Campbell.27 What Foucault is getting at is the fact that the
machine does not represent, it imitates, or perhaps more exactly: it simulates.28 When Warhol paints the soup cans, he is not trying to
represent them; the painting is not referential in this senseit is not providing us with a
window onto the world. It is not a painting of 200 Campbell soup cans. Rather, Warhol is
mechanically simulating the image of the can, based on a model. Whereas re-presentation
means the thing is not here, it negates the thing represented, simulation involves
a repeated effort to be like the model. Warhol seems to have liked the mistakes that are
built into the silkscreening process itself (seen more clearly in the car crash
paintings), the differences that were accidental, in part because they emphasize the
similitudethe non-identityof the images.
What, however, does likeness have to do with liking? Here the
German critic Walter Benjamin, who sustained a lifelong interest in the importance of
similarity, is helpful. Benjamin is interested in likeness precisely to the extent that we
are less and less able to perceive it. This ability has declined because the systems of
equivalence set up by a money economy tend to obscure the more subtle quality of
similarity. Living in a world in which anything can be exchanged for anything else via the
abstraction of money encourages us to think in terms of the binary opposition
identity/difference. The more subtle antennae of what Benjamin calls the mimetic faculty
wither away in this context. The decline in the mimetic faculty is a problem in Benjamin's
view because he believed that the perception of similarity was the key to emotional
attachment. Think, for example, of the importance of the returned smile. So many facial
gestures are precisely about this confirmation of likeness - if someone smiles, we
smile back. If someone is frowning, we frown. Fear can produce fear. Watching a yawn makes
yawning nearly irresistible. Towards the beginning of the century there were a series of
studies which discovered what is called the Carpenter effect: this tells us that in fact
these responses were involuntary, machine-like: we automatically mimic the facial
expressions of others. Imitation forms the basic tissue of relationality.29 For Benjamin, and here we are back to Warhol, the
ability to be like is the precondition for liking.
That this mimetic faculty was still present in children was cause, for
Benjamin, for hope. 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. The
mimetic capacity of children, in other words, is so vital, that they even play at being
machines. The child does not perceive the machine in the industrial context, but
simply as another thing to imitate. And this behavior is itself rather machine-like
inasmuch as imitation is itself mechanical, indexical, acting according to a preset form.
Benjamin sees children as imitation machines. Benjamin, like Warhol then, wishes to
reverse the notion that we start out as human and then through our encounter with machines
become dehumanized. Rather, we are always already machine-like. Indeed, we start out more
machine like. When we get into trouble is when we forget this fact in our reification of
the human-machine opposition and put imitation on the machine side as something to be
avoided. Benjamin, like Warhol, hoped to help us remember how to be machine-like, which is
to say how to be like, and he hoped that the new technologies of photography and
filminsofar as they could be divorced from an industrial context - could help us in
this task.
The new technologies are able to help in the invigorating of the
mimetic faculty precisely because of their systemic quality, because each technology is in
essence a functional simplification, that is, a form of the reduction of complexity that
can be constructed and realized. Each technology affords its own particular way of seeing
the world. Just as it is a different nature that speaks to the thermostat (a nature
defined by temperature alone), it is also, as Benjamin said, a different nature that
speaks to the camera than to the human eye.30 On one
level, Benjamin is speaking of things like the motion studies of Muybridge, where the
camera records specifics of bodily movement which are invisible to the naked eye. But he
is also describing the way that in the process of translation from one system to another,
the moment of coupling between machines, what is conveyed is not an equivalence, but a
similitude. To get a better sense of how this works, think of translation between
languages: everyone knows that two words that mean the same thing in different languages
do not really mean in the same way, they have different connotations, shades of meaning,
histories: bread, the French pain, the Russian khlyeb. They are similar but
not the same. Linguistic translation requires the operations of the mimetic faculty.
But, it is not only linguistic translation that requires the perception
of similarity. For example, when the face is translated onto the movie screen it is also
translated into something else, what we might call a simulation of the face. Warhol
understood this, which is why he would give screen tests: That screen magnetism is
something secret - if you could only figure out what it is and how to make it, you'd have
a really good product to sell. But you can't even tell if someone has it until you
actually see them up there on the screen. You have to give screen tests to find out.31 You recognize Edie's or Baby Jane's face up there, but
our mode of looking when we're looking at a moving image projected on a screen is quite
different from the one when we see someone face to face. Screen beauty is different from
life beauty. And some people have screen magnetism and others do not. In the process of
translation between systems the mimetic faculty is invoked, and this is why Benjamin is so
hopeful about the possibilities of technology for changing the possibilities of our
mimetic capacities. Creative mistranslations, distorted resemblancesthese can jump start
the mimetic faculty because they force us to take conscious notice of what we are doing.
To make any connection we have to think in terms of similarity; we are forced out of the
identitydifference dichotomy. Or, in Warhol's terms, these moments of system
interface enable the perception of likeness, which is necessary if everybody is to like
everybody, as Warhol thinks they should.
Warhol's interest with system interface can be seen throughout his
career. For example, in 1976 he acquired a Minox 35 El, and it was this camera (or other
small SLRs like it) that he carried with him everywhere for the rest of his life,
replacing his wife that had earlier been his constant companion. It has been estimated
that he took on average a roll of film every day for the rest of his life.32 Warhol loved to talk on the phone and watch TV at the
same time. The more machine-mediation the better. Like the camera, the telephone changes
the nature of relationality. We all know that some things are easier to hear or to say on
the phone. Warhol's interest in system interface is also why Warhol liked to have his
assistants misunderstand him a little bit:
Something that I look for in an associate is a certain amount of
misunderstanding of what I'm trying to do. Not a fundamental misunderstanding; just minor
misunderstandings here and there. When someone doesn't quite completely understand what
you want from them, or when the tape is bad, or when their own fantasies start coming
through, I often wind up liking what comes out of it all better than I liked my
original idea. Then if you take what the first person who misunderstood you did, and you
give that to someone else and tell them to make it more like how they know you would want
it, that's good too. If people never misunderstand you, and if they do everything exactly
the way you tell them to, they're just transmitters of your ideas, and you get bored with
that. But when you work with people who misunderstand you, instead of getting
transmissions, you get transmutations, and that's much more interesting in the long run.33 When one's associate misunderstands, or when the tape
is bad, instead of transmissions, you get transmutations. The transmutation, rather than
being an exact transmission or a metaphoric substitution is metonymic. It is a creative
mistranslation. Like the party-game of telephone, it is better when people mis-hear, when
their own fantasies come through.
This is the idea behind A: a novel, which is approximately 24
hours of conversation transcribed verbatim, in three sessions over the course of a couple
years from 1965 to 1967. Reading A is nothing like listening to or participating in
a conversation nor is it like reading the recorded speech in a novel. Because of its
written quality, it is at once more tedious and more interesting to read. Meaning is hard
to discern since the signifying work usually done by tone, facial expression, gesture when
you are talking to someone face to face is left undone. So first, one notices these
absences. And then other things begin to emergepatterns, repetitions, correspondences,
contradictions and incoherences that are otherwise invisible when we are wrapped up in the
logic of face to face interaction.
Warhol's interest in faces, in celebrity, in technologies of
reproduction, in collecting can all, I suggest, be productively thought about in
terms of system interface, the (mis)translation between systems. The fact that this moment
of system interface references the structure of feeling of the lifeworld in which we
already live, a lifeworld defined by functional differentiation, is what gives Warhol's
work its emotional punch.
Warhol's work is essentially a primer for studying the production of
likenesses and the liking that the inevitable coupling of systems enables. Warhol is
reminding us that the moment of system translation is not just something he is
doing, not just something that happens in art, but a structuring principle of our everyday
life-world, one that if avowed and used, has transformative potential because it can
remind us how to like.
Adorno once remarked that the feelings provoked by artworks are real
and to this extent extra-aesthetic.34 He was speaking
of the fact that it is through their emotional effects that artworks exceed themselves,
contradicting their own apparent disinterestedness and autonomy. One might make the case
that inasmuch as emotions need contexts and objects in order to come into existence,
artworks allow emotions to come into existence in forms that otherwise might not exist.
This is the locus of their political importance. The paradox at the center of Warhol's
project is that the negation of subjectivity achieved through the imitation of the machine
does not increase our alienation; instead it rescues us from our isolation by reminding us
to notice our likenesses.