5. Vis-à-vis Television: Andy Warhol’s Therapeutics

Here’s an observation: the most common twentieth-century North American slang words for television were names for genitalia and other intimate body parts. The box, the tube, the boob tube—how to understand this sexualization of television? How better to understand it than in terms of what Melanie Klein called part-objects, those elements of infantile phantasy that refer, in the first instance, to the breast? “The part-object,” as Robert Hinshelwood explains, “is firstly an emotional object, having a function rather than a material existence”; it is, for the infant, what “touches his cheek, intrudes a nipple into his mouth for good or bad purposes. In spite of having only these ephemeral qualities it is completely real for the infant.”¹ From the perspective of object-relations theory, these slang words point less to a material object than to a sensual, emotional, and intentional one: a part-object that functions to contain (box) and deliver (tube) nourishment and poison, love and hate, idiocy and entertainment. The boob tube may be part of larger objects such as networks or nations that intrude, with mixed purposes, into the lives of viewers, but these whole objects are often difficult to perceive. “From the infant’s point of view,” as Hinshelwood puts it, “the part is all there is to the object” (379). Television, it can seem, is all that we can touch, see, or hear.

No longer a tube but a flat display, television now appears on any number of portable devices that we have, if anything, an even more explicitly infantile relation to; we keep these devices close, fingering or manipulating them to ensure a constant flow of communication through umbilical connections to mouth or ear. I begin with the somewhat familiar figure of TV-as-breast from the less familiar vantage of object-relations theory not to denounce or disdain television (as maternal, infantilizing, feminizing) but to begin thinking about our powerful because fundamentally infantile relations to it. From a Kleinian perspective, denunciations of television would appear to come from the paranoid-schizoid position, that early state of mind characterized by the strict separation of what is good (in other words, what supports life) from what is bad (what threatens to destroy it). For example, take the slogan, printed on many thousands of bumper stickers and T-shirts, “Kill Your TV”—presumably before it kills you by draining your life force, turning you into a zombified consumer. Or consider the opposite response, the boosterist window-on-the-world perspective from which television appears to educate and inform, creating conditions for global democracy and so on. Neither of these attitudes toward television is entirely wrong, but they are split, partial, unintegrated. I would like to approach television from the perspective of that other infantile state of mind, what Klein called the depressive position, to perceive television as a whole object, an irremediably mixed, contaminated, or damaged object that invites reparation. To put it another way, how can we think of television as the form of theater that mass democratic cultures deserve?

I believe that this is how Andy Warhol watched and thought of television: he not only accepted it, consuming large amounts (like most other North Americans of his time and ours); he also avidly made use of our infantile relations to television in much of his work. Warhol’s poetics, as I understand them, adopt a televisual perspective on emotion, and in the first part of this chapter I explore these poetics in readings of some of his early film and video work. These televisual poetics closely resemble Gertrude Stein’s landscape poetics. Consider the terms in which Warhol explains the appeal of his early films, such as Sleep (1963) and Empire (1964), in which very little seems to happen:

My first films using the stationary objects were also made to help the audiences get more acquainted with themselves. Usually when you go to the movies, you sit in a fantasy world, but when you see something that disturbs you, you get a little more involved with the people next to you. Movies are doing a little more than you can do with plays and concerts where you just have to sit there and I think television will do more than the movies. You could do more things watching my movies than with other kinds of movies: you could eat and drink and smoke and cough and look away and then look back and they’d still be there. It’s not the ideal movie, it’s just my kind of movie.²

Warhol’s contrast between the “fantasy world” that audiences enter when they watch most movies (or other staged performances) and the more engaged social spaces created by watching his films would initially seem to invite a Brechtian reading in terms of disturbance, defamiliarization, or modernist shock of some kind. But the qualities of audience experience that he describes (“You could do more things watching my movies”) can be specifically understood in terms of increased capacities, possibilities, or (in the terms of my previous chapter) those loose affective coordinations that permit a reversible relation of containment between audience and screen. Like Stein’s plays, Warhol’s early films turn away from the pressures of one-way identification with character and anticipation of plot and toward the infantile intensities of reverie, as Wilfred Bion understands it. Warhol suggests that something about the reliability or dependability of his films (“they’d still be there”) helps audiences “get more acquainted with themselves” and that this therapeutic object stability is even more pronounced when we watch television.

It is this unusual approach to television as an instrument for self-acquaintance that I pursue in the second half of this chapter, where I argue that Warhol adopts a televisual perspective in developing the celebrated self that emerged during the 1960s as the emblem of Pop Art. In addition to Kleinian and other affect theory, I turn to Michel Foucault’s late lectures on ancient therapeutics to offer a reading of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (1975). Here Warhol figures television as a therapeutic device, a figure specifically for conversion and control; it is one among several devices that offer him the technical means to become himself, Andy Warhol, by regulating or tuning emotional perspective and distance. In its theatrical capacity to frame affect by reproducing the face or the voice, television resembles some of the other instruments in Warhol’s bag of tricks, such as the screen print, the tape recorder, the camera, and even the mirror. But unlike these other devices, television names both an instrument of graphic reproduction and an entire industry that permits viewers from home to enter imaginary relations with a mass audience. Warhol identified with television along these lines, aiming to mimic its position as culture industry, as instrument of emotional feedback, and as agent of transference. His so-called passivity and affectlessness should be viewed, in this context, as a highly engaged response to televised emotion, his impassive face the expression of an analytic stance that was, in principle, shareable. If, as he famously put it, “I think everybody should be a machine,” the machine that Warhol most wanted everyone to be was television.³

I begin with the recent scholarship that has demonstrated the central place of television in Warhol’s art practices. By the time the Philosophy was published in 1975, Warhol had been experimenting with video technology and television’s forms and genres for more than a decade. The film Soap Opera (1964) spliced together footage from producer Lester Persky’s television commercials with scenes of superstar Baby Jane Holzer and others. In the summer of 1965 Warhol received promotional use of a Norelco video camera and monitor and made several hours’ worth of video tapes at the Factory, using two of these tapes in a complex film portrait of Edie Sedgwick called Outer and Inner Space (1965; more on this below). Callie Angell, the Warhol archivist and historian, points out that these experiments with video predate Nam June Paik’s, marking him as a very early video artist; but as Lynn Spigel notes in her exploration of Warhol’s uses of television, “Warhol TV was not counter-TV in the video-art sense.”⁴ Rather Warhol evolved an attitude toward television that did not oppose commercial aims and sensibilities to modernist or experimental ones. For example, in 1968 he directed a one-minute television advertisement for Shrafft’s restaurants called “Underground Sundae” (1968) in which a red dot turns into a swirl of color, out of which emerges an ice-cream sundae with a cherry on top. In 1971 he set up Andy Warhol Studio with Vincent Fremont and continued experimenting with television genres, eventually producing three series for cable television. Through the 1970s and 1980s Warhol appeared in TV commercials and in 1985 on an episode of The Love Boat.⁵

As this brief, highly selective survey indicates, Warhol worked with television in a variety of ways throughout his career. Graig Uhlin has convincingly argued that even Warhol’s early films should be understood by way of the televisual “elements of indefinite duration, liveness, and a spectatorial experience defined by ‘waiting.’”⁶ In a discussion of Empire, Warhol’s eight-hour film portrait of the Empire State Building, Uhlin observes that the film’s subject houses one of the most powerful television transmitters in the world and reads the film as “a sort of staring contest between the two media . . . and it is no question for Warhol which one will blink first” (5). Relatedly, but along different lines, J. Hoberman has suggested that Empire and Sleep “might be considered the original video installations” and that generally “Warhol used 16mm film as if it were videotape.”⁷ Refreshingly the scholars who focus on television tend to avoid the standard art historical narrative that insists that Warhol’s career declined after he turned to what he called Business Art (the commissioned portraits and bigger budget films) in the 1970s. As Spigel puts it, “This way of understanding Warhol winds up returning him to the modernist—and masculinist—embrace of irony and distance from all things kitsch—in effect erasing Warhol’s queerness and denying or at least bypassing pop’s more complicated and integral relations to domesticity, everydayness, femininity, and consumerism.”⁸ Like Spigel, I find it difficult to imagine any convincing account of Warhol’s career that discounts these relations, as well as his remarkable celebrity and strategies for remaking his queer self in the context of the media-saturated postwar culture.⁹

But Spigel does not always acknowledge Warhol’s use of some form of ironic distance, what permits him to represent the kitsch or popular, its beauty and his desire for it, so directly. Television, I suggest, offers Warhol just this form of direct distance and perspective. Consider, as primary examples of this televisual perspective, the Screen Tests, a series of over four hundred short, silent black-and-white film portraits that Warhol and his assistants (most often Gerard Malanga and Billy Linich) made at the Silver Factory between 1964 and 1966. Certainly Uhlin’s televisual elements of duration, liveness, and waiting characterize the Screen Tests, what Warhol and company called, by contrast with movies, the “stillies.” Here is Callie Angell’s precise descriptive summary:

Warhol provided himself with a set of simple rules to follow, rules similar to those required for passport photographs: the camera should not move; the background should be as plain as possible; subjects must be well lit and centered in the frame; each poser should face forward, hold as still as possible, refrain from talking or smiling, and try not to blink. By transposing the conventions of the formal or institutional photographic portrait into the time-based medium of film, he created a set of diabolically challenging performance instructions for his sitters, who, suddenly finding themselves up against the wall and face-to-face with Warhol’s Bolex, struggled to hold a pose while their brief moment of exposure was prolonged into a nearly unendurable three minutes. The subject’s emotional and physiological responses to this ordeal are often the most riveting aspect of the Screen Tests, adding complex layers of psychological meaning to the visual images structured by the artist. The films’ silent projection speed further exaggerates these behaviors, revealing each involuntary tremor or flutter of an eyelid in clinical slow motion.¹⁰

Warhol’s filming conditions can be understood by way of what Laplanche and Pontalis, in their dictionary of psychoanalytic terms, call neutrality, “one of the defining characteristics of the attitude of the analyst during the treatment”: the analyst’s neutrality consists of a refusal “to direct the treatment according to some ideal,” a lack of immediate response to the patient’s emotional provocations, and a suspension of the analyst’s own “theoretical preconceptions” when listening to the patient’s discourse.¹¹ In the Screen Tests analytic neutrality is an effect of the combined stillness of the camera and a minimal directing style, so minimal that Warhol would sometimes walk away, leaving the subject to contend with the camera alone. Warhol’s unwillingness to let his subject’s discomfort interrupt the filming process, a basic part of his filming technique, makes actors (and often viewers) uncomfortable—one reason why his filmmaking is so often described as sadistic. But this neutrality is precisely what enables the transference to take place, both the positive and especially the negative transference, that is, the expression of aggression, hate, and envy toward Warhol or his camera.

Not that these feelings are what we see expressed, not directly; rather all of the Screen Tests show the portrait subjects’ different strategies for coping with the posing conditions. For example, Ann Buchanan’s first portrait shows a young woman who keeps extremely still (fig. 6). As Angell puts it, “apparently under instructions not to blink, she heroically holds her eyes wide open while they slowly well up with glistening tears.”¹² A glimmer of a smile crosses her face toward the end of the film as Buchanan expresses some pride at having managed to follow Warhol’s instructions to the letter. In a film taken right after, “she fixes the camera with a moist, wide-eyed gaze and then very slowly crosses her eyes” (45). Other subjects show different strategies: Paul America chews gum and smirks; Billy Linich (aka Billy Name), in charge of setting up lighting for the stillies, wears sunglasses that reflect the studio lights back at the viewer; Nico glances at a magazine and performs utter boredom; and Ingrid Superstar consciously imitates Warhol’s hand gestures and facial expressions.¹³ Warhol’s neutrality lets viewers pay close attention to the subtle dynamics of facial expression, and the less the subject does, the more interesting the portrait becomes. Buchanan is one of the few who managed to follow Warhol’s instructions, and as a consequence of her extreme stillness, it becomes difficult to distinguish between minute facial movements and the movement of the film projection itself. This indistinction makes the expressiveness of face and film continuous: her tears may express distress, but at the same time they are a physiological consequence of her unblinking gaze into bright lights. In these films, then, affect takes place on the surface of the skin as a consequence of the filming process, its expression an index to the transferential relation between subject and camera.

Figure 6. Andy Warhol, Screen Test: Ann Buchanan, 1964. 16mm film, black and white, silent, 4.5 minutes at 16fps. ©2014 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.

Warhol’s analytic neutrality is less in the service of diagnosing his subjects than of displaying them, permitting the performance of idiosyncratic facial styles, and watching this bare-bones theatricality can be a psychedelic experience: the silent, slowed-down film projection gives us the unusual experience of paying extremely close attention to strangers’ (mostly young and beautiful) faces close up, without being directed by discourse or language. In chapter 2, on expression and faces in Poe’s short stories, I discussed what Silvan Tomkins calls “the taboos on looking,” in which the affect of shame-humiliation inhibits and underlines experiences of looking and being looked at. There I suggested that theater suspends these taboos on looking: audiences are permitted to stare at the faces of actors on the stage without the shame of being caught in the act of looking. While film and television certainly offer these pleasures of looking and are forms of theater in this sense, in most cases our visual attention is guided (and sometimes overwhelmed) by language or by the requirements of narrative. This is why, according to Tomkins, watching television with the sound turned down may be useful for “the student of affect”:

Language interaction is usually so demanding and obtrusive that few individuals may penetrate the linguistic envelope to isolate the idiosyncratic style of the face of the other during conversation. For the student of affect, however, if he will turn off the flow of information from linguistic interaction and attend simply to the face of the other, there is immediately revealed an astonishingly personal and simple style of affective facial behavior. This can easily be done by turning off the sound of any unrehearsed television program. (AIC 1: 143)

Television offers one of the few opportunities to stare at a stranger’s face in silence, something we might otherwise do with someone we know and love, without risking the humiliation of breaking the taboos on looking.¹⁴ Elsewhere Tomkins remarks that in watching television talk shows “much of what appeared on the face became ground to speech as figure. One had to turn down the speech to see the face.”¹⁵ In the Screen Tests Warhol finds a comparably simple and powerful way to reverse the figure-ground relations between language and facial affect, and, like Tomkins, he makes spaces of social exchange (a living room, a night club) into laboratory settings in order to experience something other than strictly verbal meaning. “When I read magazines,” asserts Warhol in one of his most cited interviews, “I just look at the pictures and the words, I don’t usually read it. There’s no meaning to the words, I just feel the shapes with my eye and if you look at something long enough, I’ve discovered, the meaning goes away.”¹⁶ Warhol’s Screen Tests let propositional or verbal meaning subside so as to allow other kinds of meaning, affective ones, to surface.

I’m suggesting that in the Screen Tests Warhol uses the medium of film televisually to represent facial affect or behavior and that this televisual perspective, in making affect figural, enables transferential movements of emotion to take place between viewer and screen. I turn now to a more complex set of transferential dynamics in a film that represents the television set itself. In the black-and-white sound film Outer and Inner Space, Edie Sedgwick is seated in front of a television set on which her prerecorded image plays back (fig. 7). The televised image (Warhol used the videotapes he shot of her) is in full profile facing right, while Sedgwick is filmed in three-quarter profile looking left, her head framed by the television behind her while she addresses someone off-screen. Once again I use Angell’s apt description of the mise-en-scène: “On the left, a brightly glowing video image transforms Sedgwick’s profile into a flattened, glamorous mask which seems almost vapid in its graphic simplicity; on the right, the filmed face of the ‘real’ Edie, shadowed and expressively modeled by the glow of her own video image, exposes every detail of her increasingly unhappy subjectivity as she endured the ordeal of this face-off with her televised self.”¹⁷ Warhol filmed two thirty-three-minute reels and projected them simultaneously to create four images of Sedgwick across the screen in a manner that recalls earlier screen prints. The first reel (projected on the left) begins with a tight close-up, making it difficult to see the television at first, then eventually zooms out; the second reel (projected on the right) begins from the longer shot, eventually returning to a tighter close-up of the two faces. The audio veers in and out of intelligibility, each reel recording the voices of both Sedgwicks, along with ambient sounds of the Factory setting.

Figure 7. Andy Warhol, Outer and Inner Space, 1965. 16mm film, black and white, sound, 66 minutes or 33 minutes in double screen. ©2014 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.

These attempts simply to describe Warhol’s portrait trip over some basic representational and media paradoxes, as when Angell calls the filmed Sedgwick “real” (in scare quotes) or when Uhlin contrasts the “live” Sedgwick with the televised image. Warhol’s arrangement, as Uhlin points out, reverses the usual associations of television and film: the filmed Sedgwick is lively, animated, and expressive (like a talk-show guest), while the televised Sedgwick is larger than life, iconic, still, and glamorous.¹⁸ This reversal accords well with what Warhol says in contrasting movies and television in the Philosophy: “People sometimes say that the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually it’s the way things happen to you in life that’s unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it’s like watching television—you don’t feel anything.”¹⁹ Warhol understands that “the movies” (classic Hollywood film), in representing faces and voices on the big screen, delineate emotions more clearly and, often, more simply than in ordinary life, largely an effect of the sutured, single point of identification with the camera (as psychoanalytic film theory has it). Television, on the other hand, offers viewers multiple points of view simultaneously, whether within a program (switching between multiple cameras), or between program and commercials, or as a result of the viewer’s own ability to switch channels; these all contribute to the fundamental televisual experiences of fragmentation and flow. Integrated into ordinary domestic routines and living spaces, television offers multiplicity, simultaneity, and emotional complexity, the terms in which Warhol casts his own psychic experience: “Right when I was shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it’s all television. When you’re really involved with something, you’re usually thinking about something else. When something’s happening, you fantasize about other things” (91). David Joselit, in his discussion of these passages, suggests that for Warhol, “‘TV’ and ‘life’ mutually de-realize one another.”²⁰ But I read it another way: for Warhol, affective life is like television in being multiple, complex, volatile, and suffused with phantasy; emotionally there are always several things happening at the same time.

Outer and Inner Space makes film televisual not simply by including television as its subject but by conveying its multiple perspectives: each of the four images of Sedgwick is, as it were, a different channel, a different angle (in time or space) on Warhol’s subject, the relatively small size of each projection analogous to a television screen. Here the transferential relations are enacted primarily between Sedgwick and her televised image, which, as Uhlin puts it, “seems to be whispering into the ‘live’ superstar’s ear.”²¹ Uhlin goes on to suggest that, “Like a vampire draining its victim of her life, TV-Edie hovers menacingly near film-Edie’s neck” (18), identifying Warhol (some of his associates called him “Drella,” a combination of Dracula and Cinderella) with the TV set. But the television, just behind her and to one side, is also in the analyst’s position. As much as it appears to drain or mortify Sedgwick, her televised image also irritates, provokes, or animates her in a manner that both Hoberman and Uhlin describe in psychoanalytic terms: Hoberman describes her schizoid attention and hysteria, while Uhlin describes her tendency to free-associate.²² Here the basic transference of the Screen Tests is layered and multiplied: Sedgwick, initially in front of the video camera, is now between film camera and television set. For a viewer, these multiple transferential relations are then doubled by the two reels being projected simultaneously to maximal psychedelic effect, as we scan back and forth across the four Sedgwicks’ similar voices and facial expressions as they resonate and echo with and against one another.²³

Watching Outer and Inner Space can be a strange and delirious experience, made even more so by the fact that Warhol and Sedgwick were themselves media and psychic projections of one another. Warhol describes Sedgwick in the Philosophy (where he calls her Taxi) this way: “She had a poignantly vacant, vulnerable quality that made her the reflection of everybody’s private fantasies. . . . She was a wonderful, beautiful blank.”²⁴ Warhol cultivated his own version of vulnerable blankness or nothingness, in part as a response to becoming an object of mass-media attention in the early 1960s, and Outer and Inner Space exemplifies the kind of dizzying mirror show that he excelled at setting in motion. The film ends with the four images of Sedgwick disappearing one by one: first, her televised image on the left projection disappears, then her televised image on the right; the film on the left ends, leaving a white screen as the reel runs out; meanwhile the television set on the right tunes into broadcast TV, briefly showing static-filled images of a cowboy. These classic western images connoting outside space break the closed loop of Warhol’s video camera and monitor, but only to invoke the inside space of a studio other than Warhol’s, a television studio somewhere in Hollywood. Consider Warhol’s definition of Pop Art, from the first paragraph of POPism: The Warhol Sixties (1980): “Pop Art took the inside and put it outside, took the outside and put it inside.”²⁵ Television is key in permitting these postwar reversals, bringing outside spaces (baseball fields, western landscapes) into living rooms and broadcasting interior spaces (studios, newsrooms) out. Outer and Inner Space ends with the television set turned off but still offering Sedgwick’s image: a reflection of her dangling earring and white neck remains on the screen behind her while the lights flash and the film reel runs out. Television, in Warhol’s work, has become, like film, a medium that reflects light, just as film has become multiple, emotionally layered, and dependent on visual scanning, like television.

I would like to move now from the televisual poetics of Warhol’s early films to the role of television in his therapeutics. Or, to put this somewhat differently, I would like to offer a reading of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) as philosophy. This may seem an unlikely approach, especially if one reads the title of this book as a spoof of philosophy in its claims to theoretical definitiveness (the philosophy), authority (of Andy Warhol, by Andy Warhol), and systematic coverage. All we’re getting is one step forward, one step back, not the “A to Z” of everything. But Warhol’s book offers readers sharp insights and brilliant observations in the mode of philosophy as Pierre Hadot understands this term. For Hadot, a historian of ancient philosophy, philosophical discourse should be viewed not as theory or system but “from the perspective of the way of life of which it is both the expression and the means” and as it emerges from an existential choice that is “never made in solitude. There can never be a philosophy or philosophers outside a group, a community—in a word, a philosophical ‘school.’”²⁶ From this ancient and colloquial perspective Warhol’s Philosophy resembles books associated with, for example, the Hellenistic schools: it gathers years of accumulated wisdom under a single title, is based on oral teachings (that is, recorded interviews) on a variety of time-honored subjects (love, beauty, time, art, money), and is collected and organized by someone other than the philosopher, in this case Pat Hackett, an associate of that 1960s and 1970s school of philosophy called the Factory.

Ancient philosophy, Hadot argues, is essentially therapeutic and involves work on or with one’s self, especially one’s problematic emotions, by way of the disciplined practice of spiritual exercises. Warhol’s book qualifies as philosophy in exactly this sense, page after page demonstrating its baseline concern for and work on the self that goes by the name Andy Warhol. Consider this useful exercise:

Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, “So what.” That’s one of my favorite things to say. “So what.”

“My mother didn’t love me.” So what.

“My husband won’t ball me.” So what.

“I’m a success but I’m still alone.” So what.

I don’t know how I made it through all the years before I learned how to do that trick. It took a long time for me to learn it, but once you do, you never forget.²⁷

Is this not Warhol’s version of that ancient spiritual exercise that Hadot calls “indifference to indifferent things,” part of the therapeutic practice of distinguishing what depends upon you from what does not?²⁸ There are other examples in Warhol’s book, recommendations for daily living taken from his own practice (“What you should do is get a box for a month, and drop everything in it and at the end of the month lock it up. Then date it and send it over to Jersey”) and slogans that he finds useful to repeat under certain social circumstances (for example, “I’m not the type”).²⁹ I find these slogans and practices both funny and serious. They seem to work, at least for Warhol, although it’s not always clear how, or exactly what work they do. Warhol’s abiding attitude of and ideas about self-care mark his book as a work of philosophy; later I will relate his therapeutics specifically to those of the ancient Cynics.

But my primary goal is less to bring Warhol in line with the ancients than to understand the role of television in his philosophy, and for this purpose I make less use of Hadot’s work than Foucault’s, in particular the two late courses collected under the titles The Hermeneutics of the Subject (2005) and The Courage of Truth (2011). In these lectures Foucault, informed by Hadot’s understanding of philosophy, examines the theme of “care of oneself” across a variety of ancient Greek, Roman, and early Christian writing. Foucault’s lectures, I should note, also count as philosophy, primarily oral teachings on the subject of self-care that were recorded and edited by his students and associates. Given the marked differences from his earlier work—the genealogies of apparatuses of modern state power and criticism of discourses of truth—one might wonder whether the later work on ancient therapeutics properly belongs to that school of philosophy called Foucauldian. It is clear, however, that a career-long concern with power and the relations between subjectivity and truth remain a pressing motive for his thinking. Foucault puts it this way: “I think we may have to suspect that we find it impossible today to constitute an ethic of self, even though it may be an urgent, fundamental, and politically indispensable task, if it is true after all that there is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than in the relationship one has to oneself.”³⁰ I bring Warhol together with Foucault (rather than with Hadot, who does not appear to share these critical commitments) because they were both concerned to develop an “aesthetics of the self” (251) adequate to twentieth-century modes of governance and self-relation.³¹ Foucault and Warhol, an unlikely pairing, have a surprising amount in common: almost identical life spans (Foucault 1926–84, Warhol 1928–87), queer sexualities formed in transgressive relation to postwar consolidations, and radical work that veered sharply away from both Marxist revolutionary politics and the interiorizing aspects of psychology and psychoanalysis.

Warhol and Foucault, perhaps also surprisingly, share an underexamined set of relations to mid-twentieth-century cybernetics. I cannot offer a full exposition of these historical and conceptual relations here, but I would like briefly to indicate the role of some key cybernetic ideas for these thinkers; this will help me to unfold the connections between television and therapeutics that I see in Warhol’s work. The term cybernetics was coined by the mathematician Norbert Wiener and disseminated in his influential book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948). Its title pointed to the central idea that control is a function of communication, as well as to its unusual disciplinary mix: studies of humans and other animals in a variety of life sciences with studies of machines in physics and engineering. Television was a technology of considerable interest to cyberneticians, appearing in the introductory pages of Wiener’s book as a device that can assist in transforming perception. For Wiener, the technology of television works as a prosthesis (for example, in “designing an apparatus to enable the blind to read the printed page by ear”)³² that can amplify sensory experience because of its scanning capacity, its real-time analysis and synthesis of vast amounts of data. As I explained in the previous chapter, scanning names the process by which an image is “read,” decomposed point by point into electrical signals, and “written,” or recomposed nearly instantaneously. From a cybernetic perspective, television is a powerful device for analysis and synthesis, for reading and writing, a perspective that Warhol takes when he defines television, in one of his later interviews, as “just moveable print.”³³ I wouldn’t be the first critic to suggest that Warhol’s remarks about wanting to be a machine should be read in relation to the popularization of cybernetics during the 1950s and 1960s.³⁴ In this context the parenthetical subtitle of Warhol’s Philosophy offers more than simply a joke about philosophy: it offers a succinct definition of circular causality, one of the most important concepts to emerge from (first-order) cybernetic theory. Steve Heims summarizes this idea in The Cybernetics Group: “In traditional thinking since the ancient Greeks a cause A results in an effect B. With circular causality A and B are mutually cause and effect of each other. Moreover, not only does A affect B but through B acts back on itself. The circular causality concept seemed appropriate for much in the human sciences. It meant that A cannot do things to B without being itself effected.”³⁵ Both Warhol’s poetics and his therapeutics, as we shall see, are partly defined by circular causality and feedback relations, key ingredients in the cybernetic recipe for control.

The significance of cybernetic theory and practice to postwar thinking on both sides of the Atlantic has been emerging more clearly as histories of this complex transdisciplinary research program are being written.³⁶ While Foucault has not often been included in these histories (several of which track the importance of cybernetic ideas for French intellectuals), echoes of the cybernetic notion of control can be heard clearly in his writings on power of the mid- to late 1970s.³⁷ I could turn to The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1976) to support this observation, or more briefly to the set of “hypotheses” about power in the interview “Power and Strategies” (1977): “that power is co-extensive with the social body; there are no spaces of primal liberty between the meshes of its network”; “that relations of power are interwoven with other kinds of relations”; that “one should not assume a massive and primal condition of domination, a binary structure with ‘dominators’ on one side and ‘dominated’ on the other”; “that there are no relations of power without resistances; the latter are all the more real and effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised.”³⁸ The metaphor of network and weave in these hypotheses emerges most influentially from a cybernetic-engineering perspective on control as a function of networks of communication, or what Foucault calls systems of discourse. Wiener defined control as “nothing but the sending of messages which effectively change the behavior of the recipient.”³⁹ His recurring example of a control system that operates on the principle of negative feedback is a room whose temperature is maintained by a thermostat: control is located not only at the thermostat where the desired temperature is set but anywhere along the loop of communication. Gregory Bateson put it this way: “In the steam engine with a ‘governor,’ the very word ‘governor’ is a misnomer if it be taken to mean that this part of the system has unilateral control. . . . The behavior of the governor is determined . . . by the behavior of other parts of the system, and indirectly by its own behavior at a previous time.”⁴⁰ Foucault’s fundamental ideas about power—that it should not be understood in binary terms of dominator/dominated and that resistance always accompanies power in place and time—are mapped by the cybernetic understanding of control as never unilateral, or even bilateral, but always a function of the temporal and spatial dynamics of communication in a system or network.

Foucault’s discussions of the government of self and others in his later work on ancient therapeutics exploit the shared etymological root of the words govern and cybernetics, from ancient Greek for “steersman.” Indeed, according to the OED, the French word cybernétique is both a mid-twentieth-century translation from Wiener’s book and has the earlier nineteenth-century sense “art of governing” from ancient Greek “pilot’s art.” Foucault discusses the metaphor of navigation or steering at an important moment in The Hermeneutics of the Subject (2005) in the context of his lectures on conversion, just after he summarizes what he calls the Hellenistic model of “conversion to oneself” this way:

It involves a real shift, a certain movement of the subject with regard to himself, whose nature we will have to investigate. The subject must advance towards something that is himself. Shift, trajectory, effort, and movement: all of this must be retained in the idea of a conversion to self. Second, in this idea of a conversion to self there is the important, difficult, not very clear, and ambiguous theme of return. What does it mean to return to the self? What is this circle, this loop, this falling back that we must carry out with regard to something, yet something that is not given to us, since at best we are promised it at the end of our life?⁴¹

While the concepts of conversion and control initially seem to have little to do with one another, perhaps even opposing one another (fundamental change versus stasis), these terms are based on similar circular movements: conversion is literally a “turning around,” while control depends on the circular, causal, self-correcting relations of negative feedback (the word comes from a medieval bookkeeping method for checking accounts back and forth “against the roll”). Foucault notes the frequent appearance of the metaphor of navigation or piloting in the ancient writings on conversion, observing that “the idea of piloting as an art, as a theoretical and practical technique necessary to existence” (249) consistently shows up in discussions of medicine, political government (the ship of state), and the direction of oneself (navigating one’s life journey). For the ancient Greeks and Romans, Foucault suggests, these three seemingly distinct activities and domains share a kind of knowledge: the thematics of conversion (to self) are linked with those of control (of one’s body, of others).

Foucault pursues the connections between the therapeutic turn toward the self and questions of power by way of the notion of governmentality: “If we understand by governmentality a strategic field of power relations in their mobility, transformability, and reversibility, then I do not think that reflection on this notion of governmentality can avoid passing through, theoretically and practically, the element of a subject defined by the relationship of self to self” (252). While it is not exactly clear how this “passing through” takes place, how governmentality and self-relation are connected, he appears to be offering an implicit critique and revision of Louis Althusser’s notion of interpellation: those moments when the networks of control and dependence that characterize any sociopolitical organization are realized in intersubjective relation. Whereas Althusser’s famous example is being hailed on the street by a police officer—the moment I turn around to answer the call is the moment of my becoming, as he would put it, the subject of ideology—Foucault seeks to prioritize self-relation (“the relationship of self to self”) rather than the relation of self to other, or in the Lacanian terms that Althusser’s notion of interpellation depends on, Self to Other. Frédéric Gros offers a helpful frame for thinking about Foucault’s focus on ethics and intersubjectivity in a discussion of the kind of self-division that accompanies the ancient Greek idea of the daimon: “The ethical dimension is not then the effect of an internalization of the other’s gaze. We should say, rather, that the daimon is like the mythical figure of a first, irreducible caesura: that of self to self. And the Other takes up its place within this relationship, because there is first of all this relationship. It is the Other who is a projection of the Self, and if we must really tremble, it is before the Self rather than before this Other who is only its emblem.”⁴² Put differently, we might say that Foucault chooses Melanie Klein over Jacques Lacan: he focuses on the primacy (or inevitability) of self-splitting or self-differentiation, the way others and otherness can be experienced only by way of the complex and confusing movements of projective and introjective identification (object relations emerge only as a consequence of self-differentiation). We might say this, but Foucault certainly wouldn’t. There’s no reason to believe that he wouldn’t have distrusted Kleinian theory along with the rest of psychoanalysis (despite what I see as a potentially productive conceptual alliance). Psychoanalysis, for Foucault, was the most significant of those modern disciplines that subordinated techniques of self-care to the (scientific) project of self-knowledge, of telling the truth of the subject in the medium of language at the cost of other, ethical or political aims.⁴³

It is no accident, then, that Foucault’s remarks on governmentality take place in the middle of his two lectures on conversion, or what he calls “the great image of turning around towards oneself”:⁴⁴ his concern is to explore the dynamics of turning toward one’s self (in the world), in the therapeutic mode of self-care, rather than only toward the other, or even one’s self as an other, in the epistemic mode of knowledge or belief. His specific goal in these lectures is to unearth a Hellenistic model of conversion that was overwritten by or assimilated to the “two great models in Western culture” (216) that Hadot identified: Platonic epistrophe and Christian metanoia. The Hellenistic model of conversion contrasts with the Platonic model in that it “does not function on the axis opposing this world here to the other world” and “does not take place then in the break with my body” (210). And whereas “a fundamental element of Christian conversion is renunciation of oneself, dying to oneself, and being reborn in a different self and a new form” (211), Foucault argues that the Hellenistic model requires a break, not within the self but with what surrounds the self, “so that it is no longer enslaved, dependent, and constrained” (212). Foucault wants to recover a this-worldly form of conversion, a “self-subjectivation” that contrasts with Platonic and Christian models of “trans-subjectivation” (214); the stakes are to find practices of self-care that do not take one out of the world but locate one firmly in it, for better and for worse. His most powerful statement of these stakes comes at the end of the lectures on conversion in a discussion of the Stoic spiritual exercise of the “view from above.” The person who undertakes this exercise, says Foucault, “must understand that all the wonders to be found in heaven, in the stars and meteors, in the beauty of the earth, in the plains, in the sea and the mountains, are all inextricably bound up with the thousand plagues of the body and soul, with wars, robbery, death, and suffering. . . . He is shown the world precisely so that he clearly understands that there is no choice, that nothing can be chosen without choosing the rest, that there is only one possible world, and that we are bound to this world” (284). To my Kleinian ears, this sounds very much like the insight of the depressive position, the perception of a mixed or contaminated whole, and the place of the self in the networks of dependency that embed it. This form of perception aims to distinguish between what is necessary for that self and what may not be necessary, what can be changed and what (at a given time) cannot.

Warhol’s Philosophy, as I understand it, is thoroughly concerned with the dynamics of conversion and control that I have begun to unfold here: “from A to B and back again” names both the control relations of circular causality or feedback as well as the circle or loop, the shifts and returns of Warhol’s conversion to self. These movements take place primarily by way of dialogue between A and B, that is, between Andy and (in the first instance) Brigid Berlin (aka Brigid Polk), one of Warhol’s longtime telephone confidantes. Pat Hackett wrote or “redacted” the Philosophy based on recordings of telephone calls with Berlin, as well as her own interviews with Warhol. More generally B names any of Andy’s associates, assistants, or worker bees, and dialogue between A and B serves as the book’s central formal and thematic device. Almost every chapter begins with an epigraph, a (sometimes implied) dialogue that illustrates the relevant theme; most chapters contain dialogues or narratives featuring A and B as well. In POPism Warhol explains the importance of this kind of dialogue to his working method: “I was never embarrassed about asking someone, literally, ‘What should I paint?’ Because Pop comes from the outside, and how is asking someone for ideas any different from looking for them in a magazine?”⁴⁵ From A to B and back again describes Warhol’s poetics, his use of others in his artistic practices and his basic connection to the “outside” as creative source. And as the chapter “Work” makes clear, A and B also stand for Art and Business: Warhol, a successful commercial artist turned fine artist, helped to upset the myth of art’s autonomy from the market (especially the market in images) by showing their reciprocal interdependence. Finally, as an edited, redacted assemblage the Philosophy consists of conversations with Warhol, made available to his readers who then become implicated in or part of the loop.

The book’s prologue, titled “B and I: How Andy Puts His Warhol On,” jumps right into the self-constituting (and deconstituting) dynamics of A’s conversion to self with a telephone conversation.

I wake up and call B.

B is anybody who helps me kill time.

B is anybody and I’m nobody. B and I.

I need B because I can’t be alone. Except when I sleep. Then I can’t be with anybody.

I wake up and call B.⁴⁶

The conversation that follows, a hilarious and often vulgar sequence of seeming non sequiturs, offers a camp mix of irony and existentialism as a way to introduce readers to A, our narrator, at once utterly dependent (“I need B because I can’t be alone”) and aloof (“Except when I sleep”). Over the course of the telephone call A is transformed from “nobody” to that media somebody called Andy Warhol, an image, however, that never replaces the narrator’s “nobody.” Quite the opposite: what emerges from this opening chapter is an image that constantly turns on the idea of nobody or nothing: “I’m sure I’m going to look in the mirror and see nothing. People are always calling me a mirror and if a mirror looks into a mirror, what is there to see?” (7). With its allusion to Emily Dickinson (poem 260 begins, “I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you—Nobody—too? / Then there’s a pair of us! / Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know!”), Warhol’s book begins by staging a basic problem that accompanies any act of publication, print or otherwise: how to navigate between the self of everyday emotional experience and the self that is imaged or viewed from the perspective of another. Warhol refuses to maintain an absolute difference between these selves—inside and outside are reversible, as in Outer and Inner Space—but neither does he entirely collapse them. Rather his strategy is to identify precisely with those technologies that introduce the gaps or shifts in perspective in the first place: mirror, telephone, and television.

Consider this opening chapter’s telephonic perspective. While A and B describe their morning rituals and dreams from the night before, a reader is kept constantly aware of the medium, a transcribed telephone call: twice B interrupts the conversation to go pee (“I took a dehydration pill and they make me pee every fifteen minutes” [5]), and once B yells, “I CAN’T HEAR YOU. I CAN’T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU’RE SAYING” (7). This telephonic perspective becomes the reader’s, who may also find it hard to follow the conversation since it’s not always clear who is speaking. A reader becomes even more implicated in the dynamics of A’s conversion to self when, in the middle of the chapter, the narrator offers a long, comic-virtuoso description of what he sees in the mirror when he puts himself together in the morning: “Nothing is missing. It’s all there. The affectless gaze. The diffracted grace. . . . The bored languor, the wasted pallor. . . . The chic freakiness, the basically passive astonishment, the enthralling secret knowledge. . . . The glamour rooted in despair” (10). The list goes on and on, a collage of descriptions of Warhol taken from journalistic and other accounts.⁴⁷ “It’s all there, B. Nothing is missing. I’m everything my scrapbook says I am” (10): the highly cultivated, and (I will return to this) entirely swish persona of Andy Warhol makes its familiar visual appearance to a reader who, the writing can assume, has seen this image many times before in magazines and on television.

Television is the primary technology in these dynamics of A’s conversion to self. Not only is B watching television when he calls (“A? Wait and I’ll turn off the TV” [5]), but she is also literally identified with television as “anybody who helps me kill time.” A’s first bit of philosophical meditation offers up his own identification with television—“A whole day of life is like a whole day of television. TV never goes off the air once it starts for the day, and I don’t either” (5)—and he goes on to admit to “the great unfulfilled ambition of my life: my own regular TV show. I’m going to call it Nothing Special” (6). Andy Warhol’s Nothing Special: in much the same way that commercial television juxtaposes news reports of mass death with advertisements for orange juice, the flat, even tone of the Philosophy weaves together meditations on life and death with descriptions of going to the bathroom. For example, a discussion of their scars segues quickly into B’s account of A’s shooting: “You were in a room in the intensive care unit, getting all these cards and presents from everybody, including me, but you wouldn’t let me come and visit you because you thought I’d steal your pills. And you said you thought that coming so close to death was really like coming so close to life, because life is nothing” (12). Certainly the thematics of nothingness in this chapter could be read in relation to Warhol’s near-death experience in the late spring of 1968. But I read nothingness in these pages primarily as an index to theatricality, to the defining, structural hollowness or void of the stage, the page, the screen, the canvas, and especially the tube.⁴⁸

One way to redescribe Warhol’s minimalism is in terms of his alignment with or his attempt to embody the hollowness of theatricality. His blankness and pallor, his white wig, the silver Factory are all images of this hollowness, the distance between feeling and image introduced by technologies of reproduction. I have shown how television in particular offered this distance, a shift in perspective on emotion that guided Warhol’s art practices. Here I suggest that television guided his practices of self-conversion as well, eliciting his infamous “affectless gaze” that empties out expressiveness to make room for performance. As Warhol explains in POPism, “David [Bourdon] tells me that I used to be much friendlier, more open and ingenuous—right through to ’64. ‘You didn’t have that cool, eyeball-through-the-wall, spaced look that you developed later on.’ But I didn’t need it then like I would later on.”⁴⁹ Warhol develops his look (in both senses) only when he becomes a celebrated object of media attention, and his skill, in part, was in transforming (what he calls transmuting) this mass attention into a set of performance practices. Rather than affectless, I would characterize Warhol’s look as casual or cool, and the flat or even tone of the Philosophy as its print equivalent: a cool look and tone that invite a minimum of judgment and a maximum of interest. Warhol describes this casual style later in the Philosophy as a way to keep in time: “Then there’s that time on the street, when you run into somebody you haven’t seen in, say, five years, and you play it all on one level. . . . Just a casual check-in. Very light, cool, off-hand, very American. Nobody’s fazed, nobody’s thrown out of time, nobody gets hysterical, nobody loses a beat. . . . Just play it all on one level, like everything was yesterday” (111). Warhol’s cool style, keeping it all on one level, orients him to the present of experience. This is a version of an American poetics of the contemporary that connects him to John Cage, Gertrude Stein, and their predecessors, Emerson and William James. In Stein’s poetics the space of psychic experience itself becomes theatricalized, creating an empty space that can accommodate the back-and-forth movements of proximity and distance in experiences of coming to new knowledge. For Warhol, the hollowness of theatricality serves a somewhat different therapeutic project, his conversion to self. “I have to go and dye. I haven’t done it yet today,” A says toward the end of the chapter, to which B replies, “Sometimes I’d like to pull your wig off but somehow I can’t ever do it. I know how it would hurt you” (16).

Television is A’s best B: it offers the most effective means for creating the protective, theatrical space that lets Warhol’s self-conversion take place. Consider a story about television that takes place in the next chapter, titled “Love (Puberty),” which replays the dynamics of A’s conversion to self in the register of memoir rather than seriocomic dialogue. The chapter begins with Warhol narrating his decision to seek psychiatric treatment: “At a certain point in my life, in the late 50s, I began to feel that I was picking up problems from the people I knew” (21). After a couple of pages of extraordinarily compressed life narrative Warhol describes how he bought his first television set on his way home from a session with a Greenwich Village psychiatrist, who, it turns out, never called him back to make another appointment: “Right away I forgot all about the psychiatrist. I kept the TV on all the time, especially when people were telling me their problems, and the television I found to be just diverting enough so the problems people told me didn’t really affect me any more. It was like some kind of magic” (24). The reader is given the chance to identify with television precisely in this protective, therapeutic role. The compressed narration introduces readers to a younger Andy, inviting us to settle comfortably into our armchairs to make sense of the life of the artist. The Reader’s Digest version of his past includes the three nervous breakdowns he had as a child, his immigrant father’s absence and his mother’s love, his sexual naïveté, move to New York City, gradual entry into commercial art, and frustrated desires for intimacy with many roommates. But our comfort (and superiority) is quickly disrupted by the story about television as the more reliable therapist that somehow offers him magical protection or a second skin to layer on his own famously sensitive skin; as he puts it toward the end of the chapter, “When I got my first TV set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships with other people” (26). While the chapter tempts a reader to take up a diagnostic position—nothing would be easier than to point to Warhol’s “problems” (his ironic code word for homosexuality)—it also lets us know that we don’t have to practice such a version of pop psychiatry. Rather we can work our own televisual magic by accepting the Pop perspective offered by the tone of the writing, becoming one of Andy’s Bs and protecting him from our own impingement on him (that is, our own envious desires, the very ones he elicits).

I find Warhol’s story about television-as-therapist both funny and provocative: what could he possibly mean by television’s magic? What’s so funny (and is it discomfort or relief?) in the image of television as a successful rival to psychiatry in mid-twentieth-century America? Postwar medicalized psychiatry, with all its damaging homophobic and heteronormative authority over sexuality, was clearly not going to guide him through his process of conversion to self.⁵⁰ Television, on the other hand, just might. Young Andy’s main professed problem is his susceptibility to vicarious identification, a theme that reappears later in the Philosophy when he describes losing his skin pigmentation as a child: “I saw a girl walking down the street and she was two-toned and I was so fascinated I kept following her. Within two months I was two-toned myself” (64). Two become one (becomes two again); this is a kind of love story, as indicated by the word fascination. (The end of the chapter “Love [Puberty]” introduces Warhol’s interest in Edie Sedgwick by asserting, “The fascination I experienced was probably very close to a certain kind of love” [27].) Television lets Warhol cultivate intimacy as fascination. Not that his desire for intimacy ever diminishes. Consider that, in yet another reference to television in the Philosophy, he describes the pleasure of watching talk shows this way: “I’d love to be able to know everything about a person from watching them on television—to be able to tell what their problem is” (80). But television resists this diagnostic form of intimacy: “I would also be thrilled to be able to know what color eyes a person has just from looking at them, because color TV still can’t help you too much there” (80). Rather than giving him knowledge of the problems of others, as psychiatry claims to do, television diverts his attention (“The television I found to be just diverting enough so the problems people told me didn’t really affect me any more” [24]), converting intimacy to fascination. Warhol’s vicariousness can then become a promiscuous relationship with television itself—“So in the late 50s I started an affair with my television which has continued to the present, when I play around in my bedroom with as many as four at a time” (26)—one of several tools for self-care. And he goes on: “But I didn’t get married until 1964 when I got my first tape recorder. My wife” (26). Warhol explains the tape recorder’s therapeutic power: “Nothing was ever a problem again, because a problem just meant a good tape, and when a problem transforms itself into a good tape it’s not a problem anymore. An interesting problem was an interesting tape. Everybody knew that and performed for the tape. You couldn’t tell which problems were real and which were exaggerated for the tape. Better yet, the people telling you the problems couldn’t decide any more if they were really having the problems or if they were just performing” (26–27). If we remember the role of the tape recorder in the creation of the book we are reading, then this chapter about Warhol’s problems is itself transformed and becomes a good (transcribed) tape, that is to say, an interesting performance.

Television’s magic, like the tape recorder’s, is the perspective it offers on emotion: its capacity to change problems into performances. The Screen Tests exemplify this kind of magic, offering an analytic perspective on his Bs that Warhol used both in his artwork (his poetics) and in his work on himself (his therapeutics). To cast my reading in the terms that Foucault offers, television permits Warhol to practice the therapeutic technique of converting one’s vision in Hellenistic philosophy, a technique that is not in the service of knowing oneself, as it were, objectively, “not a movement of the mind or of attention that would lead us to detect everything bad in ourselves”; it permits us instead “to concentrate on keeping to the straight line we must follow in heading to our destination. . . . It is an exercise of the subject’s concentration.”⁵¹ According to Foucault, the Hellenistic technique of vision offers an athletic discipline that permits us to “clear a space around the self, to think of the aim, or rather of the relation between yourself and the aim” (223). Television helps the workaholic Warhol convert his gaze toward his self, not to define and understand his own problems (as a normative psychiatry might) but to convert these problems into performances in the service of his primary aim or goal, as he gives it to readers in the opening chapter of the Philosophy: “I wish I could invent something like bluejeans. Something to be remembered for. Something mass” (13). The fundamental wish for what is mass—to turn himself into a mass object, like Levis—motivates Warhol’s performance practices, and the televisual perspective lets him attend to this aim directly. In the late 1950s, Warhol tells us, he begins a process of conversion to self by way of television; by 1960 he is painting in his new Pop style; and by 1962 the Campbell’s Soup cans introduce Warhol to a level of celebrity that no other postwar artist would receive. Television serves Warhol’s practices of self-conversion: watching TV becomes a therapeutic technique for focusing his gaze on the mass.

It may help to clarify my reading here by comparing it with the only other in-depth reading of the figure of television in the Philosophy that I have seen, Steven Shaviro’s essay “The Life, after Death, of Postmodern Emotions.” Shaviro takes up a commonplace of recent and still contemporary discussions that casts postmodern emotion in terms of a combination of “terminal irony” and political helplessness, most famously captured by Fredric Jameson’s phrase “the waning of affect.”⁵² This commonplace is structured by a set of oppositions that one could summarize as follows: Warhol chooses postmodern, posthuman surfaces over the depth orientation of an earlier modernist, humanist psychology. Shaviro reads Warhol’s Philosophy in order to fill out the details that might make the commonplace convincing, noting that “Warhol credits the technologies of mass reproduction, the very ones that form the basis of his art, for killing off his emotions” (127) and emphasizing the role of television in this process: unlike movies (which, as we have seen, “make emotions look so strong and real”), television, due to its intimacy, its proximity to us, and the continuity of scale between us and it becomes the primary agent of postmodern simulation. Shaviro focuses on Warhol’s camp irony as it becomes mainstreamed and co-opted by an overarching self-conscious, smug popular culture. His argument here resembles that of David Foster Wallace, who, in the essay “e unibus plurum: Television and U.S. Fiction,” argues that what was once, in the 1960s, a politicized, critical ironic response to television was co-opted by television itself. Wallace goes on to diagnose the failure of writers of the 1980s to develop any alternatives to ironic detachment toward mass culture.⁵³ Unlike Wallace, Shaviro refuses nostalgia for modernist critique, embracing Warhol as “an exemplary postmodern aesthete” whose “self-described ‘affectless gaze’ of ‘basically passive astonishment’ is his updated version of Kantian disinterest.”⁵⁴

These descriptions of Warhol, as I pointed out earlier, are not Warhol’s own but come from journalistic and other accounts. Shaviro accepts these as self-descriptions because they support the Christian model of conversion he is proposing: Warhol’s emotions die to be reborn under the Enlightenment rubric of Kantian aesthetics and the disinterested contemplation of beauty. I have turned to Foucault’s Hellenistic model of conversion as it offers an alternative precisely to such models of death and rebirth, especially as these tend to disembody or depoliticize by way of a decontaminating renunciation. It’s worth observing that Warhol never describes his emotions as having been killed off. Rather he explains television’s magic as a form of protection that offers a fascinated, analytic perspective on emotion: “During the 60s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don’t think they ever remembered. I think that once you see emotions from a certain angle you can never think of them as real again.”⁵⁵ Rather than killing off emotions, television’s therapeutic angle lets Warhol see them not as marks of authenticity but as performance: emotion becomes theatricalized, the medium for the transferential relations between selves and technologies of reproduction. As I have demonstrated, this change in the status of emotion has a longer history than the twentieth-century transition from modernism to postmodernism: Warhol completes a trajectory from a Romantic to a post-Romantic theatricalization of writing and affect, from Poe via Stein to the postwar moment.

In my reading of the Philosophy television works as a therapeutic device that converts Warhol to a canny perspective on his self in a world of complex and ever-shifting relations of dependency, the mass consumer culture of postwar America that is governed, in part, by television itself. Warhol never disavowed his dependence on mass consumer culture and never stopped being the successful commercial artist he had become during the 1950s. Quite the opposite: after his success in fine art in the 1960s he sought ways to pursue what he called Business Art in the 1970s and 1980s, including the lucrative portrait projects, less commercially successful film and television productions, and Interview magazine. His full acknowledgment of mass consumer culture has proven difficult for critics to assess, more difficult, in some ways, than his sexuality. That these are related to one another is evident from a well-known story that Warhol tells in POPism: when he asks his friend Emile de Antonio why Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg (homosexual artists who did commercial art pseudonymously) didn’t like him, de Antonio says, “You’re too swish, that’s what upsets them.”⁵⁶ De Antonio goes on to list Warhol’s success as a commercial artist and his habit of collecting other artists’ work (“Traditionally artists don’t buy the work of other artists, it just isn’t done” [14]) as strikes against Warhol, concluding, “The major painters [of Pop Art] try to look straight; you play up the swish—it’s like an armor with you” (15). Warhol writes, “It was all too true. So I decided I just wasn’t going to care, because those were all things that I didn’t want to change anyway, that I didn’t think I should want to change” (15). Warhol’s therapeutics or care of self involved both an embrace of the New York gay and queer undergrounds and his own obsessive habits as a collector, as well as a refusal to give up his commercial art ambitions. His swishness, a key aspect of his self-presentation, can be read as a marker of sexuality and also an investment in elegance, fashion, style, smartness, the cutting edge.

Warhol’s politics (in the conventional sense) may not have been radical (as Pat Hackett puts it, “Philosophically, Andy Warhol was a liberal Democrat, although he never voted because, he said, he didn’t want to get called up for jury duty”),⁵⁷ but his therapeutic practices were: his powerful indifference (“I decided I just wasn’t going to care”) let him reject norms of sexual and artistic behavior. In the concluding pages of this chapter I briefly consider this indifference, and Warhol’s therapeutics more generally, by way of Foucault’s lectures on the ancient Cynics. At least three aspects of Warhol’s self-presentations accord well with Cynic therapeutics: his outness, or his impulse to demystify, that is, to represent the scandal of the ordinary; his commitment to mistake, transmutation, or what I would call bad performance as a way of life; and a strategy of amplification or positive feedback. These are all related to one another as well as to basic Cynic principles, as Foucault explained them in his last course of lectures, The Courage of Truth (2011). Foucault argues that Cynicism is “the broken mirror, as it were, for ancient philosophy”; while Cynicism shares a number of basic principles with other schools of ancient Greek philosophy (the principles of care of self, of philosophy as preparation for life, and others), it differs in its direct and immediate linking of truth-telling to mode of life: “This is the kernel of Cynicism; practicing the scandal of truth in and through one’s life.”⁵⁸

One main source of Cynic difference is the slogan or principle, given to Diogenes of Sinope by the Delphic oracle, to “alter the value of the currency” (238–39), an oracular pronouncement that, as Louisa Shea explains, can be read as “You must deface the social norms, you must alter the moral currency.”⁵⁹ Foucault contrasts the Cynic slogan with the basic principle of Socratic philosophy, “Know yourself,” and sketches two lines that develop from the philosophical principle of care of the self: the first leads by way of Plato and Western metaphysics to the contemplation of the soul and the “other world,” the second to a radically “other life” (246) by way of Cynicism and its inheritors, a distinctively antitheoretical development that “gives rise to nothing more, in a sense, than Cynic crudeness” (247). Foucault offers a broad survey of this second line of Cynic development, not in philosophy itself so much as in anti-institutional forms of Christian asceticism, in militant revolutionary politics, and in European culture and art; describing what he calls the anti-Platonism and anti-Aristotelianism of modern art, he concludes that “modern art is Cynicism in culture” (189). Certainly Warhol can be located in this line of modern art, from Symbolism to Surrealism, Dada to Pop and punk, each of which might productively be read along the lines of the Cynic principle “Give a new stamp to the common currency.”

A primary technique for achieving this goal was the Cynic practice of shamelessness and exposure described as living a dog’s life. Foucault points out that the dog’s life takes to its logical extreme the Stoic ideal of the unconcealed life, “no longer an ideal principle of conduct . . . [but] the staging of life in its material and everyday reality under the real gaze of others, of everyone else, or at any rate of the greatest possible number of others” (253). For the Cynic who masturbates in the marketplace (as Diogenes was said to do), nonconcealment is “the blaze of the human being’s naturalness in full view of all” (254). Warhol’s films operate with this logic of letting it all hang out, a demystifying or deflating of conventions and norms of behavior that he describes in the Philosophy this way: “I love every ‘lib’ movement there is, because after the ‘lib’ the things that were always a mystique become understandable and boring, and then nobody has to feel left out if they’re not part of what is happening” (45). In much of his film and video work Warhol stages the unconcealed life in its everydayness, making the improper into something ordinary or banal.⁶⁰ Television, in the genre of reality TV, has become central to the practice of depicting versions of the unconcealed life, but in the Philosophy such televised self-exposures and shameless performances appear as part of an explicitly political discourse. In the opening chapter, B presents a fantasy of Warhol’s presidency, which involves “a nightly talk show—your own talk show as President. You’d have somebody else come on, the other President that’s the President for you, and he would talk your diary out to the people, every night for half an hour” (13). This version of Andy Warhol’s Nothing Special offers a pastiche of Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats, but rather than exploiting the intimacy of broadcasting for the purposes of political governance, Warhol offers up the diary genre only to delink it from confession and authenticity. (Indeed Andy Warhol’s Diaries reveals not Warhol’s thoughts and feelings but the amount of money he spends on taxis, dinners, parties, and the general comings and goings of a complex network of acquaintances.)

Warhol’s ideas about what we now call reality TV are politically inflected throughout the Philosophy. For example, after noting a basic contradiction in the American ideal of classlessness—“Somebody still has to do it” (99)—Warhol pitches the following television show: “If the President would go into a public bathroom in the Capitol, and have the TV camera film him cleaning the toilets and saying ‘Why not? Somebody’s got to do it!’ then that would do so much for the morale of the people who do the wonderful job of keeping the toilets clean” (100). In his persona of ingénue, he goes on to elaborate the show’s premise: the president “should just sit down one day and make a list of all the things that people are embarrassed to do that they shouldn’t be embarrassed to do, and then do them all on television” (100). As faux-naïve as this sounds, Warhol still offers a Cynic use of television that presents the performance of normatively shameful activities in front of as many people as possible as a form of public therapeutics.⁶¹ By contrast with Warhol’s show idea, consider the game shows that Chuck Barris began inventing in the 1960s (The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game) and brought to perfected form with The Gong Show (1976); like the more recent reality programs that descend from them, these game shows demand that their viewers experience all the shame or embarrassment that contestants don’t. (In other words, the audience gets cast as at once naïve and knowing.) Warhol’s program reverses this premise, accommodating rather than projecting shame. And while Barris and Warhol share a keen interest in bad performance, Barris’s shows aim to elicit Schadenfreude in viewers, whereas Warhol looks for a very different pleasure: “I can only understand really amateur performers or really bad performers, because whatever they do never really comes off, so therefore it can’t be phoney” (82). For Warhol, bad performance has the advantage of relieving epistemological pressures on authenticity, something that reality TV, with its generic insistence on “reality,” never manages to do.

Bad performance also makes available the experience of surprise: “What I like are things that are different every time. That’s why I like amateur performers and bad performers—you can never tell what they’ll do next” (82). This interest in the surprises of bad performance is closely related to Warhol’s preference for misunderstandings: “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 you work with people who misunderstand you, instead of getting transmissions you get transmutations, and that’s much more interesting in the long run” (99). Like Gertrude Stein, who values words to the degree that they can be mistaken, Warhol enjoys the noisy, positive feedback and lively surprises that accompany a good compositional game of broken telephone.

I have read Warhol’s “from A to B and back again” in terms of a cybernetic definition of circular causality, and now I would like to modify this reading: whereas most cyberneticians focus on negative feedback, crucial for establishing stability or equilibrium (in homeostatic systems, say), Warhol sought out a certain amount of positive feedback for the purposes of transmutation. I mean positive feedback in the colloquial sense as well as the technical one, Warhol’s consistent exclamations of pleasure (“Gee! That’s fantastic!”) working to amplify the activities of his associates or assistants rather than subduing or correcting them. Not that Warhol wasn’t capable of subduing his associates, but he seemed to prefer to use positive feedback as a technique. Hackett describes Warhol’s “three ways of dealing with employee incompetence,” one of which was to “break into an impromptu imitation of the person—never a literal one, but rather his interpretation of their vision of themselves—and it was always funny.”⁶² The technique of noisy or positive feedback serves Warhol (paradoxically perhaps) as a control strategy, for example when he gives out different stories about his childhood in interviews, as he explains in the Philosophy: “I used to like to give different information to different magazines because it was like putting a tracer on where people get their information. That way I could always tell when I met people what newspapers and magazines they were reading by the things they would tell me I had said” (79). Rather than playing into mass journalism’s efforts to establish stability and consensus through the correction of mistake, Warhol destabilizes the directional flows of communication to bring information about readers to him.

Such reversals accompany what Foucault describes as “the systematic practice of dishonor” in Cynic philosophy: “Dishonor is actually sought after by the Cynics who actively look for humiliating situations which are valuable because they train the Cynic in resistance to everything to do with opinions, beliefs, and conventions.”⁶³ Foucault suggests another reason for the Cynic’s interest in seeking out such situations: “Within the accepted humiliation, one is able to turn the situation around, as it were, to take back control of it” (261). He tells the story of a dinner at which Diogenes, called the Dog, was thrown a bone—which he accepted only to lift his leg and piss on the guests. Warhol’s many interviews exemplify this kind of amplification and redirection, a reversal of control that brings the interviewers’ assumptions and the norms and conventions of the interview genre itself into question. Similarly his seeking out of embarrassing moments in his films and other performances serves as a strategy that aims to discover or uncover both what is present and what is actually necessary, the amplification of convention until its contingency or gratuity can be perceived. This strategy offers one way to understand the last chapter of Warhol’s Philosophy, “Underwear Power” or “What I Do on Saturday When My Philosophy Runs Out,” in which he shops for underwear at Macy’s with one of his Bs. This would initially appear to be as un-Cynical an activity as possible, especially given Foucault’s discussion of the Cynic “conduct of poverty” as the limit case of philosophical indifference to material goods.⁶⁴ In late twentieth-century America, however, buying takes on a different set of meanings than in ancient Athens: “Buying is much more American than thinking and I’m as American as they come” (229).

Consider the fact that through the 1970s and 1980s Warhol went shopping for several hours every day before going to his office, eventually accumulating more than $25 million worth of consumer goods, most of which were boxed up and put into storage; these more than six hundred boxes have come to be understood as an extensive art-and-collecting project, Warhol’s Time Capsules.⁶⁵ The everyday objects in these boxes range from financial papers to newspaper clippings, photobooth strips that Warhol would use as the basis for portraits, postcards, letters, other people’s manuscripts, food, toys, and more. Taken out of circulation and use, these objects become (more or less enigmatic) indexes to Warhol’s life, and at the same time art objects of a kind: Warhol wanted to offer the sealed boxes for sale at a gallery show, all at the same price (initially $100, but later in his life $4,000 to $5,000). His extraordinary amplification of U.S. habits of consumption both exaggerated his responsibility as an American to be a consumer of global commodities in his historical moment and cannily repackaged the everyday objects that gave him the idea for many of his Pop artworks. Here again are Warhol’s Bs, ideas from the outside that, boxed and put into storage, reemerge later (from B to A and back again) with a different value. And how much of a stretch would it be to think of these boxes as Warhol’s televisions, his boxes that contain, and later deliver, the detritus of a Cynic mode of life, so many episodes of nothing special? Give a new stamp to the common currency indeed, for better and for worse.