The Life, After Death, of Postmodern Emotions

The Life, After Death, of Postmodern Emotions Steven Shaviro 1. To the best of my knowledge, Andy Warhol never used the word postmodern. Nonetheless, he anticipated, and indeed helped to create, much of what we now mean by that word. In the 1960s, and until his death in 1987, Warhol manufactured a style and a sensibility. It's something he picked up from the culture around him, transmuted in the social and artistic laboratory that he called the Factory, and transmitted back to American culture at large. For this reason, Warhol and his work have an exemplary status, even a privileged one, when it comes to looking at the changes American culture underwent during the second half of the twentieth century. In what follows, I look at the meaning, or the redefinition, of emotion in the postmodern world. I do this, however, not by generalizing from Warhol as a particular case but by looking at him as closely as possible, in his singularity (which in part also means his queerness), and by constructing a narrative about how that singularity has become for us, today, a cultural "universal." 2. In his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, Warhol tells the following story: "During the 60s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered. I think that once you see emotions from a certain angle you can never think of them as real again. That's what more or less has happened to me. I don't really know if I was ever capable of love, but after the 60s I never thought in terms of 'love' again."1 3. What happened during the 1960s? Who is to blame (or credit) for this state of affairs? Who killed the emotions that we used to think were real? Of course, the 1960s were a time of massive change, in America and in End Page 125 other parts of the world as well. In the United States it was the period of the civil rights movement, the women's and gay liberation movements, and the antiwar and anticolonialist movement, together with sweeping changes in sexual and domestic mores. As if to mirror these changes, right-wing social commentators still blame the decade for an alleged decline in social cohesiveness and values. The 1960s were also the time when Andy Warhol himself moved from being a commercial illustrator to being a world-class artist. The social scene around Warhol's Factory at the time is often taken to exemplify the excesses (for good or ill) of the decade. 4. But Warhol doesn't mention any of this in his story of the death of his emotions. Rather, he fingers technology as the culprit. He says that television and the tape recorder did it. "When I got my first TV set," he writes, "I stopped caring so much about having close relationships with other people." Even more, he continues, "the acquisition of my tape recorder really finished whatever emotional life I might have had." And he adds that he considers this a good thing: "I was glad to see it go."2 5. Warhol's account of the loss of his emotional life—leaving aside his sense of satisfaction at the prospect—has since become a commonplace in discussions of postmodern culture. Thus J. G. Ballard writes of "the death of affect" under the influence of the last century's new technologies and media.3 In a somewhat different way, Fredric Jameson also posits "the waning of affect" in postmodernism.4 And of course, Jean Baudrillard's work is all about how "the cool universe of digitality" has eclipsed the real, "the 'cool' cybernetic phase supplanting the 'hot' and phantasmatic."5 The argument goes something like this: Thanks to the new electronic technologies, the world has become a single global marketplace. Universal commodity fetishism has colonized lived experience. The real has been murdered by its representations. Every object has been absorbed into its own image. There is no longer (if there ever was) any such thing as a single, stable self. Subjectivity has broken into multiple fragments, and the high modernist endeavor to totalize these...