Warhol in the age of Facebook

First of all, a note on Owens' text on "the allegorical." As someone who has taken many literature courses at Brown, I was surprised to find that I had never encountered the sort of "anti-allegory" attitude that Owens described as entirely pervasive in modern criticism. For instance, I have read Borges for Comp Lit classes, and while Owens does say that his works are often considered highly allegorical (and certainly my professors interpreted them as such), not once was it mentioned that Borges himself wrote against allegorical art. It is strange that my courses never discussed this critical tendency, and I have to wonder what that says about Brown's literature departments (or at least the courses I have taken)....

As for Foster: Like Monica, I was intrigued by Foster's description of Warhol's screen tests. Not having yet seen Empire, I cannot respond to her post, but I did find it intriguing that I felt a strange impulse to be "subjected" to this "subject test" myself. Much of it is natural curiosity, I'm sure: Would it be mainly psychological for me? Physiological? Would I be one of the few to "triumph" over the apparatus? I would imagine not, and yet I feel a perverse(?!) impulse to try. Of course, I also want to see the screen tests, especially as I find it hard to imagine how it is that I would identify with the apparatus as Foster says. Of course I am familiar with Metz's notion of the camera as primary source of identification for the viewer, and yet, in such a static position, watching the inevitable travails of the test subject, how could I maintain this sadistic primary identification? And in watching, how can one help but feel the desire to see how one would stand up to the challenge? Why does such a desire exist??

What is most interesting about the concept of the screen tests and my own desire to try, is what Foster mentions in the footnote, spekaing of the subject in "our age of MySpace and Facebook" (40). To a generation raised on the 'necessity' of creating a self-image for the cyberworld, such a screen test must, ultimately, be far more familiar than it would have been for Warhol's visitors. For example, I'm sure we are all familiar with that new motivation for photography, the 'I-need-a-new-Facebook-profile-picture' phenomenon. It is as if every social event, no matter how private, is somehow staged for universal consumption, once a camera is introduced. Perhaps it is, in some way, a new kind of celebrity that we all have been taught to seek; our generation is as desperate as the stars Foster describes: "seek[ing] recognition... threatened if [we] are not iconic enough" (36). Any student in this class who has/had a Facebook is familiar with the strange iconicity it produces--how many of us 'know' certain students by face, without ever having spoken to them? So my question is: How can we theorize this phenomenon? How might it be described psychoanalytically? Is this strange need, this impetus to self-promote, self-project, also figured in my desire to be "tried" by a screen test? Such questions address only a fraction of the bizarre phenomenon that has overtaken our generation, and I can only be left to wonder: how might Andy Warhol have acted if he had lived to the age of Facebook???