Anima Automata: On the Olympian Art of Song

Dominant explanations of the power of song, in musicology, sound studies, media theory, and our cultural mythologies about divas and pop singers, follow a Promethean trajectory: a singer wagers her originary humanity through an encounter with the machinery of music (vocal training, recording media, etc.); yet her song will finally carry an even more profound, immediate human meaning. Technology forms an accidental detour leading from humanity to more humanity. In an alternative, "Olympian" practice of singing, humanity and machinery constantly and productively contaminate each other. My readings, centering around the singing doll Olympia from Jacques Offenbach's 1881 opera Les Contes d'Hoffmann, illuminate the affective and ethical consequences of the confrontation between Promethean and Olympian song./nI first demonstrate our contemporary techno-ideological world's fixation on Promethean song. Reading Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan alongside electropop music, I show that a sustained, iterative process of falling in love again with the Promethean fantasy structures our everyday encounters with omnipresent vocal technologies (telephones, iPods, radios) and with the form of the Real that they imply and instantiate. I next turn to Theodor Adorno and the simultaneously technological, ideological, and psychoanalytic establishment of a Promethean world. Adorno's lesser-known works on pop music propose an affective and epistemological model of "fetishism" that I unfold through a reading of Serge Gainsbourg's pop songs of the 1960's. Adorno radically revises Freud's specular fetishism by discovering an auditory, vocal fetish-object. Adorno's theory requires the disciplinary program Gainsbourg develops in his masochistic relationship with the young singer France Gall: forcing her to become a Promethean robot, Gainsbourg endows her with a phallic, prosthetic voice, inserting her in a homosexualized (since universally masculinized), indifferent circuit of desire./nMy central chapter turns to Olympia herself. 18th century automata, music theory, and fantastic literature all define a thermodynamic, mathematically irrational force that their imitative and speculative powers cannot yet represent: Félix Vaucanson's famous defecating duck and pipe-playing automaton imitate everything except the chemical process of digestion or the adjustment of aperture and breath speed needed to compensate for harmonic resonance within the flute; music theory and the practice of tuning negotiate between calculable rational-number intervals and their irrational, incommensurate remainders; and E. T. A. Hoffmann carefully distinguishes between realizable engineering and magical technologies linked to acoustics and thermodynamics. When 19th century media generalize the manipulation of these forces, all based on the calculation or circulation of mathematically-irrational energy flows, in everyday reality, Olympia enters this empty space as a fantasy, enabling a denial of the omnipresent electromagnetic flow that had appeared fatally destabilizing to the rational order of 18th century technology and thought. Freud's reading of Olympia's "uncanniness" fetishistically avoids the troubling complex of affect and automatism central to feminine desire to exorcise the "fantastic" potential of figures such as Olympia. However, in a recent performance at the Met disseminated clandestinely online (challenging us to reconsider the place of "liveness" in the reception of opera and the strange pleasure of the opera "pirate," often considered as an aberrant or marginal form of opera spectatorship), the understudy Rachele Gilmore rediscovers this fantastic dimension of Olympian song, dissolving a rigorous distinction between fantasy and reality./nTwo chapters investigate fin-de-siècle responses to Olympia. In Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's L'Ève future, Thomas Edison constructs the android Hadaly not to satisfy a positive male desire but instead to forestall the apocalyptic threat to male subjectivity embodied by fin-de-siècle women, who are already androids. Edison's "modeling" of Hadaly influences both future science-fiction texts and the practice of science itself, notably Alan Turing's theory of artificial intelligence. Gaston Leroux's Le Fantôme de l'Opéra textually situates the Phantom at the female pole of a homosexual love-triangle between the ostensibly heterosexual protagonists. The properly masculinized and prosthetized Christine and Raoul - along with their audience - abandon the opera house, and the specter of femininity entombed within it, entering a glacially transsexualized world of desire without difference./nMy conclusion focuses on the Australian pop star Kylie Minogue, who performs Olympian song from within the universalized Promethean system. Her work defines affective intersubjectivity neither as impossible nor as indifferent sympathy. Kylie develops a practice of "telepathy" feared and desired by Freud, Turing, and Lacan. Playing on the "earworm," Kylie minimalizes immediate or profound affect to highlight the constant circulation of productive mechanisms between bodies both "technological" and "human." In this human-machine voice, we rediscover our difference from each other, and from ourselves, in the singular ways we execute the most homogenizing of programs.

Advisor: Boyarin, Daniel
Spackman, Barbara