UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Anima Automata: On the Olympian Art of Song Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2f4304xv Author Porzak, Simon Lucas Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Anima Automata: On the Olympian Art of Song By Simon Lucas Porzak A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Daniel Boyarin, Co-Chair Professor Barbara Spackman, Co-Chair Professor Pheng Cheah Professor Susan Schweik Spring 2014 Anima Automata: On the Olympian Art of Song © 2014, Simon Lucas Porzak 1 Abstract Anima Automata: On the Olympian Art of Song by Simon Lucas Porzak Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric University of California, Berkeley Professor Daniel Boyarin, Co-Chair Professor Barbara Spackman, Co-Chair 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. I 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. My central chapter turns to Olympia herself. 18 th 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 2 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 19 th 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 18 th 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. Two 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. My 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. i Aux amateurs, Aux automates. ii Table of Contents (ii) Acknowledgements (iii) Prelude: Technology/Feeling/Humanity (1) Some Questions Concerning Fembots (1) Towards an Olympian Art of Song (8) Alarm-Clock Dreams: Sound, Technology, and Ideological Fantasy (23) How Soon Is Now? (23) I’m Waking Up To Us (26) La Baise Hyper-technique: Serge Gainsbourg and Theodor Adorno’s Ballads of the Fetish (39) Sea, Sex, and Sun (39) SHEBAM! POW! BLOP! WIZZ! (46) Poupée de son (66) Hoffmann, Fantasy: Olympia’s Uncanny Song (80) Vocal Breakdown, Technical Breakthrough (80) Interlude (84) Divas, Dancers, Dolls, Ducks: Figuring Automation in the Contes (86) Thermodynamic Poetics in the Contes and the Tales of Hoffmann (95) Olympia’s Negative Magnetism: Stella and Antonia (107) Unheimlicher Fetischismus, oder Fetischistiche Unheimlichkeit? (115) Re-fantasizing the Fantastic (125) Science-Fictions of the Fembot: Edison’s Super-Modeling (131) Engineering Equilibrium, or, The Balance of Terror (134) Super-Models: Villiers’s Hyper-Realist Science Fiction (145) Orpheus Out of the Underworld: Silencing the Noisy Ghosts of Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (155) In which the “Amateur des Trappes” Loses His “Maîtrise” (156) On Unfortunate Sequels (169) I, X: Kylie Minogue’s Telepathic Pop (173) I. (173) II. (177) III. (178) IV. (180) V. (182) VI. (194) VII. (203) VIII. (215) IX. (219) iii Acknowledgments I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the members of my committee, without whom I never could have become the author of this dissertation. Daniel Boyarin was the first to make me feel welcome at Berkeley, and challenged me and supported me throughout my time here in more ways than I can enumerate or even comprehend. Barbara Spackman gave me the courage to follow my vocation, and I will always strive to emulate her infectious passion, imposing erudition, and intellectual generosity. Pheng Cheah patiently and elegantly showed me the virtue of precision and care, all the while allowing me to follow my own path. Susan Schweik kindly agreed to take on my project in a very late stage of progress, and for nevertheless offered enthusiastic, candid support in the too-brief time I had to study with her. Ann Smock, besides fearlessly demonstrating the beauty of reading and letting me delve into texts that made both of us uncomfortable, is perhaps the best writer I have ever met; I hope one day to write a sentence worthy of her. An incredible set of mentors and teachers paved the way for my time at Berkeley. Anne Berger first inspired me to study French literature, and she taught me how to love texts unabashedly, a gift that I can never begin to repay. Richard Klein showed me how thinking could be a way of life that fills every moment with wonder, frustration, and still more wonder. I’m honored that Xak Bjerken chose me as his piano student, and every time I touch a keyboard I hear his influence, for which I am eternally grateful. Stephen Chase, Ray Craib, Jonathan Culler, Laurent Dubreuil, Diana Medina Lasansky, Timothy Murray, and Diane Rubenstein also played instrumental roles in shaping my career and existence. Michal Grover-Friedlander was a true inspiration in this project, and I would like to thank her especially for her