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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 April 2025
This article sketches an interpretation of Olga Neuwirth’s Le Encantadas o le avventure nel mare delle meraviglie by focusing on the song by the Vocaloid Hatsune Miku in the last section of the composition. This Vocaloid song is disturbing because it expresses a conflicted form of subjectivity that is typical of our time. The article considers four different ways to read this expression: as pop-cultural negation of subjectivity, as postmodern celebration of singularity, as post-revolutionary longing for collectivity or as the contemporary mythical counterpart of the capitalist subject form. I argue that the fourth interpretation seems the most promising. According to this interpretation, Neuwirth stages Hatsune Miku as the sirene of digitalised capitalism – a technological mythos against which the contemporary subjectivity tries to constitute itself.
1 Olga Neuwirth, Le Encantadas o le avventure nel mare delle meraviglie (Milan, Berlin, London and New York: Ricordi, 2016). A recording of the world premiere in Donaueschingen by Ensemble Intercontemporain is available at @g_inblat, ‘Olga Neuwirth: Le Encantadas o le avventure nel mare delle meraviglie (2014/15)’, 15 July 2019. YouTube video. Accessed 27 August 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xJNAHGm9kQ.
2 Herman Melville, ‘The Encantadas’ [1856], in The Writing of Herman Melville Vol 9: The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces 1839–1860 (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1987).
3 The sound recalls the beginning of Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony, which Adorno compared to the headache caused by the bright grey of a cloudy sky. Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physiognomik (Frankfurt am Main: Bibliothek Suhrkamp, 1960), p. 11.
4 One might think about the treatment of the famous Pink Floyd chord from ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ at the beginning of Fausto Romitelli’s An Index of Metals.
5 ‘O wir Wandernde, kriechende Würmer für kommende Schuhe, unser Tod wird wie eine Schwelle liegen vor euren verschlossenen Türen!’
6 On Afrofuturism, cf. Alexander G. Weheliye, ‘“Feenin”: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music’, Social Text 71: Afrofuturism 20, no. 2 (2002), pp. 21–47; Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (London: Quartet Books, 1999); J. Griffith Rollefson, ‘The “Robot Voodoo Power” Thesis: Afrofuturism and Anti-Anti-Essentialism from Sun Ra to Kool Keith’, Black Music Research Journal 28, no. 1 (2008), pp. 83–109. On the phenomenon of the Vocaloid and Hatsune Miku, cf. Ka Yan Lam, ‘The Hatsune Miku Phenomenon: More Than a Virtual J-Pop Diva’, The Journal of Popular Culture 49, no. 5 (2016), pp. 1107–24; Jennifer Milioto Matsue, ‘The Ideal Idol’, in Vamping the Stage: Female Voices of Asian Modernities, ed. Andrew Weintraub and Bart Barendregt (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2017), pp. 320–348; Jessica Tsun Lem Hui, ‘Reconfiguring Voice in The End: Virtuosity, Technological Affordance and the Reversibility of Hatsune Miku in the Intermundane’, Cambridge Opera Journal 34 (2022), pp. 364–79; Rafal Zaborowski, ‘Hatsune Miku and Japanese Virtual Idols’, in The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality, ed. Sheila Whiteley and Shara Rambarran (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 111–28.
7 Cf. Diedrich Diedrichsen, Über Pop-Musik (Cologne: Kiepenhauer & Witsch, 2014), 313ff.
8 Roland Barthes, ‘Le grain de la voix’, in L’obvie et l’obtus : Essais critiques III (Paris: Seuil, 1982), pp. 238–43.
9 Etienne Balibar offers a good overview in ‘Subjection and Subjectivation’, in Supposing the Subject, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 1–15.
10 Olga Neuwirth and Stefan Drees, ‘Programmheftbeitrag’. Ricordi website. Accessed 27 August 2024. https://www.ricordi.com/de-DE/News/2015/10/Neuwirth-Le-encantadas.aspx.
11 Andreas Reckwitz, Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten: zum Strukturwandel der Moderne, (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2019).
12 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).
13 Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, (London:Routledge, 1991), pp. 149–181.
14 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Bartleby, ou la formule’, in Critique et clinique (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1993), p. 110.
15 Gary Shapiro, ‘Beasts, Sovereigns, Pirates: Melville’s “Enchanted Isles” Beyond the Picturesque’, in Melville among the Philosophers, ed. Corey McCall and Tom Nurmi (London: Lexington Books, 2017), p. 83.
16 Cf. Carola Nielinger-Vakil, Luigi Nono: A Composer in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
17 Cf. Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Gunnar Hindrichs, Philosophie der Revolution (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017).
18 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung: philosophische Fragmente (Adorno: Gesammelte Schriften, 3) (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997).
19 Olga Neuwirth, Le Encantadas; Adolfo Bioy Casares, La invención de Morel (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1940), translated by Ruth Simms as The Invention of Morel (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2003).