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The Submerged Subject of Video-Opera: Fausto Romitelli's An

Index of Metals

Article in The Opera Quarterly · March 2017

DOI: 10.1093/oq/kbx028

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The Submerged Subject of Video-Opera: Fausto
Romitelli’s An Index of Metals

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trent leipert
university of regina

Opera in the present can be said to exhibit two tendencies: “radical” restagings and
remediations propose new configurations of music, bodies, voices, and scenogra-
phy, while the institution itself nonetheless relies largely on historically constituted
subjects and inherited emotional frameworks for continued sustenance (consider,
for example, Lyric Opera of Chicago’s recent advertising campaign: “Long live
passion”).1 A contemporary intermedial work such as the 2003 “video-opera” An
Index of Metals—created by the late Fausto Romitelli with music and video collabora-
tors Paolo Pachini and Leonardo Romoli, and poet Kenka Lèkovich—might seem to
reflect these tendencies: it emphatically foregrounds video and voice, and plays on
the audience’s expectations for an emotional profundity that never quite material-
izes or, rather, is strangely unmoored from a clearly defined subject. Indeed, there is
no apparent plot in this “opera” and no dramatis personae. Furthermore, any sense
of dramatic development detected in the three “songs” comprising the work is ulti-
mately offset by the increasingly effaced subjecthood expressed therein. In this and
many other ways, Romitelli, Pacchini, and Lèkovich play with surface and depth: for
most of the fifty-minute work, a video screen slides over various metallic substances;
the single vocalist at the center of the “opera” remains off-stage and off-screen, pro-
jecting her voice at times through an electric megaphone; and the work’s opening
moments contrast Spectralist-inspired sonorities with rock album samples.
Why, then, does this work hold onto not only the operatic female voice but also
the traces of a subject? Why does it not do away with it completely and abandon any
pretense of invoking operatic expectations? After all, in what has become a sort of
aesthetic prescript in much contemporary cultural practice and discourse, Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari suggested that “the aim of art is to wrest the percept
from perceptions of objects and the states of a perceiving subject, to wrest the affect
from affections as the transition from one state to another: to extract a bloc of sensa-
tions, a pure being of sensations.”2 This is, of course, a rather extreme take on affect
and the subject (not to mention the function of art), but one that has been influen-
tial and especially resonant in an age that, for numerous reasons, is no longer

The Opera Quarterly Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 161–183; doi: 10.1093/oq/kbx028
Advance Access publication December 8, 2017
# The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
162 | trent leipert

convinced of the metaphysical integrity of the subject. The death of the subject has
been proclaimed, observed, and mediated routinely for decades by this point, so
why would a contemporary creative venture such as a self-consciously and self-
described video-opera seek to conjure its faded traces? We might, I suggest, consider
the obverse of Deleuze and Guattari’s position: if the function of art is to wrest pre-
cept and affect from the subject, perhaps it also functions to reveal or explore what

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remains of the subject. So conceived, the distinction between indeterminate, pre-
subjective affect and knowable, localized emotion—a key contribution of affect
theory—becomes especially important in experiencing this work and for under-
standing its often hazy operatic allusions.3 With An Index of Metals, the promise of
the operatic subject’s presence relies on recognizing the distinction between affect
and emotion, as well as the potential fluidity between the two. As I will discuss, af-
fect in An Index of Metals arises through a simultaneous excess and lack: a surfeit of
signs and physicality, but an absence of correlations and causes. It is precisely be-
tween these spaces of uncertainty that affect is activated, yet the presence of a poten-
tial subject also flickers. An Index of Metals therefore alerts us to the ambivalence
between these conceptions of human feeling. These features also play a role in en-
abling the work to resonate with both the history of video art and the longer tradi-
tion of opera and its female protagonist-victims, thereby offering a particularly
suitable operatic exploration of the subject of late modernity.

Immersion, Absorption, and Affect

Whether attending a live performance of the music or watching the commercial
DVD, for fifty minutes the audience of An Index of Metals will try to follow three
slightly out-of-synch and randomly deviating screens that present a constant flux of
filmed metal substances that have undergone digital manipulation. Although the
score is divided into twelve sections (see Table 1), the music and video are continu-
ous. Several minutes into the work, a voice emerges from the chamber ensemble
(augmented by keyboard, electric guitar and bass, and electronics). The singer does
not act. She is also never seen in the DVD, and in live performances she is posi-
tioned off to the side of the video screens with the rest of the ensemble. Instead, she
both describes and, in the second song, assumes the position of the otherwise
unseen girl in Lèkovich’s three texts, the “Hellucinations,” which the author calls
collectively “metalsushi: 3 songs for an index of metals” (see Table 2).
By designating her text as a set of songs, Lèkovich already suggests an indepen-
dently conceived poetic work at some remove from a conventional libretto, but one
that is nonetheless clearly intended for incorporation into Romitelli’s project. Song
forms do provide musical and poetic structure at various points in An Index of
Metals, yet no intervening dramatic dialogue brings them together. An Index of
Metals has no clearly identifiable character beyond “Hellucination 1,” where the lines
 the submerged subject of video-opera | 163

Table 1. Formal Division of An Index of Metals

An Index of Metals

1. Introduzione
2. Primo intermezzo
3. Hellucination 1: drowningirl
4. Secondo intermezzo

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5. Drowningirl II
6. Terzo intermezzo
7. Drowningirl III
8. Adagio
9. Quarto intermezzo
10. Hellucinations 2/3: risingirl/earpiercingbell
11. Finale
12. Cadenza

“she don’t care / she won’t call Brad for Help” allude to Roy Lichtenstein’s iconic
1963 painting “Drowning Girl”; no named individuals occupy the subject and object
positions of the “I” and “you” in “Hellucination 2”; and the vocalist bears no con-
stant or fixed relationship to anyone presented (or for that matter not presented) on-
screen. As we will see, these features will have important consequences for how we
approach the subject of this video-opera.
In the opinion of one reviewer: “The words are a silly, prepubescent mishmash
tartly seasoned with chemical and industrial imagery.”4 This apparent trashiness (in
the reviewer’s opinion) seems intentional, however, and the work is littered with refer-
ences to 1970s popular music, especially progressive rock, a genre whose zenith
would have roughly coincided with the adolescence of Romitelli and some of his col-
laborators. For example, the work opens with a Pink Floyd sample, Lèkovich’s text
contains a line taken from the poetry of Jim Morrison, and the title itself is borrowed
from a Brian Eno track from his 1975 album Evening Star. Allusions to popular culture
and media, often simultaneously mixing the admittedly tacky with the pretentious,
mark much of Romitelli’s oeuvre, evident in titles such as Acid Dreams & Spanish
Queens (1994), EnTrance (1995–96), Professor Bad Trip: Lessons I–III (1998–2000),
Trash TV Trance (2002), and Dead City Radio/Audiodrome (2002–2003).
Allusions to popular music are evident not only on the timbral surface of
Romitelli’s work, but also as a more general cultural reference for experimentations
with altered physical states and changed consciousness. In his published commen-
tary on the piece, Romitelli suggests that the work be experienced akin to a drug-
induced fantasy, a “trip”: “Far from soliciting solely our analytical capacities like the
bulk of contemporary music, An Index of Metals wants to seize the body through [a]
dreamlike and sensorial double exposure.”5 I would take issue with Romitelli’s char-
acterization of contemporary composition as solely cerebral, analytic, and
164 | trent leipert

Table 2. Kenka Lèkovich, “metalsushi: 3 songs for an index of metals”

Hellucination 1 (drowningirl) Hellucination 2 (risingirl) Hellucination 3 (earpiercingbells)

1. 1.
Shining growing Murder by guitar, BEDRIDDEN (TO)
melting drowning nickel you are DUMBFOUND
into an iron but when I pierce and fix NOISEDIN

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bluegrey wave your smile EARPIERCING BELLS
a pillowing wave to dive in and dive HELLPHONES
breaking over her head you rise on and rise METAL SHELLS
sudden extreme honeymooners infected by noise
literally drowning in emotions. Steel thrust sucking space
2.
2. A brown lust for life, corrupting
she suddenly fell rust you are infecting
in a metal-miso hell but when I collapse into transfixing
a loop of seaweed soup your eyes collapsing
pieces of milky broken glass to dive in and dive empoison
leaves of red copper rust you rise on and rise imprison
industrial noisy dust corroded by noise enchain
3. 3. incinerate
she don’t care Black Iron Prison, lacerate
she won’t call Brad for help chrome you are perforate
she would rather give up too soon but when I crash into intoxicate
she will drown and sink in a spoon your bones demolishing
to dive in and dive squashing
SHE’D RATHER SINK IN HER you rise on and rise crashing
NAIL ENAMEL corrupted by noise corrode
SHE’D RATHER SINK IN HER pierce
4. hole
LONGLASTING NAIL ENAMEL
The basement is done bore
INOXIDABLE STAINLESS
lithium you are drown
EXPRESS
but when I hit and shot nail
your soul rent
to dive in and dive break
you rise on and rise cut
crucified by noise shoot
strike
hit
crucify the heartbeat

incorporeal, especially in light of the continuity between sensation and interpretation

pursued by many modernists. As Charles Altieri has shown in the field of literature,
the rejection of emotional expression among certain modernists did not mean they
were uninterested in feeling. Rather, emotions were tarnished by centuries of
 the submerged subject of video-opera | 165

rhetorical codification and, as they relied upon narrative situations to arise, seemed
increasingly self-theatricalizing. But if feeling could be separated from emotion, af-
fective states could be developed that were uncontaminated by social and historical
baggage.6 Feelings “could be honored for a subtlety and fluidity impossible to stage
within socially approved abstractions. When feelings did involve intentionality, they
contoured the imagination to the sensation and not the sensation to gesture and

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posture and belief.”7 I would place Romitelli within a larger tradition of later mod-
ernist composers who seek these very aims.8 If his characterization of contemporary
music appears skewed, it is perhaps because he seeks to position his last work out-
side of the academic institutions and intellectual confines in which contemporary
art music had largely been relegated during much of his lifetime.
An Index of Metals premiered in Brussels in 2003, only weeks before Romitelli’s
death from cancer, and was written with the knowledge that it would be his final
work. While it has since received a number of performances throughout Europe
and North America, its recording and diffusion further attest to Romitelli’s interme-
dial ambitions. A recording by the Brussels-based Ictus Ensemble includes
Pacchini’s video with viewing options set for single screen view or three-screen view
(i.e., all three original visual tracks appearing side-by-side on one screen). The un-
usual medial status of this video is worth noting. Apart from cinematic
adaptations—which sidestep some questions of performance while suturing other-
wise disjointed bodies, voices, and spaces—operas conceived specifically for elec-
tronic and digital media are still relatively rare.9
Two currents offer contextualization in theorizing a project that calls itself a
“video-opera”: the relatively recent tradition of electronic mixed media and the longer
history of opera in which the relationship between the visual, textual, and musical has
periodically come under scrutiny and reformulation. As David Levin notes in his
study of “unsettled” opera, under the new musicological regimes, opera “has under-
gone a series of signal transformations— first, from ‘work’ to ‘text,’ and more recently,
from text to performance.”10 This shift has reinvigorrated opera studies while also
posing some challenges, not least because video formats (whether DVD or HD-
broadcast) are now a major—if not the dominant—mode of operatic engagement and
reengagement. Levin takes issue with the insistence that “our absorption in the
work’s performance (its eventness and materiality) is limited to live performance, that
it must not extend to recordings.”11 This interrogation of opera’s ontology calls our at-
tention to the medial elements that constitute the contemporary enterprise of
“opera.”12 Emanuele Senici makes a similar point regarding video recordings of live
opera, noting that the conception of video as parasitic on both the work and the stag-
ing has left few in-depth considerations of the specifically video component of DVD
recordings. As he observes, “This has prevented detailed and sustained investigation
of the ways in which video does not simply mediate, relate, or translate a live perfor-
mance, but rather constructs it according to video’s own technical and medial
166 | trent leipert

characteristics as well as to a complex set of cultural and social assumptions about its
function and role.”13 Yet while these and other studies expand our understanding of
what constitutes the operatic work, the operatic canon and its subjects stubbornly re-
main. If experiments in new stagings and mediations as “translations” or
“transpositions” change our perception and understanding of opera and operatic
spectatorship, the trials are nevertheless typically carried out on familiar test subjects.

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Romitelli and Pacchini utilize the current possibilities of video in the visual com-
ponent of their work; at the same time, Romitelli recalls the familiar rhetoric of op-
eratic renewals that have periodically appeared throughout the genre’s history.
Hence his stated aim is to immerse the audience in “total perception, plunging the
spectator into an incandescent matter as luminous as it is sonorous; a magmatic
flux of sounds, shapes and colors, without any aim except that of hypnosis, posses-
sion and trance.”14 Here Romitelli suggests that the conventional absorption of the
audience in the drama is taken by him to another extreme, one in which the com-
munication of stage content occurs either beneath the level of conscious meaning,
through an almost automatic response, or at the very least in a manner reminiscent
of altered states of consciousness. Despite the absence of explicit dramatic action,
the composer nevertheless hints at some plot structure, insisting that it is conveyed
through an “abstract and violent narration,” which is “purged of all operatic artifice:
an initiation rite of immersion, a lumino-sonorous trance of light and sound.”15
The synesthesic goal of merging sight and sound does not account for the pres-
ence of text in this work, however. Romitelli’s additional comments offer limited
clarification but confirm that the composer seeks to circumscribe the special nature
of his project within the history of opera:

An Index of Metals is therefore not a new attempt at renewing opera by adding im-
age to the production as an adjuvant, nor a strictly multimedia approach where
each artist illustrates a common narrative by his or her part. Its plan is quite origi-
nal: to conceive jointly sound and light, music and video; to use timbres and
images as elements of a common continuum, subjected to the same computer
transformations. The story is that of this perceptual fusion, of the loss of reference
points, and of our body becoming limitless in the blazing mass of the senses.16

A number of paradoxes arise in these equivocal claims, but they lead us closer to the
particular relationship between affect, emotion, and the sensorium. Romitelli seeks
neither a renewal of opera altogether nor a simple supplementation of action by
new media. He even rejects the multi-media label, implying that such a designation
involves wholly independent media that work toward a “common narrative.” But
what is the single “story”? If we take it to be the content and not the structure of the
work, we can note Romitelli’s insistence on creating a state of being both disoriented
and overwhelmed, of losing our bearings and “becoming limitless” not through
 the submerged subject of video-opera | 167

transcendence but through a sensuous mutability. Along similar lines, Marco

Mazzolini has observed the recurring theme of a disrupted or disintegrated journey
through what he calls the “acoustic landscapes” in several of Romitelli’s texted and
non-texted works, such as Professor Bad Trip: Lesson I–III and Lost for voice and fif-
teen instruments (1997). According to Mazzolini, “the only voyage possible in this
territory is a ‘bad trip’ which does not at all appear to be a Romantic, LSD-

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influenced Wandern.” Where Romitelli portrays a journey, “his destination is being
lost; his way out, dissolution. Such a landscape, charged with disarray, with disorien-
tation or with hallucinatory multi-orientation, prevents a univocal narrative
course.”17 The uncertainty and unknown paths that Mazzolini hears in these earlier
compositions would also seem to characterize An Index of Metals. But it has no lost
or wandering protagonist, an issue that Mazzolini ignores. Of all Romitelli’s compo-
sitions would we not most expect to find one in an opera?
Given the lack of any clear on-stage or on-screen persona, musicologist
Alessandro Arbo suggests that “Metal is the real protagonist of this piece: it appears
in the fusion of different alloys and in diverse states, from the liquefied to the rigid,
from the clear to the murky, from the cold to the incandescent.”18 As metal is one of
the only materials one will see in An Index of Metals, this is not an unreasonable
claim. In fact, Jane Bennett observes that although metal has long literary and his-
torical associations with “passivity or a dead thingness,” for Deleuze and Guattari
(among others) metal is exemplary of an inorganic vitality; metal complicates the
hard and fast distinction between “life” and “inert substances.”19 Yet Arbo’s eleva-
tion of metal as protagonist does not account for the profusion of pronouns found
in the first two of Lèkovich’s three texts: the “she,” or drowningirl, of “Hellucination
1” as well as the unspecified addresser and addressee of “Hellucination 2.” Precisely
whose heartbeat is crucified at the work’s conclusion? Moreover, considering that
“Hellucination 1” is three times the duration of the combined “Hellucination 2/3”
section, it would seem premature to dismiss the importance of the drowningirl as
an implied or imaginary protagonist, however non-concrete a plot may present
itself.
My questions about the articulation or absence of certain formal elements—
narrative, dramatic structure, even characters—are not meant as a checklist of ge-
neric traits, but cut to the heart of the affective engagement and mediation of the
subject in An Index of Metals. Just as Romitelli suggests a “double exposure,” audien-
ces may experience a double “trip.” On one hand, An Index of Metals represents a
particular type of trip or transformation on the part of the girl/voice-dyad: types of
becoming-metal, and a movement from third-person description to first-person ac-
count, and finally to the removal of any apparent subject position through the
course of the three “songs.” On the other hand, the work allows the spectator to un-
dergo an immersive experience. Unlike most music theater, the singer is separated
from actor and the voice remains disconnected from the visual. Although the
168 | trent leipert

audience is discouraged from identification, it becomes engrossed through immer-

sion. We are drawn into inhabiting certain positions of the drowningirl but are si-
multaneously barred from engaging her as a stable subject. We follow her on a type
of journey, though it remains one without a clearly defined destination and points
of orientation—apart from the implied death (again, is it hers?) that hangs atempor-
ally over each of the songs. The limitlessness that Romitelli invokes does not sug-

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gest transcendence so much as a mode of becoming that remains beholden to
sensory experience, one that is less about the girl than about the progression
through a series of audio-visual transformations that put us into particular affective
states as well.
In wavering between a sense of automation and intentionality in the introduc-
tion, Romitelli introduces uncertainty about the presence of the purported protago-
nist. The “Introduzione” to An Index of Metals opens with a resonant and repeated
G-minor chord sampled from Pink Floyd’s “Shine on you Crazy Diamond” from
their 1975 album, Wish You Were Here. The sample connects with its well-known
source via lo-fi artifice: despite the digital composition of the electronic audio track,
the speeding attack and slowing decay remain audible and thus foreground the
sample qua sample. But here and throughout his score, Romitelli obscures his elec-
tronic or acoustic sources: while the original Pink Floyd chord was made from layers
of electric organ and wine glasses filled with water, Romitelli adds wind and brass
trills (some overblown or toneless), which surround the resolutely G-minor chord
with an otherworldly sonic halo. The treatment of the sample is simultaneously
reminiscent of Spectralist composition, an acknowledged influence on Romitelli—
who in each reiteration gradually lengthens the sampled and instrumentally aug-
mented sonority in a manner that recalls Gérard Grisey’s Partiels (1975). This sonic
mixture of partials and Pink Floyd is precisely the point of conversion between high
art and popular culture: not a set of references but rather an amalgam of two sonic
substances.
This is all part of a spectacle of materials. The waning and waxing dynamic in-
tensity of the chords accompanies white cloud-like forms that emerge and fade on
each of the three black screens (fig. 1). They illuminate and disappear roughly in
step with each sounding of the sample. Shimmering to life and then vanishing
from it, they suggest not any particular substance as of yet, nor any sense of repre-
sented or reproduced space. Depth is apparent only within each cloud; they other-
wise become an ephemeral play of light on the black screen surface. These
flickering, veined globules seem to straddle the electronic and the organic: as an
opening gesture, this audio-visual assemblage is not composed of representational
images but of analogs of anthropomorphic action. It is suggestive of an emerging
pulse, a heartbeat, or perhaps inflating and respiring lungs. These are the most ba-
sic signs of life that are not yet recognizably human. The means are digital and vir-
tual, yet the outcome is analogic and sympathetic—not in the sense of inducing
 the submerged subject of video-opera | 169

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Figure 1 An Index of Metals, “Introduzione.”

emotional involvement, but of activating a similar visceral response. We are meant

to “warm up to” and tune into these entities without proper bodies: here we are
clearly amid the aesthetic of pre-personal affect.

The Submerged Subject

“Hellucination 1” alludes to Lichtenstein’s “Drowning Girl” (1963) most notably
through the lines “she don’t care / she won’t call Brad for help.” The thought-
bubble above Lichtenstein’s blue-haired heroine has her thinking to herself: “I
DON’T CARE! I’D RATHER SINK—THAN CALL BRAD FOR HELP!” Her psycho-
logical state is in turmoil, revealing desperation and defiance, the latter evincing an
increasing irrationality. The reference to Lichtenstein’s painting brings a certain im-
age of a subject to the minds of the work’s audience, even though they will never see
any such drowning girl. The preceding lines of “Hellucination 1”—“drowning into a
bluegrey wave” and “literally drowning in emotions”—would seem to be the attrib-
utes and actions of a specific figure. But no girl appears on-screen, and at first there
seems to be no other direct correspondence between Lichtenstein’s painting and the
video except for the turbulent and liquified metals that constitute much of the lat-
ter’s visual vocabulary. Yet the painting is widely known and the allusion is pointed
out in the original program notes as well as the booklet accompanying the DVD.
Hence Lèkovich’s text goes into a different direction: it provides the invisible girl
with hints of a story, a possible identity, a more involved voice.
Such context is lacking in Lichtenstein’s painting, which instead foregrounds
iconic imagery. The artist’s source was the cover of Run for Love!, published by DC
Comics in 1962, depicting the girl’s boyfriend, who clings to a capsized boat in the
background. Lichtenstein cropped the original and placed the girl alone and
170 | trent leipert

engulfed by waves. He further decontextualized the scene by changing the caption

from “I don’t care if I have a cramp!” to simply “I don’t care!” (he also changed the
boyfriend’s name from Mal to Brad). As the artist explains, he was “very excited
about, and interested in, the highly emotional content yet detached impersonal han-
dling of love, hate, war, etc., in these cartoon images.”20 In addition to its pop cul-
ture origins, Lichtenstein’s painting also alludes to both Katsushika Hokusai’s The

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Great Wave off Kanagawa (c. 1829–32) and ironizes the bold painterly strokes of ab-
stract expressionism. Drowning Girl ups the Japanese printmaker’s moody seascape
of a boat being overwhelmed by a surging wave (“the water is not only Art Nouveau,
but it can also be seen as Hokusai. I saw it and then pushed it a little further until it
was a reference most people will get . . . it is a way of crystallizing the style by exag-
geration”21). The Ben-Day dots of Drowning Girl depersonalize—and possibly regen-
der, but at the very least demasculinize—the heroicized canvas choreography typical
of American postwar modernist painting.22 Lichtenstein constructs lurid contours
of danger amid emotional and environmental turmoil, but leaves the viewer largely
clueless as to the causes of the girl’s distress. This is where Lèkovich’s text picks up.
In eliding Lichtenstein’s title and rendering it in lowercase letters, Lèkovich’s
subtitle “drowningirl” compresses this specific, if archetypal, figure into a single
gesture. With her wavy blue hair and tear-filled eyes, Lichtenstein’s girl was already
engulfed in the water and well on her way to becoming one with it. While the
painter still gives a sense of silent defiance and self-determination in the stark black
outlines and comic-book contrast, Lèkovich’s text dissolves drowningirl into a vertig-
inous deluge of sensations melded with the debris of context. If these are all internal
projections, conjured by the voice of the absent singer, “Hellucination 1” begins
with a cut to synchronized solid blue screens that can serve as a mere screen for
these projections.
Reflections on the metal planes slowly bring out surface textures and imperfec-
tions that give the impression of an expanse of water or sky—no more and no less
than a limitless ocean or heaven suspending the girl at the very moment of submer-
sion in the state of consciousness that Thomas De Quincey related so vividly from a
drowning girl in Suspiria De Profundis (1845):

[S]he had completed her ninth year, when, playing by the side of a solitary brook,
she fell into one of its deepest pools. Eventually, but after what lapse of time no-
body ever knew, she was saved from death by a farmer, who, riding in some distant
lane, had seen her rise to the surface, but not until she had descended within the
abyss of death, and looked into its secrets, as far, perhaps as ever a human eye can
have looked that had permission to return. At a certain stage of this descent, a
blow seemed to strike her, phosphoric radiance sprang forth from her eyeballs;
and immediately a mighty theatre expanded within her brain. In a moment, in a
twinkling of an eye, every act, every design of her past life, lived again, arraying
 the submerged subject of video-opera | 171

themselves not as a succession, but as parts of a coexistence. Such a light fell upon
the whole path of her life backwards into the shades of infancy, as the light, per-
haps; which wrapt the destined Apostle on his road to Damascus. Yet that light
blinded for a season; but hers poured celestial vision upon the brain, so that her
consciousness became omnipresent at one moment to every feature in the infinite
review.23

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Despite the situation presented in the text, the music, video, and voice induce serene
calmness—perhaps indicating, as many drowning survivors have claimed, that fol-
lowing an initial stage of struggle and panic, one falls into euphoria as the self gives
over to surroundings and experiences in the mind, the “mighty theater” that De
Quincey described. Beyond the disjuncture of panic and tranquility lies another im-
portant question surrounding affect and emotion: are these states experienced by
the audience or are they representations of particular emotional responses? Here it
seems that Romitelli mobilizes the musical elements in a stark shift toward sensa-
tion, not at all supplementing Lèkovich’s text with any specific musical signs that
might lead us to ascribe an emotion to the situation. At most, he imparts the lull of
her opening lines. The voice enters languidly on a G5 as the ensemble gives the
singer wide berth: the keyboard and guitar sustain open fifths while the strings slide
between breezy harmonics. Despite the quiet chromaticism introduced by the
strings and, eventually, the woodwinds, they never disrupt the slow-moving har-
monic sequence established by the keyboard, guitar, and bass that repeats three
times in this first section of “Hellucination 1: drowningirl 1.” Nor do they introduce
any hint of tonality into the otherwise strongly modal quality of the harmony. A re-
duction of the parts along with the vocal line reveals a loosely Mixolydian chord pro-
gression reminiscent of rock music (ex. 1). Just as De Quincey described the
suspended temporality of the drowning girl’s visions (“every design of her past life,
lived again, arraying themselves not as a succession, but as parts of a coexistence.”),
the progression remains unmoored from any tonal syntax and swims aimlessly
without a clear center or forward-moving momentum.

Example 1 “Hellucination 1, drowningirl 1,” chord progression; harmonic and vocal reduction.

Amid the music’s cyclical movement, the text takes a sudden and striking turn
toward self-conscious description at the end of the stanza: “literally drowning in
emotion.” But we can hardly say that in this part of An Index of Metals the
172 | trent leipert

untethered voice/drowningirl moves us by expressivity. Rather, her treading of affec-

tive turbulence—due in part to Lèkovich’s lack of details, and due in particular to
Romitelli’s setting—sustains a situation that allows us a space for experiencing sym-
pathetic sensation but without empathy, an unusual goal for an “opera.” The features
I have noted in the score do not point toward the ineffable—if anything, they are too
obvious as physical and pictorial signifiers of the oceanic. Yet the drowningirl’s

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inexpressivity—Lèkovich and Romitelli’s drowningirl is stripped of the tears that
flow from Lichtenstein’s, while her ambiguous indifference/defiance (“she don’t
care”) remains—prohibits us from establishing a clear correspondence between the
affective atmosphere and her specific subjectivity. Even if drowningirl is over-
whelmed with emotions, we are given no access to the reasons for this. Affect there-
fore remains largely pre-personal in the audio-visual domain. As audience we are
given too little to establish an emotional connection with drowningirl. In short, we
can only accompany her and adopt a similar feeling of being adrift.
Affect also emerges and reveals itself as transpersonal in such passages: we in-
vest first our eyes and ears—eventually, as the surrounding space is filled with light
and sound, our bodies are immersed and we feel enveloped. The repetitive pop-
music progression draws this section away from the history of representational mu-
sic to which its many other elements belong. We may sense ourselves lightly afloat
in this billowy wash of sound on a cyclical though seemingly undirected harmonic
support. Yet, identification remains largely barred, from both a still-to-be introduced
subject and any represented setting beyond a sort of virtual audio-visual pool made
up of music and metal. In this sense, it is also a sonic space in which we are sub-
merged along with the drowningirl; we cannot see her and even the singer does not
necessarily peer out at us. So in another sense, we are the only ones floating before
the blue screens, which in spite of some accompanying musical signifiers are never
unequivocally representative of an aqueous expanse. Together, the music and
screens provide unspecific signs that are ultimately surfaces onto which we can proj-
ect possible meanings. There is a semiotic overdetermination of space, setting, and
situation, yet nothing aligns that might allow us to impart the causality necessary
for an emotional categorization. As the video proceeds in this section, it becomes
more apparent that the surfaces are in fact metal and not water. Bennett observes
that, “Playing on the notion of metal as a conductor of electricity, [Deleuze and
Guattari] say that metal ‘conducts’ (ushers) itself through a series of self-
transformations, which is not a sequential movement from one fixed point to an-
other, but a tumbling of continuous variations with fuzzy borders. What is more,
this tumbling is a function not only of the actions applied to metal by metallurgists
but of the protean activeness of the metal itself. . . .”24 Along similar lines, the
“transformation” witnessed in this section of the video reveals that metal will not
only become enfolded with the subjectivity of drowningirl; it will also achieve a
 the submerged subject of video-opera | 173

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Figure 2 Screens during the beginning of the “Secondo intermezzo.”

dynamism that allows it to move between elements and time alike. Metal, in other
words, performs both figure and ground.
As the work proceeds from “Hellucination 1” to the first intermezzo, this affect-
ability without subjectivity is further induced as the video scrolls up and down the
building exteriors at multiple speeds on each screen. The vertiginous effect provides
a fitting end to the falling trajectory of “Hellucination 1.” Visually, the video presents
kaleidoscopic patterns, increasingly baroque in their figuration, that upon enlarge-
ment reveal building façades (fig. 2). This imagery is derived by manipulating close-
ups of the mirrored glass and steel architecture in La Défense, the Parisian business
district that is set geographically and architecturally apart from the rest of the city.
In addition to inducing a sinking sensation for the viewer, the imagery is sugges-
tive as a bridge between the affective, the ideational, and the ideological. Indeed, the
sequence plays with notions of vision, abstraction, and reflection that extend beyond
the immediate “drama” of the drowningirl. For the viewer, the windows remain im-
penetrable, offering no glimpse of their interior. This is a tempting metaphor for
the obstruction of our access to drowningirl’s interiority, that is, the nature of her
specific emotions and the causes of their engulfment of her. The choice of La
Défense may have been due mainly to proximity and practicality: it the largest
among the handful of planned urban areas in Europe devoted to high-profile con-
temporary, corporate architecture. At the same time, the representative face/façade
of the financial sector offers a powerful image for the analogies and relationships be-
tween circulations and mediation of both affect and capital. This intermezzo
extends the ambiguity of transparency and opaqueness that has played out with
regards to Drowningirl’s interiority. Likewise, the glass surfaces are literally win-
dows into the corridors of contemporary finance, yet they are impenetrable; and as
mirrors, they are not mimetic but provide merely reflections of forces. Romitelli and
Pacchini enact flows between and among capital (through the synecdoche of La
Défense), subjects, and affect: they allow us to experience their speed and vertigi-
nous sensation, yet as we coast along the exterior edifices of capital, we are permit-
ted neither entry nor represented emotions that may foster meaningful
communication beyond a generalized affectability. At the same time, once caught
174 | trent leipert

up in its circulation we are not permitted from stopping, just as Pacchini’s video
never slows down in the intermezzo.
In Post-Cinematic Affect, Steven Shaviro notes that, “Intensive affective flows and
intensive financial flows alike invest and constitute subjectivity, while at the same
time eluding any sort of subjective grasp.”25 In Index’s “Secondo intermezzo,” we
are amid these two streams: we flow along the glass surfaces of La Défense, the frag-

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ile financial shells that nevertheless bar us from viewing within, and induce delir-
ium as their patterns become increasingly complex. The glass of the buildings is not
transparent, but neither can it offer a mirror of ourselves. Instead, it acts as another
screen—not in the sense of a filter for sensation or affect, but rather a screen that
undergoes its own chromatic modulations in order to move us. Yet no emotion is
cathected or smelted out of this metallic and glass mess. And no critical commen-
tary on the structures of global capital is ever put forward.

Post-cinematic Opera(tions)
In Opera’s Second Death, Slavoj Zi zek discusses the “affective appropriateness” of
certain art and media forms to particular historical periods by adopting Walter
Benjamin’s hypothesis that older artistic forms often enter a period where they
“aspire to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical stand-
ard.”26 As an example, he suggests that “only when cinema had developed its stan-
dard procedures could we really grasp the narrative logic of Dickens’s great novels
or of Madame Bovary.”27 Older artistic forms use procedures that “at least from the
standpoint of the present, seem to point toward a new technology that will be able to
serve as a more natural and appropriate objective correlative to the life experience
that the old forms endeavored to render by means of their excessive
experimentation.”28 By invoking the notion of an “objective correlative,” Zi  zek
means a medium for accessing and linking subjective feelings with exterior objects.
Therefore, although Zi zek is focused ostensibly on form, feeling remains a key ele-
ment of the philosopher’s reading of the operatic past as a “future anterior.” As a fur-
ther example, he argues that if the nineteenth-century novel finds its afterlife in the
lineage of classic Hollywood cinema, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde finds its counter-
parts in two particular late twentieth-century media forms. Zi  zek argues that the
logic of several possible, but ultimately tragic, outcomes in Wagner’s music-drama
resonates with the musical, narrative, and affective structures generated by video-
games and music-videos, two media that I will consider in relation to An Index of
Metals.
 zek’s example is a film that combines elements of both of these: Tom Tykwer’s
Zi
Run, Lola, Run (Lola rennt, 1998). In Run, Lola, Run, we experience the subordina-
tion of cinematic narrative to the logic of the video game. As Zi  zek suggests, “the
film’s narrative itself was invented to be able to practice its specific style. . . . [A]s in
 the submerged subject of video-opera | 175

the usual survival video game, Lola is given three lives. Real life itself is thus ren-
dered as a fictional video-game experience.”29 The film begins in the manner of
time-governed role-playing game in which the protagonist, Lola, has twenty minutes
to reach her boyfriend, Manni, and hopefully but improbably, to come up with
100,000 Deutschmarks to replace the drug money he lost. The film proceeds to pre-
sent three possibilities in sequence: Lola dies; Lola’s boyfriend dies; Lola and her

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boyfriend recover the drug-money he lost and earn a “bonus” in casino winnings to
boot.
Without stretching the comparison too far, it is entirely possible to read An Index
of Metals not only as a video-opera, but as a video-game opera, that is, as presenting
three outcomes to what would be drowningirl’s back-story with the Brad of
Lichtenstein’s caption and of Lèkovich’s text. There is little logical progression be-
tween the situations described in each of the three “songs.” In “Hellucination 1,”
drowningirl sinks serenely to her watery grave. “Hellucination 2” would seem to
proceed it chronologically—if it is, in fact, the same drowningirl and, presumably,
the Brad whom she rebuffs. And “Hellucination 3” reenacts a death already implied
in the first two texts, this time “crucifying the heartbeat” of the figure (again, drow-
ningirl?) who already rose up. If the three texts imply a faint narrative—drowning,
rising, transformation—their content also raises temporal inconsistencies.
Ultimately, we understand the three “Hellucinations” are indeed three different ver-
sions of the same “trip.”
More compelling, perhaps, for defining video-opera—a genre that in sticking to
the operatic tag raises the fantasy of “prima la musica, poi le parole”—is Zi  zek’s ar-
gument that Run, Lola, Run is structured not by its narrative but by its soundtrack
(and thus somewhat closer to music video than to classic cinema): “The interest of
Lola resides precisely in its tonality: not only the fast rhythm, the rapid-fire montage,
the use of stills, the pulsating exuberance and vitality of the heroine, and so on but,
above all, the way these visual features are embedded in the soundtrack—the con-
stant techno soundscape whose rhythm stands for (renders) Lola’s—and, by exten-
sion, ours, the spectators’—heartbeat.”30 Here, Zi  zek spares his usual critique of
late capitalism’s (Deleuzian) affective logic as his fascination with form lies precisely
in affect: speed, pulse, exuberance–all resulting in the autonomic response of the
heartbeat. What matters is not the story but what leads through another circuit from
its generating powers to its outward presentation. Thus Tykwer’s film elicits a sense
of Lola being tossed about by forces beyond her control as much as she attempts to
direct the outcome. The “crucified heartbeat” is the last image presented in
Lèkovich’s text. This is why I have argued for considering the opening video and
sample sequence as a sort of bodily beat prior to any identifiable and intentional
body.
If the music seems to propel the drowningirl of “Hellucination 1” forward, the
risingirl of “Hellucination 2” moves to the first person as its four parallel stanzas
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Example 2 Voice and keyboard melody, “Hellucinations 2/3: risingirl,” mm. 163–65.

release the latent energy of metals that emerges from their collision—“their pro-
foundly violent and murderous nature,” as Romitelli describes.31 While
“Hellucination 1” emphasized sinking, downwards motion, and drowning,
“Hellucination 2” reverses course. Its rising suggests a double “assumption”: as-
suming power and a possible postmortem apotheosis. Leaving behind the third-
person descriptions of “Hellucination 1,” the “you” and “I” of “Hellucination 2” do
not move into the territory of dramatic confrontation between characters. Instead,
we get a collision of bodies that “dive” into (and “rise” from) each other repeatedly,
merely changing the nature and force of the impact: “pierce,” “collapse,” “crash,”
“hit.”
It is here that Lèkovich’s text most resembles a strophic song structure, and the
music assumes this form with the voice repeating a short melody three times per
stanza (ex. 2). Its elements are derived from two expressive extremes. Each state-
ment begins with a twelve-tone theme, a compositional technique that, when pre-
sented in such a straightforward manner against the backdrop of harmonic stasis,
cannot help but invoke serialism as a citation.32 Although typically associated with
emotional excision, serialism’s history is in fact enmeshed with both positive and
negative expressive aims. While Arnold Schoenberg had rationalized his own earlier
expressionist free atonality, integral serialism became the postwar avant-garde’s lin-
gua franca, assuming an utmost distance from the language of emotions that had
dominated Western music for almost three centuries. Thus ironically—and most
certainly deliberately—a twelve-tone melody acts here as an unlikely but remarkably
effective “hook” for an electric guitar-accompanied “riot grrrl” anthem.33 The tag of
this theme comprises a descending chromatic tetrachord that sinks back to D. This
 the submerged subject of video-opera | 177

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Figure 3 “Helucination 2: risingirl,” screens.

is the other extreme: an allusion to the historical musical topoi of lament (fitting the
context of death), which has devolved into a fleeting melodic filler rather than a
plodding structural bass line—another of the many surface-depth inversions in An
Index of Metals. Such loss of historical depth is yet another outcome of Romitelli’s
reconfiguration of the remains of the subject into pure surface features.
This lack of expressive depth for the violent text goes hand in hand with the
video accompanying “Hellucination 2,” where graceful black and white ribbons and
bubbles twist and turn across the three screens (fig. 3). The image track is thus fol-
lowing a course that parallels the larger textual process of abstraction. From the
start, it pursues a loose succession of visual themes with increasing dynamism:
white light against black, transformations of various metallic planes, and by this
point, highly abstract arabesques whose smooth and sleek surfaces begin to lose
touch, as it were, with the specific materiality of metal. Next to the strophic structure
of the text, the increased movement, speed, and flux of the video lock in with the in-
creased tempo, expanded pitch space, and melodic contour of the music. With this
double focus on patterns, not plot, the audio-visual component here flows more eas-
ily than any attempt to mimic past narrative or present drama.
Here we turn from video-game logic to the history of video art and its treatment
of the subject. The shifting subject of Lèkovich’s texts and the slippage between
indexicality and abstraction in Pacchini’s video echo the relationship that developed
between conceptual art and video beginning in the 1970s. In her 1979 essay “On
the Index,” the influential American art critic Rosalind Krauss considered a growing
body of 1970s conceptual art that demonstrated a disaffection with the analytic mod-
ernism of the 1960s. The medium-specific self-reflexivity that had defined much
postwar artistic production, and that had been the hallmark of Clement Greenberg’s
avant-garde, was being replaced with a different sort of self-reflexivity, one that called
into question the very coordinates of subject and object. It was through the medium
of video that Krauss saw a new type of play occur among the “empty signs” applied
to subjects and bodies. Vito Acconci’s 1973 video work Airtime, in which the artist
sits before a mirror and talks to his reflection, exemplified this new tendency. As
Krauss observes: “Sometimes he addresses his mirrored self as ‘you.’ ‘You’ is a
178 | trent leipert

pronoun that is also filled, within the space of his recorded monologue, by an absent
person, someone he imagines himself to be addressing. But the referent for this
‘you’ keeps slipping, shifting, returning once again to the ‘I’ who is himself,
reflected in the mirror. Acconci is playing out the drama of the shifter—in its regres-
sive form.”34 Krauss’s notion of the “shifter” draws on Roman Jakobson’s term for a
sign that overflows with signification due to its condition as an initially empty signi-

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fier awaiting a referent to be supplied—a striking structural similarity to the power
of affect under late capitalism. By obscuring its referentiality, video art such as
Acconci’s enabled what Krauss characterizes as a complicated “gymnastics of the
‘empty’ pronomical sign.”35 The deictic “I” operates as such an evacuated sign in
this particular example, where it functions less to designate content than to estab-
lish a certain type of relation between two speaking positions; it is a sign that is at
once evacuated and over-determined.
In contrast to Krauss’s focus on the indexical and deictic impulse of video-artists,
American writer Lucinda Furlong has noted another tendency, which replaced re-
cording reality with the creation of intricate imagery that conjured up “new realities”
associated with hallucinogenic drugs—surely another embedded history of video
that would have been of interest to Romitelli.36 This tendency quickly engendered
critical scorn, however, for its perceived links to modernist painting. Critic Robert
Pincus-Witten dismissed much of the early work by these artists as simply bad: “a
vocabulary of Lissajous patterns—swirling oscillations endemic to electronic art—
synthesized to the most familiar expressionist juxtapositions of deep vista or ana-
tomical disembodiment and discontinuity.”37 Such charges may or may not apply to
Pachini, whose imagery deliberately skirts abstraction and materiality while at the
same time draws unapologetically on psychedelic culture for partial inspiration. We
may wonder why such a stance may have been of interest to the creators of An Index
of Metals, with its movement between recognizable surfaces and the “miso soup
hell” of digital distortion. Gene Youngblood, a more sympathetic critic, argued that
unlike the “object” frame of film, video allows for a continuous signal and the crea-
tion of a syntax based on transformation rather than transition. Although he is
speaking of the digital manipulation of electronically generated video-imagery, his
observations hold for photographically captured and digitally altered video. The re-
sult combines “the subjectivity of painting, the objectivity of photography and the
gravity-free motion of hand-drawn animation.”38 This mobile ontology of video
allows for a constant movement between the boundaries of these media. Likewise,
in An Index of Metals, Pacchini’s video imagery—which for the most part seems to
slip away from indexing metal surfaces as much as confirming them—comes to
function as an uninterrupted but constantly changing surface that establishes differ-
ent types of relationality: that is, relations that occur more between material bodies
and forces than between agents and intentions. With the exception of the second
Intermezzo and the conclusion, recognizable objects are rare, and the viewer must
 the submerged subject of video-opera | 179

relate in a similar space, suspended between subject and object, never quite able
make a stable connection to one or the other.
These various facets of An Index of Metals provide the conditions for what Steven
Shaviro has more recently discussed as “post-cinematic affect.” In order to develop
an account of “what it feels like to live in the early twenty-first century,” Shaviro exam-
ines several contemporary films and music videos beginning with the premise that

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the combination of digital technologies and neoliberal economic relations have
given rise to new forms of generating and articulating lived experience.39 Thus in
Nick Hooker’s 2009 music video for Grace Jones’s “Corporate Cannibal” the digital
manipulation of Jones’s image produces an “imaged body [that] is not a figure in im-
plied space, but an electronic signal whose modulations pulse across the screen . . .
[that] works as a material support for this signal/image.”40 Although Shaviro con-
cedes that we clearly know Jones’s body was originally filmed, he argues that the dig-
ital modulation carried out in the medium of video creates here a different type of
body, and therefore a new type of relational space, which allows affect to circulate
transpersonally but not interpersonally:

Where classical cinema was analogical and indexical, digital video is processual
and combinatorial. Where analog cinema was about the duration of bodies and
images, digital video is about the articulation and composition of forces. And
where cinema was an art of individuated presences, digital video is an art of what
Deleuze calls the dividual: a condition in which identities are continually being
decomposed and recomposed, on multiple levels, through the modulation of nu-
merous independent parameters.41

Even as Shaviro essentializes the mediums of film and video to make his argu-
ment, part of the power of the video for “Corporate Cannibal” may be said to result
from the application of digital video effects on the filmed body. Here, several similar-
ities may be drawn between Pacchini’s video in “Hellucination 2” and Jones’s and
Hooker’s “Corporate Cannibal.” Both rely on black and white abstraction that never
quite renounces the real. The high contrast registers volume, space, and depth, yet
remains somehow always at the surface: there is nothing behind the shifting
shapes, both bodily and metallic. Hooker both draws attention to, and dissolves, the
otherwise unmistakable physical features that point to Jones’s identity. As we have
already seen, decomposition and recomposition of identities is an integral feature of
An Index of Metals, extending from the drowningirl and metallic substances to musi-
cal samples and twelve-tone rows.
Although Shaviro draws attention to how affect operates—at least visually—in
“Corporate Cannibal,” he pays less attention to the music. The synthesized techno-
shuffle of the song lends a cool, moody, and unchanging drive to the visual modula-
tions of the video. Jones uses the indices and expressive qualities in her voice to
180 | trent leipert

great effect: an accent that reveals a Jamaican childhood, American adolescence,

transnational career, and French residency mixes in her low vocal range and produ-
ces an almost non-human timbre. She theatricalizes but also personifies multina-
tional corporate capitalism, and in doing so begins the work of converting affect
into an actual emotion that lends an object to our fear: if not disturbed by the body
that does remain, we are to understand that, sooner or later, she is going to eat us.

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Of course, this won’t happen; the attractive force of affect is not fully converted into
fear—that wouldn’t sell pop singles, after all—but here lies the power and theoreti-
cal allure it shares with other immaterial labor at work under late capitalism. In this
respect, An Index of Metals, as a self-described video-opera, may therefore prove an
even more fitting example of a work whose use of affective forces—inspired by the
media of video art, music video, and video games—move it toward what might be
an even more capacious category of post-cinematic opera.

Conclusion: Operatic Ends

In “Hellucination 3: earpiercingbells,” the text is neither descriptive nor dialogic: fol-
lowing a series of words suggesting acoustic excess and a quotation culled from the
poetry of Jim Morrison (“Steel thrust sucking space”), the remainder of
“Hellucination 3” becomes a deluge of verbs suggesting destruction and violence
that could be carried out on metal and inflicted on a body alike. Whatever coherent
thought might have been communicated dissolves into fragments as syntax gives
way to a perpetual present tense. The raw and concentrated power of verbs as words
of action extends the bodily impact described in the previous poem through the doc-
umentation of extreme sensory experience. The latent violence of “Hellucination 2:
risingirl” is unleashed through series of actions carried out on both metallic and cor-
poreal surfaces. This passage, therefore, should also alert us to how the power of
affect in art may be complicit with the aestheticization of violence.
“Hellucination 3” is elided with “Hellucination 2” in the same musical move-
ment. The words “BEDRIDDEN / DUMBFOUND / NOISEDIN / EARPIERCING
BELLS / HELLPHONES / METAL SHELLS” are set to a two-measure descending
line of minor seconds separated by larger intervals. The “you” and “I” of the previ-
ous section are abandoned, as is syntax, however surreal the content of the preced-
ing text had been. Now we are presented with a series of non sequiturs and
neologisms. The last four of these, however, all relate to manners of hearing,
sounds, and noise—and to particularly painful listening at that. The images of a
dumbfounded and bedridden body also suggests one in narcotized bliss, and we are
left perched between pleasure and pain as the voice shrilly rings out against the dis-
tortion of the electric guitar, bass, and electronic track.
Like the preceding song, “Hellucination 3” ends with a crucifixion, this time car-
ried out upon a seemingly subjectless “heartbeat.” Could this heartbeat, presented
 the submerged subject of video-opera | 181

in the text, refer back to the globules that pulsated on-screen and via the on/off Pink
Floyd sample at the outset of the work? If so, An Index of Metals follows and arcs
from corporeality to consciousness and back. Moreover, it forces the tension be-
tween the heartbeat as autonomic response and the crucifixion as unalterable bodily
icon: in other words, a distinction between bodies and subjects—each moving to-
ward and away from each other in the dissolution of the subject and its utmost in-

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carnation. This movement is further animated by a trajectory of dissolution in both
textual organization and subjective articulation: there is a movement from the third-
person subject of “Hellucination 1” to the unidentified I/you of “Hellucination 2,”
and finally to the absence of any subject pronoun in “Hellucination 3.” The text
runs a parallel process of prosodic dissolution, moving from description to lyric to
mere list—a textual structure revealing itself at the work’s conclusion that, in retro-
spect, may be one of the few indications of a linear progression through the piece.
“Hellucination 3” thus brings us to an endpoint in the separation of emotion and af-
fect, the (cryptically) personal and the transpersonal.
Here, drowningirl’s death resonates with operatic ends throughout history—
Dido’s, Isolde’s, the unnamed woman of Erwartung’s, for example. For these
women, who also drown in emotion, excess carries them to their death. This end is
partially a result of the object of their emotional attachment being severed in some
way, and of their subsequent inability to contain their physical and psychological
responses. Drowningirl, however, has no such dangerous devotion (certainly not to
Lichtenstein’s Brad, who is dismissed by the end of the “Hellucination 1”). Affect is
abundant, but she herself registers indifference or violence, dying in any case
though transforming into some other form and material, which remains dynamic
and leaves her subjecthood no better or worse than it had been. The video montage
sequence picks up pace during the instrumental conclusion with images of inciner-
ation and then metal, trash, and broken glass. The swirling refuse at the work’s end
is the most concrete imagery to appear thus far. This potpourri of rubbish brings to
the mind the very unblended quality of the media components in An Index of
Metals: an aggregate of waste materials may be metonymic of the lack of absolute co-
herence between the constituent parts of this video-opera. Or maybe this conclusion
represents a demise that is wholly appropriate for an evanescent subject composed
out of various scraps of late modern culture. At the end of An Index of Metals,
drowningirl has achieved some sort of transmutation; but she is also laid in late
modernity’s earth.

notes
Trent Leipert completed a PhD in Music
History and Theory at the University of Chicago
with a dissertation examining the composition of
the subject as the subject of composition in
contemporary music and multimedia. His
research examines the relationship between
subjectivity and affect in contemporary
composition, musical intermedia, and post-punk.
He teaches in the Department of Media, Art, and
Performance at the University of Regina.
182 | trent leipert
I would like to thank Seth Brodsky, Berthold
Hoeckner, David Levin, and Steven Rings for
their feedback at various stages of this article.
This article emerged from a research
collaboration with Marcelle Pierson into the work
of Fausto Romitelli and I thank her for her
insights and intellectual companionship. I would
also like to acknowledge the feedback from
colleagues and audiences at the several
conferences and workshops in which earlier
versions of this article were presented.
1. See, for example, David Levin, Unsettling
Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and
Zemlinsky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2007); Tom Sutcliffe, “Technology and
Interpretation: Aspects of ‘Modernism’,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century
Opera, ed. Mervyn Cooke (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005); “Mediating
Opera,” ed. Melina Esse, special issue, Opera
Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2010).
2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is
Philosophy, trans. Graham Burchell III (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), 167.
3. Eric Shouse provides three useful and
succinct distinctions that I will retain throughout
this article: “Feelings are personal and
biographical, emotions are social, and affects are
prepersonal.” Eric Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion,
Affect,” M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). Accessed
January 16, 2010.
4. Grant Chu Covell, “Ictus Rocks: New
Romitelli and Aperghis on Cyprès,” La Folio
Online Music Review, June 2006. http://www.
lafolia.com/archive/covell/covell200606ictus.
html. Accessed February 22, 2012.
5. Fausto Romitelli, “An Index of Metals: note
d’intention,” (2003) in Le corps électrique: Voyage
dans le son de Fausto Romitelli, ed. Alessandro
Arbo (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005), 139. All
translations mine.
6. Charles Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 50.
7. Ibid., 50–51.
8. We can see further echoes of this
modernist sensorial impulse in Romitelli’s
descriptions of his music, his references to Henri
Michaux’s writings on mescaline, and his interest
in prog- and psych-rock of the 1960s and 1970s:
“After Professor Bad Trip [inspired by Michaux’s
Miserable miracle (la mescaline) and other texts],
where the instrumental harmonies were per-
ceived as if under the influence of mescaline—
saturated, distorted, twisted, liquefied—it
seemed to me essential to pursue this research
to the limits of perception by projecting sound as
if it were light, to go to the limit of this
hallucination that renders sound as seen.” (Après
Professor Bad Trip o u les harmonies instrumen-
tales sont comme perçues sous mescaline: satur-
ées, distordues, liquéfiées, il m’a semblé
indispensable de poursuivre cette recherche aux
limites de la perception en projetant le timbre
comme une lumière. Aller au bout de cette hallu-
cination qui rend le son visuel.) Romitelli, “An
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Index of Metals: note d’intention,” 139.
9. See Christopher Morris, “‘Too Much
Music’: The Media of Opera,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Opera Studies, ed. Nicholas Till
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012),
95–116.
10. David Levin, Unsettling Opera: Staging
Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2007), 3.
11. Ibid., 8 9.
12. See also Carolyn Abbate, In Search of Opera
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
13. Emanuele Senici, “Porn Style? Space and
Time in Live Opera Videos,” Opera Quarterly 26/1
(2010): 66.
14. Romitelli, “An Index of Metals,” 139. “An
Index of Metals a pour projet de détourner la
forme séculaire de l’opéra vers une expérience de
perception totale plongeant le spectateur dans
une matière incandescente aussi bien lumineuse
que sonore ; un flux magmatique de sons, de
formes et de couleurs, sans autre visée que
l’hypnose, la possession et la transe.”
15. Romitelli, “An Index of Metals,” 140. “An
Index of Metals sera cette narration abstraite et
violente, épurée de tous les artifices de l’opéra,
un rite initiatique d’immersion, une transe
lumino-sonore.”
16. Romitelli, “An Index of Metals,” 140. “An
Index of Metals n’est donc pas une nouvelle
tentative de renouveler l’opéra en y ajoutant
l’image comme adjuvant a la mise en scène. Ni
une approche strictement multimédia o u chaque
artiste illustre de son côté une narration
commune. C’est le projet tout a fait original de
penser conjointement le son et la lumière, la
musique et la vidéo, d’utiliser timbres et images
comme éléments d’un m^eme continuum soumis
aux m^emes transformations informatiques.
L’histoire est celle de cette fusion de la
perception, de cette perte des repères, de notre
corps devenu sans limites dans la fournaise
d’une messe des sens.”
17. Marco Mazzolini, “Lesson IV, Bad Trip
autour du style,” in Le corps électrique, 83. “Selon
Romitelli, le seul voyage possible dans ce
territoire est un Bad Trip, qui paraı̂t sous la forme
pas du tout romantique d’un Wanderen [sic]
lysergique. . . . Sa destination est la perte (Lost

pour voix et 15 instruments, 1997), son issue, la
dissolution. Un tel paysage, chargé de désarroi,
de désorientation ou de multiorientation
hallucinaoire, emp^eche un déroulement narratif
univoque.”
18. Alessandro Arbo, “EnTrance” in Le corps
électrique, 49. “C’est le metal le vrai protagoniste
de cette pièce: il y a figure dans la fusion de
different alliages et dans divers états, du liquéfié
au figé, du lucide au trouble, du froid a
l’incadescent.”
19. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political
Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press
Books, 2009), 82. Building upon the vitalist
philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, Bennett
describes her project in a chapter called “A Life of
Metal”: “The aim here is to rattle the adamantine
chain that has bound materiality to inert
substance and that has placed the organic across
a chasm from the inorganic. The aim is to
articulate the elusive idea of a materiality that is
itself heterogeneous, itself a differential of
intensities, itself a life. In this strange, vital
materialism, there is no point of pure stillness,
no indivisible atom that is not itself aquiver with
virtual force.”
20. Roy Lichtenstein, quoted in Carolyn
Lanchner, Roy Lichtenstein, MoMA Artist Series
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 13.
21. Ibid.
22. These allusions are made explicit in the
Lichtenstein’s “Brushstroke” paintings of the
mid-1960s.
23. Thomas De Quincey, Suspiria De Profundis
in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and
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the submerged subject of video-opera | 183
Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1985), 145.
24. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 59.
25. Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect
(Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2010), 5.
 zek and Mladen Dolar, Opera’s
26. Slavoj Zi
Second Death (New York: Routledge, 2002), 197.
27. Ibid., 198.
28. Ibid.
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29. Ibid., 199.
30. Ibid.
31. Romitelli, “An Index of Metals,” 140.
32. Two pitch-classes are repeated; the entire
series is presented most clearly in the keyboard.
33. But again, we cannot truly attribute anger
to the singing “I”: we know nothing of what led
to this exchange.
34. Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the
Avant-garde and Other Modern Myths
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 197.
35. Ibid.
36. Lucinda Furlong, “Tracking Video Art:
Image Processing as a Genre,” Art Journal (Fall,
1985): 234.
37. Robert Pincus-Witten, “Panel Remarks,”
(1977) in The New Television, ed. Douglas Davis
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977): 70.
38. Gene Youngblood, “Cinema and The
Code,” Leonardo, Computer Art in Context:
SIGGRAPH ’89 Art Show Catalog (1989): 28.
39. Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect, 2.
40. Ibid., 15.
41. Ibid., 17. Here Shaviro is drawing on the
Deleuze’s Negotiations 1972 1990, trans. Martin
Joughlin (New York: Columbia University Press,
1995), especially 179–82.