Depersonalized, synthetic voices can enact an escape from identity’s pressures

Evidence

Yet there’s something beyond the fatalism, too. You can hear it in Drake’s signature move — the transition from rap to singing, the slipping down from ego-assertion into a sensual purring, the relaxing into a lasciviousness that has nothing to do with the localised libido and dumb automatisms of phallic sexuality. Down here, there is a glorious release from the pressures of identity. Rave-like, pitched-up vocals are suspended on placid currents of synth. Voices stop being human, become avatars from a space where subjectivity has been left behind like a bad dream. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1326

Categorization

• FICTION: The image of voices becoming ‘avatars from a space where subjectivity has been left behind’ is evocative fuel for speculative fiction about post-human affect.
• XREF: Recalls Fisher’s rave writings elsewhere — acid house as collective depersonalization, the dissolution of ego that he ties to Deleuzean becoming and the rave collective. — connects to: Auto-Tuned pop voices blur the line between commodity and human selfhood — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 454; Identity forms only by struggling against its own structural self-destruction — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 233; Sounds can be re-synthesized to preserve loudness while hiding source identity

Broader Connections

• Sounds can be re-synthesized to preserve loudness while hiding source identity #expands (0.80)
• Identity forms only by struggling against its own structural self-destruction #corroborates (0.75) — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 233