Repetition in sampled voices reveals humans as automatisms gripped by drives

Evidence

As with Burroughs, there is a double pathos in Rashad’s work. First of all, there is a pathos at the level of the affects in the voices themselves; and the way that the voices are orphaned from their supposed origins means that there is an overwhelming sadness even if the feeling expressed is ostensibly joyful. It’s the same kind of depersonalised sadness we might feel if we happened upon lost photographs of an unknown person’s holiday, long ago. Then there is another pathos that arises from the way that the voices are made to repeat and stutter; the sadness of recognising a speaking animal (ourselves) in the grip of automatisms, repetitions, drives. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1336

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the book’s recurring claim that humans are instruments of drives rather than owners of them (ch 9), and the depersonalised pathos of orphaned archived fragments. — connects to: Auto-Tuned pop voices blur the line between commodity and human selfhood — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 454