Sampling as analysis, sampling as symptom

This chapter represents an attempt to bracket the discourse of private property, authorship, and cultural ownership with which we commonly frame discussions of sampling practices. Instead, the chapter uses psychoanalytical theories of repetition as an alternative framework to counteract the conceptual flattening that often befalls sampling practices when they are accused of infringing intellectual property rights. Exploring this approach in Martin Arnold’s 1998 found footage film Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy, an award-winning work of audiovisual sampling, this chapter proposes that the repetition characterizing all sampling works does not require legitimization as an analytical mode of (re-)interpretation or critique. Rather, the repetitions of sampling are symptomatic of culturally, socially, and psychologically productive tendencies that may allow us to work through the alienation characterizing our relationships to cultural expressions bound in repressive circuits of ownership and commodity exchange.