The Schizo as Meme-Archetype

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If Jung’s archetypes described recurring patterns within the collective unconscious, the schizo can be read as a distinctly digital archetype born of the accelerated, scattered logics of social media platforms. Emerging through schizoposting on US imageboards like 4chan and their European reception within transatlantic digital cultures, this figure embodies the fragmented, hyper-associative, paranoid subjectivity produced by life online. Its style—hyper-layered assemblages, disjointed text flows, conspiratorial assumptions and post-irony—mirrors the breakdown of coherence in the networked attention economy. As such, the schizo appears as a new archetype of digital cultures, extending Jung’s transhistoric universals into the dynamics of memetic circulation. In turn, this raises the question: What new myths, desires and meanings does the schizo summon, and through which technologies are they shaped? However, while archetypes such as the Karen or the tradwife stabilise social types through recognisable tropes, the schizo employs instability as a figure of cognitive overload that collapses symbolic order. Yet this very unpredictability has re-stabilised as a reproductive presence across digital cultures, resonating with the fluctuations of affect, situated humour and attention that structure a platform experience marked by post-truth dynamics and conspiratorial meaning- making. This instability-in-stability therefore raises the possibility that the schizo is not an archetype but a process of the networked environment of accelerated flows. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis, which does not treat the schizophrenic pathologically but as an “optimal enlargement of pragmatic entrances into Unconscious formations,” I therefore ask: 1 Does the schizo mark a new Jungian archetype of the collective unconscious, or does it undermine this very logic by rendering all internet users schizo under the recursive irony of the post-truth condition?

Titel der Veranstaltung

Karens, Tradwives and MechaHitlers: Internet Archetypes as Indicators of a Transatlantic, Collective Unconscious?

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