A Schizoanalysis of Schizoposting

Abstract

Schizoposting—characterized by fragmented syntax, disjunctive rhethorics, an overwhelming semiotic density, and layers of post-irony—has emerged from anonymous message boards as one of the most fascinating expressions of contemporary digital subjectivity. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s foundations in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, this lecture performance undertakes a schizoanalysis of schizoposting, exploring how brainrot memes disorganize subjectivity and “follow[s] the machinic indices of deterritorialization.” (1) In the schizoanalytic tradition, schizoposting is not understood as an appropriation of schizophrenia, but an “optimal enlargement of pragmatic entrances into Unconscious formations.” (2) This performance lecture operates as a theoretical intervention and a schizoid media experiment while treating the online collective unconscious “as an acentered system, as a machinic network of finite automata.” (3) Through a live synthesis of performative reading and meme analysis, I will unpack schizoposting’s simulation of schizophrenic rhetoric; its paranoid chains of associations, its ecstatic overproduction of meaning, and its immersion into accelerationist absurdity. Rather than dismissing schizoposting as pure nonsense, I argue that its delirious compositions function as an experimental form of poetic irony, a productive insight into the collective unconscious, and a mode of posting circumventing algorithmic control, even as it remains deeply embedded within capitalism’s cybernetic flows. By mapping the machinic assemblages of brainrot memes—their viral transmission, their repetitive-compulsive rhethorics, and their potential to instantiate new productive modes of subjectivity beyond the neurotic individualism of Oedipus—this lecture performance asks: What does the schizoposting subject desire? How does schizoposting intensify or subvert digital capitalist production? And can the syntax of schizoposting provide lines of flight toward new political potentials? References: (1) Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press: 1983, 316. (2) Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis, Indiana University Press: 1995, 68. (3) Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia II, University of Minnesota Press: 1987, 18

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Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference

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