“If that is even your real name…”: Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler
Times are often defined by some sort of psychological disorder. In the late 1970s, Christopher Lasch argued that we are living in a ‘Culture of Narcissism’. In the 1990s, Teresa Brennan made similar claims about an ‘Age of Paranoia’. For the French duo, Deleuze and Guattari, schizophrenia is the characteristic condition of our times. The benefit of this latter claim is that it subsumes the previous two conditions — paranoia and narcissism — within its explanatory framework. According to Deleuze and Guattari, modernity’s schizophrenic tendencies elicits a reactionary — ‘paranoiac-Oedipal-narcissistic’ — triangulation. But what are these schizophrenic tendencies? Of the three terms, schizophrenia is the most misunderstood — especially as it is used by Deleuze and Guattari. This is why, rather than regurgitate some abstract psychiatric definition (as I have done in ‘Dune and Retrofuturism’), I prefer to use an illustrative example. After all, as Deleuze and Guattari state in the opening pages of Anti-Oedipus, ‘A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch’.
A good example of what I am trying to describe appears in Lauren Oyler’s recently published debut novel, Fake Accounts. The plot centres around the unnamed narrator’s fateful discovery that her boyfriend, Felix, is a popular online conspiracy theorist. A recurring theme throughout is the schizophrenizing effect of our online activities. At its most basic etymological level, schizophrenia designates a split mind (from the Greek skhizein meaning ‘to split’ and phrēn meaning ‘mind’). The relative anonymity of the internet facilitates this sort of splitting. Our online personas are like masks, shielding our identity and projecting a discardable (virtual) version of ourselves. In a discussion of dating apps, the narrator notes that: ‘Even the come-ons were illusory, inspired by my virtual persona and not myself, which rendered the paranoid analysis initiated by each private message even more ridiculous, a whole person analyzing a composite’s response to a composite’. (Again, paranoia engendered by schizophrenic schisms). Techno-utopians see this mutability as freedom to reinvent oneself, ignoring the fact that it almost inevitably leads to the devaluing of individuals, turning them into partial objects:
Active users, even very successful ones, noddingly obliged that the apps were creepy and depressing, that they produced the upsetting feeling of flipping through faces like they were flannels at a thrift store, and of knowing you were facilitating the conditions to be treated like a rag yourself
Despite our aversion, we are still compelled to participate in this pantomime. The result: dissociation. When asked why ‘someone so good at Twitter would want to be anonymous’, one character responds: ‘I wasn’t always anonymous […] but my tweets weren’t good when I was posting as myself’.
As Oyler explores, the adoption of false personas bleeds through into our offline lives, facilitated by the anonymity of the urban cityscape. One character dyes their moustache and develops a persona around the attention he receives:
They asked to take photos with him. He knew now that it was self-aggrandizing to think he would be able to play this character in public and not identify at all with the character. “I sometimes do a persona, you know?” I knew. “But I guess I always assumed I could distance myself from it, because the persona wasn’t me.”
As the neurologist Robert Sapolsky writes in his book Behave, ‘urbanized humans do something completely unprecedented among primates — regularly encountering strangers who are never seen again, fostering the invention of the anonymous act’. This inconspicuousness fosters a self-fashioning fluidity similar to the experience of schizophrenics. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the schizophrenic is defined by ‘intense becomings’; ‘he is something only by being something else’:
It might be said that the schizophrenic passes from one code to the other, that he deliberately scrambles all the codes, by quickly shifting from one to another, according to the questions asked him, never giving the same explanation from one day to the next, never invoking the same genealogy, never recording the same event in the same way (Deleuze and Guattari)
The narrator engages in a similar process of identification. In what Oyler describes as a ‘funny inversion of the woman-goes-traveling-and-reinvents-herself story’, she has the narrator move to Berlin and assume a new persona with almost every encounter. At a certain point, she becomes overwhelmed with her multiple selves and fantasizes about being found out:
[…] until I happened to walk into the same bar about ten minutes later to simultaneous shouts of “That’s her, Cassandra!” and “That’s her, Audrey!” and I would have to spin on my heel and flee, never getting the chance to introduce myself as Sophie to the third date who was there waiting for me
Oyler also experiments with a structure of fragmentation that the narrator disparages but nonetheless adopts due its seeming verisimilitude:
ANOTHER JUSTIFICATION FOR THIS STRUCTURE IS THAT IT MIMICS the nature of modern life, which is “fragmented.” But fragmentation is one of the worst aspects of modern life. It’s extremely stressful. “Fragmented” is a euphemism for “interrupted.” Why would I want to make my book like Twitter? If I wanted a book that resembled Twitter, I wouldn’t write a book; I would just spend even more time on Twitter. You’d be surprised how much time you can spend on Twitter and still have some left over to write a book. Our experience of time is fragmented, but unfortunately time itself is not
Fragmentation threatens the solidity of our self-perception. Paranoia and narcissism are desperate attempts to re-fortify. Both extremes are clearly unsustainable, but also, unfortunately, self-perpetuating.
