Normalizing Hypernormalization
Talking about about misrepresentations of Yurchak's Everything was Forever because I guess people can't read anymore
A few days ago, I came across an article in The Guardian detailing the rise of the term “Hypernormalization” to describe our current political moment and was surprised to see it linked to an Instagram reel with 9 million views—where you can scroll through thousands of commiserating comments. The term, as the article explains, was coined by an anthropologist named Alexei Yurchak in his book, Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. The video applies hypernormalization to the paradox of being subjects of Trump’s tyrannical actions and as citizens of a fragile late-capitalist state. There is a certain anxiety in continuing to live and participate in a society we know is doomed—unable to picture what comes after. I read Everything was Forever a few months ago, when references to Yurchak's book first began circulating. I hoped the book would provide strategies for grappling with the mental toll of living under an authoritarian regime, but I was surprised to find a comprehensive description of political control and the strategies used to undermine it. The book has all this and more—it is enlightening, compelling, and thorough. However, every tweet, book, and movie that I run across referencing hypernormalization describes it as a feeling. l think this way of applying Yurchak’s research is flawed—we need to return to its original context to excavate the term’s full potential as the political buzzword it’s on its way to becoming.
Most who encounter “hypernormalization” do so by way of British filmmaker Alex Curtis’ film of the same name—Curtis extrapolates from Yurchak’s anthropological study to draw his own conclusions about contemporary life. It’s an important distinction because whereas Everything was Forever analyzes perestroika from an anthropological, Marxist, Foucauldian lens, Curtis is a self-confessed British independent whose personal crusade is to lambaste the manipulation of Western citizens by their “democratic” governments. To be honest, I find Hypernomalisation grating and unsophisticated; it’s essentially a lecture about how the US engineered violence in the Middle East played over found footage. The documentary also attempts a conspiratorial tone despite the fact that the narrative is outlined in broad strokes with publicly available sources. Videos of a flashlight in a narrow hallway or a dark forest play at random moments, telegraphing Curtis’ enlightenment in no uncertain terms. Also, the three people he really goes after are Kissinger, Trump, and Jane Fonda…for some reason. The version of “hypernormalization” in the documentary describes a form of state control where even though citizens are aware of a government’s fictionalized account of its global positionality, they still carry on participating in civic life—conscious of the lie but unable to picture another reality.
Yurchak’s interviews with young people at the conclusion of the Soviet era actually yield a different—and I think—more productive conversation—one we can take into this uncertain world we’re living in. Hypernormalization is not just the experience of alienation but an authoritarian strategy. A “regime of language” was just one of the tactics employed by the Communist Party to maintain consistent albeit unsatisfactory messaging. The narrative voice of all party messages shrank to one tone, words lost their plurality of meanings. Verbs became more infrequent; memos more often resembled revamped Lenin speeches than announcements. Complex modifiers ensured that certain facts were already agreed upon. (Yurchak uses the example the difference between “the sea is deep” versus “deep-sea fishing.” “Deep-sea fishing” implies that the sea is deep without stating it outright.) You only have to glance at Trump’s twitter where he uses phrases like “Illegal, Anti-American Radicals” to see a these grammar tricks deployed with new verve. Comparing these language games seems fruitful.
I guess the closest version to Curtis’ interpretation in the text of Everything was Forever is the idea of “external immigration.” Simply by voting passively, regurgitating the Communist Party’s vocab, and shamelessly playing in westernized rock bands, young generations adulterated state rituals with the vibe of carelessness. This created a perfunctory government that evacuated any real meaning from the socialist propaganda being pumped out day and night. In the 60s and 70s, workers often severed personal identity from their roles in the Communist Party. For example, artists wanted jobs in the boiler rooms and transit because it meant huge amounts of free time to pursue hobbies, but they needed a high-ranking friend to land them these lucrative positions. Naturally, slackers began taking on big roles in the Party, despite not having a particular investment in the future of communism. Leaders in the Komsomol (the communist youth propaganda league) were not necessarily huge communists; Yurchak explains that many of them just wanted friends or were the types who couldn’t say no to requests (lol real). Of course things like this eventually make the party a self-sustaining system that functions only as a Ship of Theseus for its former political ubiquity. The hypernormal world Curtis viewed as top-down corruption was actually—for the USSR at least—the intended effect of passively dissident activity.
If I’m being honest, the jaded young people described in Everything was Forever feel similar to how many in my generation already engage in national politics. Voting has become an “I guess…” rather than a duty, and a great deal of us have ‘checked out’ from the national discourse. I certainly try to focus more on problems in my local community than whatever Big Bad Trump said today. The unlawful detentions and the massive governmental cuts this administration appears to relish in are, of course, deserving of our full attention—however there is a great deal of power in recognizing that the state’s importance is set by citizens’ terms. Historian Tymothy Snyder’s concept of “anticipatory obedience” is a good reference point here. Every new authority the Trump administration seizes is in part sanctioned because we have always offered the US government our deference. I do not mean to assign blame through a statement like that, only to rediscover for myself that authority is constructed—and that we have the opportunity to take it back.
This is part of the problem with the idea of the state as a master puppeteer of narrative and policy, as Curtis would have it. Some parts of Curtis’ documentary claim that our hyperreal futures cannot be sidestepped. The Occupy movement, the counterculture of the 60s, the anarchism of the internet—are all failed projects to him rather than a suggestion that collective action is possible. Yurchak forewarns in his introduction that viewing Soviets as pawns caught in hyperreal structures or as incapable of changing their political reality perpetuates a historical myth that the late Soviet generations lacked agency. There was a full spectrum of complicity in the regime’s plans. Though people could not imagine a world beyond socialism, they still found ways to threaten norms and rituals while participating in them. At the risk of stating the obvious, Americans are locked in an entirely different socio-political context than KGB-era Soviets. There is quite a lot we still have time to do. And as Yurchak proves, even in the most dire circumstances, there are ways of laying the groundwork for radical futures.
This is another necessary distinction between his interpreters and what Yurchak actually says: his study’s subjects didn’t know the end was coming—they just weren’t surprised when it did. Whereas our current understanding of hyperreality describes the feelings of a population conscious of a nation’s descent, Yurchak’s interviewees didn’t anticipate the fall of the Eastern bloc at all. His case is not that their distrust of the political system signaled their awareness of its weakness, but rather that once the Party began to topple, their quiet dissidence prepared them to rebuild in its wake. When the “break in consciousness” described by Soviets in the 90s finally occurred—it was followed by great excitement and an engagement with the culture at large. People became sympathetic to dissident causes and looked forward to the future. The cognitive dissonance we experience in the US is unfortunately more damning. Despite whatever newfound knowledge of our country’s stupidity we may stumble upon, our habitual complacency persists. The dread we feel is not just an effect of our political reality; it’s our dormant conscience.
If that feeling needs a comparison, we might find a better one in the writings of Stefan Zweig, a Jewish-Austrian writer who details his personal experience of the two world wars in his book The World of Yesterday. After Hitler’s unsuccessful coup, he feels extremely optimistic, but by the time of the Munich agreements, begins to fear war across Europe. In those final months before Austria was overtaken by the army, Zweig expectations of the future swing violently from one side of the pendulum to the other—often exacerbated by visits home. At one point, he believes it will take three days for his country to fall; some days later he cannot imagine it happening ever. Such oscillation of our expectations and fears take a toll beyond the fears themselves. Our anxieties—like elastic—grow and change with each CNN notification.
That is to say—none of these anxieties are new. And to dwell too much on hypernormalization is also to neglect the hopeful, even silly stories of dissident movements chronicled in Everything was Forever. One amusing section describes a new type of performance art/comedy that emerged at the time of late perestroika called stoib. These were creative productions that refused to be characterized as solely earnest or ironic. Yorchak describes these groups as interrogators of the “discontinuity between authoritative form and meaning.” In one example, dissidents submitted a slightly edited version of an old Nazi poster to a Soviet propaganda office—where it was cleared and distributed. If that doesn’t sound like an episode of a Nathan Fielder show to you I don’t know what does. (Yurchak soured my admiration of his work a bit by publishing an academic article describing comedians like Stephen Colbert and John Stewart as American stoib—which I find patently demoralizing.) Another famous group staged a celebration of Soviet nationalism complete with flags and military salutes. Supporters of communism congratulated them on their commitment to their country and subversive types praised them for their poignant satire. Again, hypernormalization becomes not about the dichotomy between the knowledge we have of a flawed, absurd system and our willful participation in it—but rather, how we can color our participation with this knowledge. And of course, just because we cannot see another future doesn’t make it impossible to say “no” to the one laid out for us. Or—at least—to roll our eyes at it.
Songs of the Summer!
I’ve listening to more music this summer than I have in my life. It’s been a dizzying feeling and also a meditative one. As someone who isn’t really a music nerd, I’m not jaded by the endless critical conversations as I am by the types of cyclical conversations I see on social media about film or novels. I know none of the terms; I’m beautifully naive. (Wtf a “jangly” guitar?) In other words, I’m free!!!
Like nearly every other White Midwestern 2000s kid whose parents had Neil Young’s Harvest on CD, MJ Lenderman and Wednesday have become recent lodestones. The weird little record where they covered (mostly) country songs by shoegaze-ing them is really lovely, but all their music feels instantly identifiable and classic. It is one of those things where I am Making All My Friends Uncomfortable By Talking Almost Exclusively About It. Also just been listening to classic albums front to back, which is a really good way to force my brain to slow down. Dropping a playlist here of old & new stuff I’ve liked recently: if you also use Spotify like a social media app, we should be friends on there. :) Stay radical. love you <3