On the very same day that disruptive change was reaching a peak at my workplace, and I reflected the faces of the change–worn, I noticed this Instagram reel.
It proposes that the dislocation many people feel is a state of “hyper normalization,” in which a pretense of normalcy accompanies systemic breakdown. In other words, a society is undergoing significant social change, but prevailing norms suggests everything is fine. This brings to mind a black comic internet meme. Even black comedy is preferable to rampant toxic positivity.
It’s interesting that the popularity of this meme first appeared in right–wing social media circles on #4chan, and was picked up by the GOP as commentary about the 2016 DNC.
Inchoate Feelings of Distress Writ Large
In the first of his three lifetime achievement award–winning books on depression, Speaking of Sadness (1996), David S. Karp1 concludes that people with affective disorders like depression experience “inchoate feelings of distress” before receiving a diagnosis. Sociologists of emotion argue not only that emotions can be collective, but that as such, they unite the inner and outer worlds. This links them to processes of socialization, learning one’s culture and location in the social structure. (By “socialization,” sociologists do not mean socializing. We identify that as a form of interaction.) It makes sense that in periods prior to structural disruption, we some of us could experience an inchoate lack of fit between norms and structure.
An example of this can be found in work on youth. I suggest to my students that our society moves more easily to the idea that advanced age is a category of discrimination than that youth is. In 2016, sociologists Frank Furstenberg and Sheela Kennedy reprised their analysis of the age structure of the population, demonstrating that “the transition to adulthood was becoming more protracted and less homogeneous in the final decades of the 20th century.” Just as improved healthcare has created a new category of “elderly” in the age structure of the population, so too, the gap between the de jure and de facto independence of young adults makes “growing up harder to do,” especially after the Great Recession. Thus the cultural norm of de facto independence —“I was married, had a job and a house at your age.”—does not match the structural possibilities offered today’s youth. Particularly because more education is needed to be competitive, and because education and everything else is more expensive, full adulthood is delayed. The lack of fit between the cultural expectations or norms of a bygone era and current structural realities can be considered an example of culture lag. The norms have not caught up.
Paradoxes in Societies
But the notion of “hyper normalization” seems more pervasive through the population. The reel above explains that the term originates in reflection on the fall of the Soviet Union, specifically the book written by Russian historian Alexi Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2005). Soviet society was characterized by several paradoxes, including that it seemed both eternal and stagnating: its members were both surprised and unsurprised by the fall.
Similarly, it’s suggested that neoliberalism hides paradoxes in Western societies which may be markers of imminent transformation—or collapse. Adam Curtis has produced a documentary available on YouTube that argues as much.
Certainly the apparent current vulnerability of Western democracies to right–wing populist authoritarianism would seem to presage the collapse.
A Healthy Skepticism
As a sociologist, and a student of social movements, however, I have a skepticism of grand narratives that omit the notion of agency. As I quoted my colleague Charlotte Ryan in this blog back in September, “In the proverbial seesaw between structure and agency, strategy is the pivot.”2 We can point to many examples of agency both internal and external to Soviet society that brought about change. Right–wing populist authoritarianism has not arrived without agency by both grassroots activists and well–heeled facilitators of this activism.
I also question whether people are unable to envision alternatives to the status quo. Dystopian and utopian visions abound. The “cyberpunk” movement in science fiction exemplified in the writing of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Neal Stephenson envision dystopian fragmented social worlds of marginalized people in a post–state era ruled by corporations and yakuza. I’ve said a word or two about solarpunk, a movement beyond the literary and artistic which attempts to imagine worlds which avoid or exist after climate collapse.
Conclusion
As a sociologist, ever dedicated to the sociological imagination, the habit of mind that connects biography and history, I think it’s important to connect individuals’ inchoate discomfort with their milieux to larger issues of structure and culture. Thus I think it’s important to consider the “hypernormalization” thesis. I will watch the documentary, and I’ve put the book on the (growing) list. But I also think we need to interrogate the thesis from the standpoint of agency, and the ability of people, particularly those in social movements, to imagine alternatives. What do you think? Where do you turn for inspiration on alternatives to the prevailing social arrangements?
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David was one of three who served on my dissertation committee, and his symbolic interactionist view of how people make meaning influences me to this day.
Ryan, Charlotte, “It Takes a Movement to Raise an Issue: Media Lessons from the 1997 U.P.S. Strike,” Critical Sociology, 30(2): 483-511
See? Imagination. https://www.instagram.com/p/DE6I2pLOWc4/?igsh=NnoyNmNrMmgwYnlw