Hypernormal Summer
The summer we learned of the murder of journalist Anas Al-Sharif while peeling fruit for breakfast. The summer we saw starving children on the news as we shook off the sand on the beach. Some, for whatever reason, stayed in our memories, others were confused with the rest of the starving children. The summer we woke up with a hangover from our dinner wine and heard the death count from the day before in the food delivery lines in Gaza. The news on the radio lasts as long as it takes us to put the coffee pot on.
The summer we heard the word mutilation too many times. The summer we saw the photos of the bullets in the newspaper. It was the same summer we ate sardines again and took out our flip-flops that barely had any soles left. The summer we consumed the news about a few Palestinian children arriving in Barcelona. These children are going to be cured, these children are safe, we wanted to think, letting ourselves be infected by the journalist's overly enthusiastic tone, because we need something to console us with.
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There are several long words that apply to this. One is the very practical “cognitive dissonance,” the discomfort that comes from doing one thing and thinking another, or, in this case, not doing much. Another is “hypernormalization,” which resurfaced as a hot topic a few months ago thanks to a viral video. It was coined at the beginning of the century by the thinker Alexei Yurchak to refer to what was happening to citizens of the former USSR. It refers to a dual perception: that the system is broken, and that everyone, including themselves, was carrying on trying to maintain their lives as usual, weathering waves of fear, disgust, and dissociation.
They carried on trying to maintain their lives as usual, weathering waves of fear, disgust and dissociation.In 2016, filmmaker Adam Curtis titled one of his political documentary essays Hypernormalization . He argues that Yurchak's concept applies perfectly to what we've been experiencing in the West for several decades, and that many Americans are turning to the word to express what life will be like in 2025. Hypernormalization has also been described, with varying degrees of generosity, as a survival mechanism, or as the art of looking the other way.
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