on hypernormalisation: this feeling that you're feeling is actually the opposite of normal

The Muse Letter No. 178

The Absinthe Drinker – Edgar Degas, 1876 (cropped)

“Some mornings I awake with an enormous sensation inside me and cannot identify whether the urge is to cry or write a poem or fuck someone. All at once? My body has cross-indexed the impulse.” I’m reading Heather Christle’s The Crying Book on a Saturday afternoon where my eyes are tired and the day feels like a hangover to a party I thought I had left early enough.

I do feel like crying.

The days are buzzing, the constant bad, terrible, horrifying news that demand new superlatives, a new language to describe the atrocities that are being fought one meme at a time on my Instagram feed. I write about it as if this lies in the past but it is happening and – future II – will have happened.

In German we call the future perfect – future II – and I always felt dubious about it, like our past that was coming to haunt us, that everything has consequences. Lately everything feels like future II.

Hypernormalisation – is what we’re living in, I am learning. “We live in a time of great uncertainty and confusion. Events keep happening that seem inexplicable and out of control. Donald Trump, Brexit, the War in Syria, the endless migrant crisis, random bomb attacks. And those who are supposed to be in power are paralysed - they have no idea what to do.”, I read on the BBC website, describing the plot of a documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis with the same name. The documentary is from 2016 but if you swap Syria for Gaza, it sounds like a depiction of the present. So perhaps we’re actually not confused or uncertain about what is happening, we just wish it weren’t so.

My mom tells me how she and my dad went to a protest in my hometown. Around 200 people showed up against the far right. No opposing protest, thankfully. My hometown is small and in the West of Germany which at this point is still mostly voting for democratic parties. "It’s just so frustrating how much the AfD is lying. They’re just lying,” she tells me over the phone. And I think of an interview with Alok Vaid-Menon on the Daily show a few weeks ago where they talk about how “humour is the first point of activation on how we process our worlds. We need to start being honest, we cannot, combat a world that ritualises lying with more lying. We need to operate at a different frequency. And what I think is so honest to the human condition is that at every funeral someone cracks a joke and that joke allows people to feel deeper and if we forget that truth we forget who we are.”

And one of those truths – an uncomfortable one I admit – is that there are people out there who really want fascism, who really embrace the idea of oppression and violence, so that they will have been better off in future II. Which ties into another thing that I’ve been learning about: hyperreality.

“The inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced societies.”¹

Last year I was sitting in the cinema to watch Dune 2 or Poor Things or some other movie and this film trailer would be shown every time about a civil war in the US called Civil War and I remember the unease watching these scenes that felt almost like propaganda or fear-mongering or priming?

Hyperreality.

And it resonates with something that Naomi Klein posted on her Instagram a week ago, that: “In recent decades, shock tactics were used mainly to rapidly impose neoliberal economic policies. But what Trump is doing goes way beyond that. […] It’s really about claiming the right to assert raw power at every single level: economically, militarily and inside the family. It’s mass social engineering. This brings us to the concept of chosenness, which is at the dead centre of Trump’s administration – from the tech oligarchs to the white nationalists. All share a belief that a small group of people have been chosen to survive the catastrophes they are deliberately deepening.”

A sort of last man standing mentality.

And I think again of Alok Vaid-Menon and what they said in another interview in regards to violence against trans and non-binary people but that feels to me like an accurate assessment of the whole fascist movement: “This is a failure of empathy not education.”

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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality#:~:text=Hyperreality%20is%20the%20inability%20of,especially%20in%20technologically%20advanced%20societies.