Normalised language is loose convention across prose, narrative form, formality, and conciseness in text we write. Academic papers, professional writing, advertising, group chats, and workplace chats all have different forms of normalisation. Texts can also be normalised by the way they look – if you see a two-column LaTeX document your mind recognises that it’s an academic paper before you’ve even read a word.
In Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, Alexei Yurchak presents the concept of hypernormalised language. It takes normalised language a step further, where the words and narrative itself becomes normalised. It’s a language where the literal interpretation of the text has lost all meaning.
In the late Soviet context, when authoritative discourse became hypernormalized, its performative dimension grew in importance and its constative dimension became unanchored from concrete core meanings and increasingly open to new interpretations … In most contexts where that discourse circulated and was dominant it became less important to interpret its texts and rituals literally, as constative descriptions of reality, and more important to reproduce them with great precision.
How did this come about? Stalin defined and evolved acceptable language throughout his rule. After he died, ideological language stopped progressing. Speech writers and secretaries, at all levels of seniority, still needed to produce text.
After the 1950s, with the disappearance of the “external” voice [Stalin] that provided metadiscussions and evaluations of that language, the language structures became increasingly normalized, cumbersome, citational, and circular [hypernormalized]. This development was an unintended result of the attempts by great numbers of people who were engaged in producing texts in authoritative language to minimize the presence of their own authorial voice. By doing so, they converted their voices from that of the producer of new knowledge to that of the mediator of preexisting knowledge.
Yurchak frames this as an emergent phenomenon. Propaganda and censorship was in full effect, but the secretary writing the report would reach for hypernormalised language to remove themselves from what was being written. There was a natural incentive for them to minimise their voice, and maximise not just ideas but phrases and oblique sentences written in earlier times.
Language used by the Central Committee, party organisations, and propaganda arms all turned to this consistent, repeated, difficult to distinguish language.
The party secretaries and CC speechwriters could only look to one another’s texts to normalize their own. As a result, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, this discourse experienced progressive normalization, with the different texts written in it sounding increasingly like excerpts from one text.
Yurchak uses the frame of language having a constative meaning, and a performative meaning. That which is constative describes reality and can be interpreted as true or false. Performative acts, on the other hand, aren’t evaluated for truth but are simply deemed successful or non-successful. An example this is some crudely stereotyped soviet trope, where a coal miner emerges from a shaft and proclaims the glorious benefits of Lenin and communism. The miner does not literally believe what he is saying, however he is also not being cynical or sarcastic. Simply there is no literal meaning or evaluation of truth about the spoken sentence.
Acts of speaking in authoritative forms were neither necessarily about the intention of the speaker not about the description of reality. Acts of speaking in authoritative language, practicing ideological rituals, or voting in favor of resolutions at the party meetings in most cases were not about stating one’s opinion about constative meanings of these discursive forms but about successfully carrying out ritualized acts that inaugurated the production and reproduction of the institutions, laws, hierarchies, and subject positions, with all the possibilities and limitations that came with them, including enabling one to have a meaningful life, pursue interests, education, careers, ethical values, ideals, and hopes for the future, have friendships, belong to a community, and even reject some bureaucratic interpretation of the constative meaning of such acts.
Linguistic, narrative, and rhetorical structures were not read by most Soviet people at face value, as constative descriptions of the world (either true or false). In fact, the constative dimension of this language became open and unpredictable, and authoritative language acquired a powerful performative function. Replicating its textual forms, linguistic constructions, making speeches and compiling reports in it, participating in acts of voting, and so on had the important effect of enabling new meanings and descriptions of reality and forms of life that were neither limited to nor completely determined by those provided by the constative descriptions in authoritative language.
Normalised language has a constative meaning. A reader can parse it and evaluate the truth of the fact or claim. Hypernormalised language has no constative meaning. It’s not just “fake news” or propaganda that one can fact check, the reader needs to dismiss the idea they can evaluate the literal written word. Mikhail Epstein wrote:
No one knows … whether the harvests reported in Stalin’s or Brezhnev’s Russia were ever actually reaped, but the fact that the number of tilled hectares or milled grain was always reported down to the tenth of a percent gave these simulacra the character of hyperreality … any reality that differed from the ideology simply ceased to exist – it was replaced by hyperreality, more tangible and reliable than anything else. In the Soviet land, “fairy tale became fact”, as in that American paragon of hyperreality, Disneyland, where reality itself is designed as a land of imagination.
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Some personal interpretation. How do we think between a single item of text, say a news report or memo in a corporate workplace, and determine whether it’s hypernormalised, or just poorly or coercively written? The angle the book seemed to suggest was that hypernormalised language was a feature of the system. It wasn’t some nefarious individual at the top producing these texts, but systematic incentives and behaviours led to tens of thousands of people in the Soviet Union writing party-aligned text this way.
Those who have worked in corporate workplaces may get a glimpse of this. Every single bit of work being done or talked about linking back to Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) or company values presented as the way people actually work. It’s not just the company executive talking about these, language around these spreads through the ranks. It doesn’t become weaponised, but any reference or presentation about these (few people have active conversations about these) lose all constative meaning. Possible litmus test for hypernormalised language – that which is reference and presented in formal settings, but is rarely talked about between individuals in a casual conversation because they know it has no meaning.
Yurchak writes that Stalin acted as the arbiter of truth and knower of all knowledge. It’s from him that what is acceptable language was defined. He was viewed as external to the system (Soviet society), for they could not define truth. In this, I see more parallels in the corporate reality. Some founders cult of personality stick around long after they’re gone (Bezos – it’s always day one). Other ’external arbiters’ cited by corporate executives are the board or the shareholders. More often called upon on rainy days, citing the need for higher revenue, cost cutting, and more efficiency (as is every year, repeated every year). Though here that external arbiter is more often used as an accountability sink rather than an oracle, as Stalin later was by Khrushchev.
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For a definitive and nuanced take on Hypernormalised language read Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More - The Last Soviet Generation by Alexi Yurchak.
