Chapter 1

"Makarevich and many Soviet people also quickly discovered another peculiar fact: despite the seeming abruptness of the collapse, they found themselves prepared for it. A peculiar paradox became apparent in those years: although the system’s collapse had been unimaginable before it began, it appeared unsurprising when it happened" p.1

"Many discovered that, unbeknownst to themselves, they had always been ready for it, that they had always known that life in (Soviet) socialism was shaped through a curious paradox, that the system was always felt to be both stagnating and immutable, fragile and vigorous, bleak and full of promise." p.2

"The act of critiquing isolated binaries does not necessarily deconstruct these deeper underlying assumptions behind them. For example, Susan Gal and Gail Kligman provided a crucial critique of many binary divisions that dominate the studies of state socialism, arguing that in these societies “rather than any clear-cut ‘us’ versus ‘them’ or ‘private’ versus ‘public,’ there was a ubiquitous self-embedding or interweaving of these categories.” And yet, they connected this critique with another claim that “everyone was to some extent complicit in the system of patronage, lying, theft, hedging, and duplicity through which the system operated,” and that often even “intimates, family members and friends informed on each other” (Gal and Kligman 2000, 51)." p. 7

"What tends to get lost in the binary accounts is the crucial and seemingly paradoxical fact that, for great numbers of Soviet citizens, many of the fundamental values, ideals, and realities of socialist life (such as equality, community, selflessness, altruism, friendship, ethical relations, safety, education, work, creativity, and concern for the future) were of genuine importance, despite the fact that many of their everyday practices routinely transgressed, reinterpreted, or refused certain norms and rules represented in the official ideology of the socialist state. For many, “socialism” as a system of human values and as an everyday reality of “normal life” (normal’naia zhizn’) was not necessarily equivalent to “the state” or “ideology”; indeed, living socialism to them often meant something quite different from the official interpretations provided by state rhetoric" p.8

"This fixed and normalized discursive system was akin to the kind of discourse that Bakhtin terms “authoritative discourse” (avtoritetnoe slovo). For Bakhtin, authoritative discourse coheres around a strict external idea or dogma (whether religious, political, or otherwise) and occupies a particular position within the discursive regime of a period. It has two main features. First, because of a special “script” in which it is coded, authoritative discourse is sharply demarcated from all other types of discourse that coexist with it, which means that it does not depend on them, it precedes them, and it cannot be changed by them. Second, all these other types of discourse are organized around it. Their existence depends on being positioned in relation to it, having to refer to it, quote it, praise it, interpret it, apply it, and so forth, but they cannot, for example, interfere with its code and change it. Regardless of whether this demarcated and fixed authoritative discourse is successful in persuading its authors and audiences, they experience it as immutable and therefore unquestionable (Bakhtin 1994, 342–43). 23 To stress that during late socialism the newly normalized Soviet ideological discourse no longer functioned at the level of meaning as a kind of ideology in the usual sense of the word, I will refer to it henceforth as “authoritative discourse""

Thinking about The Market and economics as a form of authoritative discourse. - I think this is what Curtis is getting at in Hypernormalisation (2016)

"Instead, the productive and dialogic view of language developed by Bakhtin and his colleagues understands the speaking self as “voice” that is never bounded or static but always “dialogized,” because speaking implies inhabiting multiple voices that are not “self-enclosed or deaf to one another” but that “hear each other constantly, call back and forth to each other, and are reflected in one another”" Dialogical Self in a Complex World: The Need for Bridging Theories

skipped ahead to where the term hypernormalization is coined - appears to be about language, about a flattening of language in order to avoid proscription/censorship. The language becomes hyper (excessively) normal (expected, uniform, conforming).

"In order to not transgress the norm, one needed to repeat the forms of language that had already been in wide use in authoritative texts... Producers of party texts were increasingly preoccupied with minimizing one’s authorial voice and making them sound like texts produced earlier." 48

"This language had become what I term hypernormalized—that is, the process of its normalization did not simply affect all levels of linguistic, textual, and narrative structure but also became an end in itself, resulting in fixed and cumbersome forms of language that were often neither interpreted nor easily interpretable at the level of constative meaning" p.50

Hypernormalisation (2016)