Adam Curtis’ Hypernormalisation begins by declaring that ‘no one has a vision of a different or better kind of future.” Curtis portrays the world as a complex, interconnected web, where neoliberalism, social media, technocratic power, artistic complacency, ideology and distortions of truth have all played a part in driving us into a new, directionless era of instability. Hypernormalisation tells the story of how we got to this strange place.
Curtis knits together a web of archival footage from across the last five decades. This collection acts as his ‘detective evidence-board’ of string and pins, from which Curtis presents causal links between seemingly disparate moments in modern history. The narrative begins with two moments on different sides of the world, both occurring in 1975: the fiscal crisis in New York City and the tension between the US’ Henry Kissinger and Syria’s President Hafez al-Asad with regard to the Arab world. The two moments at first don’t appear to be significantly linked. However, Curtis’ narrative plays out in such a way that these two moments appear to directly interact, somewhat forging a new reality in their wake.
Throughout Hypernormalisation, Curtis continues to place distinct moments in direct causal chains with each other. In this sense, there is some similarity between his view on historical progression and that of the German Idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel developed the notion of a dialectic system to explain the way things progress and develop. His system comprises three dialectical stages: a thesis; an antithesis, which contradicts or negates the thesis; and the tension between the two, which is resolved through their synthesis. This system repeats when the synthesis becomes a new thesis itself.
Hegel’s dialectic can supposedly be applied to many that progress through stages of contradiction and reform. In particular, Hegel viewed history as a one enormous dialectic, operating with the forces of alienation, liberty, corruption and rationality among others. For instance, the American Civil War saw the anti-slavery Union (thesis) in conflict with the pro-slavery Confederate forces, culminating in the Union victory and amendments to the US Constitution (synthesis). Hegel’s dialectic is often criticised for being an oversimplification when it comes to thoroughly understanding changes in history. However, I would argue that it functions as a way of observing and understanding the progression of broad tensions in history, and that to some extent, the dialectic synthesis provides us with an understanding of how the future comes into being.
Returning to Hypernormalisation, I would argue that many of its historical moments are presented in dialectic form. For instance, President Asad and the New York fiscal crisis can be seen as the thesis and antithesis, with the shaken world after 1975 emerging as the synthesis. To some extent, there are dialectics present between each event in multiple directions; President Asad could also be in dialectic tension with Henry Kissenger and Neo-imperialist forces, with their synthesis being the emergence of suicide bombings and an unstable middle east. And the New York fiscal crisis could be placed in dialectic tension with the politically disillusioned artists of the 1970s. Countless examples present in Hypernormalisation can be cited: cyberspace utopianism and social media synthesising into echo chambers; the arab spring, social media and youth disillusion; artificial intelligence, future predictions and neoliberal markets; etc.
Hegel’s dialectical system can also be used with regard to Curtis’ fundamental theme: the dissolution of society’s visions for the future. There are two significant ways that the modern world has evolved to be dysfunctional with the mechanics of the dialectical system: first, via globalisation, there is now an overload of forces in dialectic tension with each other; second, the dissolving of truth and understanding, making it more difficult for us to identify the theses, antitheses and syntheses at play in the modern world. Both of these phenomena are significant overloads to the dialectical system. Vladimir Putin and Vladslav Surkov’s post-truth tactic is an example of how an overload of information can lead to mass confusion. The very same thing is happening with the explosion of dialectical tensions at play in the world. With a fading vision of ‘what is in tension with what’ it is increasingly difficult to grasp the direction that society is heading in.
References:
Adam Curtis, Hypernormalisation
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, https://www.britannica.com/topic/philosophy-of-history/History-as-a-process-of-dialectical-change-Hegel-and-Marx