Is everything connected? Dr. Endre Dányi Department of Sociology Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main danyi@em.uni-frankfurt.de Draft prepared for the Lichter Filmfest, 1 April 2017 Hypernormalisation is a BBC documentary, directed by Adam Curtis and released in October 2016, just a few days before the last presidential election in the U.S. To put it briefly, it is a film about a conspiracy, which involves the political elite of the U.S., and some parts of Europe, and suggests that since the 1970s we – Western viewers – have been living in a false reality, cunningly manufactured by the power-hungry. At the same time, Hypernormalisation also functions as a conspiracy: by juxtaposing various images and archival footage in an almost surreal fashion, the documentary alleges that it is possible to fully understand our present condition, from the Syrian civil war through Brexit to the election of Trump; all we need to do is follow the connections, which are only a few clicks away. The film, especially a part titled ‘The truth is out there’, made me think of Susan Lepselter’s (2005) wonderful study of Area 51, a highly classified area that belongs to the U.S. Air Force and supposedly holds important evidence of the existence of UFOs. Lepselter’s ethnographic research, which took place in a small town called Rachel, was focused not necessarily on the contents of conspiracy theories (although many of them were both funny and frightening), but more the conditions for those theories to emerge and circulate. Why is it important for otherwise friendly and reasonable people to organise their lives around stories about aliens, secretive government agents, and mutilated cattle? It would be tempting to say that real traumas of closed mines, lost children, and ill health tend to generate strange fantasies, but Lepselter maintains that both traumas and fantasies are real. Taken together, they are vignettes of the West as ‘a place of restless melancholy’ (Lepselter 2005: 275). When discussing UFO secrets, Hypernormalisation neither addresses specific traumas, nor does it stay with the fantastic for too long. It bluntly claims that the U.S. Air Force itself is responsible for the conspiracy theories associated with the air base, which were meant to divert people’s attention from military experiments during the Cold War. Adam Curtis bases this claim largely on archival material that is available for anyone with a reliable internet connection. In fact, throughout the whole film Curtis asks us to believe what we see, and not what we are being told. The scepticism towards established narratives of reality seems justified, especially in light of such developments as the rise and fall of Colonel Gaddafi. A particularly troubling part of the documentary shows how, in an elaborate plot, the former leader of Libya was being transformed from a global villain into a strong ally of the West (only to become a global villain again). Leading politicians and the media played an important role in this transformation, but so did influential sociologists, such as Anthony Giddens, former director of the London School of Economics. Giddens’ fascination with Gaddafi’s vision of North Africa and the Middle East suggests that when it comes to reality, social analyses do not fare much better than politicians’ campaign speeches and the sensationalist coverages of the mainstream media. As I was watching the film, I felt sorry for Giddens, and through him for all social scientists, including myself. Is there any way we can resist such allegations? Is there any way we can insist on the difference between social analysis and a collage of various tabs open in our internet browser? And if there is, how? One possible answer, inspired by French pragmatist thought and Actor-Network Theory (see Boltanski 2014; Latour 2013), would be to shift our attention from what entities are being connected through our stories to how they are being connected. In Curtis’s film, connections appear as explanation: we are presented with images at a dizzying speed and just before we could formulate a question about the materials we are confronted with yet another image, so we sit back and try not to be too embarrassed for being slow. In Lepselter’s analysis, by contrast, the art of explanation (if this is the right word – see Benjamin 1969) lies in connecting images in a way that places us right in the middle of the confusion. There is no hidden wholeness behind or beyond the fragments. As she says, ‘fantastic narratives and conspiracy theories offer no final, singular “real” meaning to be excavated like a mystery novel, in which a clue indexes a single referent to be finalized and solved. Instead of a single hidden sign, you might instead notice the fallout of many social memories mixed with random, everyday disenchantments, accumulating in unpredictable forms’ (Lepselter 2005: 265). Hypernormalisation is such an unpredictable form, which makes it an object through which we may begin to address the restless melancholy of the contemporary West. References Benjamin, W. (1969). ‘The Storyteller’ in H. Arendt (ed.) Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Schocken. Boltanski, L. (2014). Mysteries and conspiracies: detective stories, spy novels and the making of modern societies. London: Polity. Curtis, A. (2016). Hypernormalisation. A BBC documentary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM – last accessed on 31 March 2017. Latour, B. (2013). An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lepselter, S. (2005) ‘Why Rachel isn’t buried at her grave: ghosts, UFOs, and a place in the West’ in D. Rosenberg and S. Harding (eds.) Histories of the future. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.