in focus
rethinking postsocialism
IN Focus
Postsocialist Studies, Cultures of
Parody and American Stiob
Dominic Boyer
Rice U
Alexei Yurchak
UC-Berkeley
Our contribution emerges from a
collective effort, at the 2008 meeting
of Soyuz: The Research Network
for Postsocialist Cultural Studies,
to rethink the possible futures of
postsocialist studies. Like others, we
are interested in what critical capaci-
ties the study of socialism and post-
socialism still offers anthropology
today. To put it bluntly, postsocialist
studies in Eastern Europe and the
former Soviet Union (FSU) have a
vanishing object. Or, perhaps more
accurately, framing these contem-
porary lifeworlds in terms of “post-
socialist transition” seems to have
a vanishing analytical payoff. In
the 1990s, in the aftermath of the
Cold War, it made perfect sense to
frame the study of Eastern Europe
and the FSU in terms of a transi-
tion “from” socialism “to” some-
thing else. The evolving geopolitics
of the new millennium have mean-
while pushed forward new concerns
like globalization, financialization,
ethnic and religious conflict, liber-
alism and security—concerns that
often dwarf the politics of transition
in analyses of the present. At the
same time, socialism has not gone
quietly to the grave. Neoliberalism
(whatever that may be) has, almost
inevitably, catalyzed the reinven-
tion of its ancient sibling, just as any
call for autonomy also summons
the fact of relatedness. But the front-
lines of “neosocialism” lie in states
like Venezuela, China and Bolivia,
not Eastern Europe.
Our response to the vanishing
objects and payoffs of postsocialist
transition is to return to socialism
itself, to excavate our knowledge
of late socialist societies for unex-
pected insights with which to
confront social scientific knowl-
edge of the contemporary. In our
current joint project, we discuss a
This series highlights the continued relevance of anthropology of (post)socialism to illuminate core questions of social, cultural and
historical transformation. Drawing on examples from Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and China, these essays offer insight
into the cascading after-effects of the Cold War and their implications for contemporary political debates. AN thanks Andrew Gilbert
for his assistance in organizing this series.
certain uncanny kinship between
the modes of parody and political
detachment that flourished at the
margins of Eastern European and
Soviet public culture in the 1970s-
80s and those that are becoming
increasingly popular in the United
States today. What we hope to
illustrate is not a direct correspon-
dence in the institutional and ideo-
logical formations of late socialism
and contemporary capitalism,
but rather that these formations
in both systems, however distinct,
today seem increasingly subjected
to comparable pressures and condi-
tions resulting in certain analogous
political effects. We argue that the
highly monopolized and normal-
ized media conditions that char-
acterized late socialism anticipated
current trends in US media, polit-
ical discourse and public culture.
Thus, it is perhaps unsurprising
that analogues to the ironic modal-
ities normally associated with late
socialism have recently become
more intuitive and popular in
the United States. We call these
analogues “American Stiob” to
accentuate our sense of their family
resemblance and common origins.
American Stiob
In his book Everything Was Forever
Until It Was No More, Yurchak
describes stiob as an ironic aesthetic
of a very particular kind that thrived
in late Soviet socialism. Stiob
“differed from sarcasm, cynicism,
derision or any of the more familiar
genres of absurd humor” in that it
“required such a degree of overiden-
tification with the object, person, or
idea at which [it] was directed that it
was often impossible to tell whether
it was a form of sincere support,
subtle ridicule, or a peculiar mixture
of the two” (2006:250). One of the
key characteristics of stiob irony
was that it was a “straight,” deep
caricature that did not often signal
its own ironic purpose. Boyer has
identified similar modes of parodic
critique among East Berlin intel-
November 2008 • Anthropology News
lectuals during the same period
(“Foucault in the Bush,” Ethnos
66[2]). In the Soviet Union stiob
sensibility emerged in the context of
a phenomenon that Yurchak terms
“hypernormalization,” in which the
structure of late Soviet authoritative
discourse gradually became more
recursive, formalized and predict-
able. As Boyer details in his work
on East German censorship, late
socialist states typically invested
considerable energy into the nego-
tiation of perfected, normalized
language of political communica-
tion (“Censorship as a Vocation,”
Comparative Studies in Society and
History 45[3]). The outcome of these
efforts, if not the intent, was that
state-sponsored political discourse
was saturated with overcrafted,
c o m m e n ta ry
repetitive and frequently esoteric
formulations that distanced the
authoritative discourse of socialism
from its desired intimate connec-
tion with the language and thinking
of its citizen subjects.
The expertized, abstract language
of socialist states thus catalyzed
various modes of experiential and
epistemic estrangement, one of
which Yurchak describes as “perfor-
mative shift” —a communicational
turn away from constative (literal)
meaning and toward performative
meaning. Under these conditions,
the overidentifying character of
stiob aesthetics made sense. Faced
with the fact that authoritative
discourse was already constantly
caricaturing itself, overidentifica-
tion sent a more potent signal than
any revelatory exposé or gesture of
ironic diminishment could have.
Moreover, while the state easily iden-
tified and isolated any oppositional
discourse as a threat, recognizing
the discourse of overidentification
as such was difficult by definition.
Overidentification also offered an
ethical refuge: unlike overt political
critique, overidentifying with state
rhetoric did not require one to auto-
matically distance oneself from the
communist idea as immoral. For
this reason, stiob did not occupy
any recognizable political positions.
Our contention is that a stiob sensi-
bility has now become increasingly
familiar in US public and political
culture too.
Hypernormalization in US
Media
Political discourse in contempo-
rary US media exhibits several
tendencies that are compa-
rable to late socialist hypernor-
malization: (1) highly monopo-
lized media production and circu-
lation, (2) active orchestration
of public political discourse by
parties and government institu-
tions, (3) ideological consensus in
political and economic news anal-
ysis, and (4) thematic and generic
normalization of modes of polit-
ical performance and representa-
tion. The comedian and media
analyst Jon Stewart frequently
draws attention to the recursive,
imitative tendencies in US polit-
ical discourse through montages
of political speeches and commen-
taries that are nearly textually
identical. Indeed, the very popu-
larity of meticulous “meta-news”
ironists like Stewart or the even
more stiob-esque Stephen Colbert
already suggests that a “performa-
tive shift” of the kind that occurred
in the late Soviet Union is arising
in US political discourse, in which
literal criticism becomes less effec-
tive than the performative parodic
work of inhabiting the norm.
But where does this kinship
between late socialist stiob and
American Stiob come from? On
the face of things, US media
appear to incorporate the antith-
esis of state-socialist centralization.
Popular discussions of contempo-
rary media, for example, routinely
emphasize an explosion of media
channels, platforms and messages
in the era of digital communica-
See Stiob on page 10

Anthropology News • November 2008
Stiob
continued from page 
tions. The overriding emphasis
on entertainment and consumer-
oriented programming also marks
an obvious divergence from the
sober high-modern rationalism of
state-socialist media. We certainly
do not deny the existence of
these differences. Our argument
is that discursive hypernormaliza-
tion can occur regardless of the
specific epistemic or ideological
content of the media in question.
In this respect, two important
trends in Western media over the
last 20 years deserve our attention.
The first is an intense concentration
and consolidation of basic content
production leading to the familiar
experience of receiving more iter-
ations of similar media content
despite diversified media platforms.
To take a striking example, in the
US news media, the Associated Press
Reconsidering Postsocialism from
the Margins of Europe
Hope, Time and Normalcy in Post-Yugoslav Societies
Andrew Gilbert
U Toronto
Jessica Greenberg
Northwestern U
Elissa Helms
Central European U
Stef Jansen
U Manchester
It is inevitable that any subfield
or regional subset of anthropology
faces an occasional reckoning. The
social world and its meanings shift
beneath our feet no less than for
those people we study, and anthro-
pologists are equally susceptible to
corresponding flurries of interpreta-
tion, questioning and “crisis.” It is
not surprising that anthropology of
postsocialism faces precisely such a
moment, particularly among a new
generation of scholars who began
their research a decade after 1989.
We struggle to understand a period
that is inadequately captured by
any one “ism,” be it (post)socialist,
neo- or late liberal, or national.
This struggle is complicated by the
10
(AP) has attained a virtual monopoly
position in the production and circu-
lation of basic news content, a situ-
ation analogous to the centralized
news services of socialist era Eastern
Europe. In virtually every small-
and medium-sized newspaper in the
US one can find the same national
and international news coverage
produced through outsourcing of
non-local news production to AP.
Second, digitization has signifi-
cantly accelerated the temporality
of media-making, cultivating new
standards of “real time” media work
that ethnographers of digital news
have described as engendering an
increased tendency toward imita-
tion as media professionals draw
upon ideas and information already
in circulation in order to keep pace
with rising productivity demands.
Ideological Dilemma
Finally, institutional analogies
are necessary but not sufficient
to account for the emergence of
American Stiob. We also see an
stakes of postsocialist analysis in
the “real” world of policy and poli-
tics. Scholarship on the former and
current socialist world has served as
justification for neoliberal economic
restructuring and for militarized
democratization efforts across the
globe. Now, in 2008, policymakers,
economists and funding agencies
have declared Eastern Europe to
be fully “transitioned,” socialism
dead and gone and liberal democ-
racy a cure-all for the difficulties
of global economic and political
transformations. Anthropologists of
postsocialism are left scrambling for
funding and wondering just how
many glasses of Milton Friedman’s
Kool-Aid the rest of the social
sciences have been drinking.
Yet as anthropologists of post-
socialism have demonstrated, this
liberal triumphalism over the “end
of history” is a much more compli-
cated story. The stakes of the anthro-
pology of postsocialism are only
heightened by the self-congratula-
tory narrative of successful transi-
tion. The postsocialist experience
resonates with and exemplifies crit-
ical social, economic and polit-
acute ideological dilemma in post-
1989 liberal capitalism, since the
ideological field of “the West” had
been organized for decades through
reference to the external pres-
ence and threat of communism.
The evaporation of this external
presence on a geopolitical scale
magnified ideological tendencies
toward discursive self-referencing
and self-aggrandizement, just as
occurred under late socialism. This
has allowed US political ideology
to gradually consolidate its univer-
salism and the ideological slippage
between the political imaginations
of “American life” and “human
life” has become more drastic. If
the core liberal political virtue of
“freedom” used to be defined, for
example, in opposition to commu-
nist authoritarianism, now it is
defined largely with reference to
itself. In other words, the perfor-
mative repetition of discourse—in
this case, speaking constantly of
freedom—seems sufficient to give
freedom a content and presence (as
ical transformations globally: post-
industrial political and economic
restructuring; the reconfiguration
of personhood around flexible
labor and niche-market consump-
tion; the displacement of alternate
forms of political practice in favor
of liberal models of representation
and participation; and the wedding
of military intervention, US foreign
policy and democratization.
Beyond arguing for the relevance
of our subfield of anthropology, we
are also responding to something
more tenuous, emergent and ener-
gizing. We find ourselves chasing
swift and fleeting forms of possi-
bility outlined against (and some-
times in terms of) disappointment,
anger and despair. Such possibili-
ties have spurred many of us to
look for new vocabularies, concepts
and frameworks to capture both the
entrenched and the emergent, and
the ways in which they are inextri-
cably entwined. In the wake of the
“end” of one of modernism’s greatest
narratives of inevitability and possi-
bility, revolution and stasis, promise
and despair, we find that there is
still much to say about socialist life
in focus
we recall from the build-up to the
two Iraq wars). This combination
of ideological universalism and self-
referentiality is strongly reminis-
cent of the political culture of late
socialism. And so, to understand
contemporary political ideology
in the West, deeper comparative
ethnography of socialist ideology
should prove a remarkably helpful
resource.
Dominic Boyer is associate professor
of anthropology at Rice University
and a visiting professor at the Goethe-
Universität Frankfurt. He is the
author of Spirit and System: Media,
Intellectuals, and the Dialectic in
Modern German Culture (2005) and
Understanding Media: A Popular
Philosophy (2007).
Alexei Yurchak is associate professor
of anthropology at the University of
California-Berkeley. He is the author
of Everything Was Forever, Until
It Was No More: The Last Soviet
Generation (2005).
worlds and the social ties, personal
aspirations and political configura-
tions that they animated.
Last November, with the support
of the Wenner-Gren Foundation and
the British Academy, we brought
together two senior anthropolo-
gists and a group of junior scholars
working in the post-Yugoslav soci-
eties of Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-
Herzegovina for a workshop at
the University of Manchester. We
sought to revitalize the region’s
relevance to postsocialist studies,
and the relevance of postsocialism
to anthropology more generally.
Yugoslavia and its successor states
have always occupied a tenuous
position in the study of socialism
and postsocialism. Recent analysis
of the region has more often been
centered on the study of ethnic
conflict, nationalism and “failed
states,” rather then socialist and
postsocialist processes. This posi-
tion, both marginal and central,
forced us as scholars in and of
the region to bring (post)socialism
“back in,” and offered the opportu-
nity to thoroughly interrogate the
usefulness of postsocialist analytic
frames. Throughout the workshop
we focused on the multiplicity of
imaginaries and practices in the
region that are shadowed, but not
exhausted, by the recent history of
war and violence. The rest of this
essay offers some reflections that