Under such conditions, Stiob aesthetics made sense

August 28, 2015 9:08 AM

American Stiob: Or, What Late-Socialist Aesthetics of Parody Reveal about Contemporary Political Culture in the West, Dominic Boyer and Alexei Yurchak, paper here in PDF

DB: The one thing I would add is that one of the fascinating things about this is that even in the case of Colbert– Stewart it’s clear the satirical moment, but we also don’t describe Stewart as doing stiob exactly, he’s doing something different – but Colbert is more of a stiob-esque type of performer. They’ve done these studies, we mention it briefly in the paper, that over half of political conservatives who watch Colbert take him literally as a populist. They don’t think of him as a comedian. I was just teaching this in my media class and there was a student who came from a conservative family who said that her father and older brother watch Colbert and find him hilarious and they don’t think of him as being a liberal or a leftist. It’s this interesting ambiguity that stiob can inhabit that makes it so effective. It allows stiob to have a different political, critical intervention than a more literal oppositional politics would.

What Late Socialism Teaches Us About Late Liberalism, Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964–1985 edited by Neringa Klumbyte, Gulnaz Sharafutdinova

A Multi-Lectic Anatomy of Stiob and Poshlost’: Case Studies in the Oeuvre of Timur Novikov

The Case of Stiob
The notion of stiob, in usage in nonconformist circles for decades, has recently received Western academic attention due to the work of Alexei Yurchak, who has integrated its explication into a broader theoretical framework (Yurchak 2005). He describes a ‘hyper-normalisation of form’ of official Soviet practices, juxtaposing this with their increasing lack of denotative semantic content in the late-Soviet period. Yurchak proposes the concept of a ‘performative shift’ to describe how certain formulaic acts (public eulogies for Communism, for instance—whether performed sincerely or not) often became ideologically vacuous means to totally different ends (Yurchak 2005, chapter 6). In lay terms, his diagnosis is of a mismatch of official form and non-official content.

"It required such a degree of overidentification with the object, person or idea that it was often impossible to tell wheter it was a form of sincere support, subtle ridicule, or a peculiar mixture of the two" - Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, Alexei Yurchak
"The Language of the exclusive and subversive sistema turned into a popular and mass-produced stiob" - The Future of Nostalgia By Svetlana Boym


Simply the best: Parody and political sincerity in Iceland [PDF], Dominic Boyer

posted by the man of twists and turns (2 comments total)

Just finished reading the first paper. Great post.
posted by PMdixon at 10:26 AM on August 28, 2015

Here's what bothers me about Yurchak:

The ironic procedure allows you to occupy a political position that transcends the for/against kind of binary or the leftist/rightist binary. It can step outside of this paradigm and comment on the political field as a whole, without necessarily even being sure of your own political position within it. I think that was definitely the case with state-socialist forms of stiob. For example, some of the intellectuals who were very critical of the communist state in Yugoslavia were also critical of the group Laibach. They thought that this group was overdoing its parody, that its audiences were unprepared for that level of overidentification and could misrecognize the parody, could mistake Laibach’s antifascist irony for the propaganda of fascism. But because this group was so provocative for both - state officials and counter-state intellectuals - the effects of their work were even more powerful. They showed that these two different positions, the state and its opponents, were in fact linked to each other as parts of one political field. And what Laibach was offering instead was a critique of this whole field.

He pretty much explcitly equates "state officials and counter-state intellectuals" and takes a plague-on-both-your houses (or rather mockery-on-both-your houses) approach. This was even clearer in his book, which I wrote about here: "My second problem with the book is that Yurchak seems to share, rather than simply reporting on, the viewpoint of the 'normal people' he quotes: that the dissidents were just as boring and annoying as the activists, and that the sensible person ignored the lot of them and concentrated on fun stuff like rock music or staging public fights to épater les camarades." He'd probably mock me for trying to pin him down to an actual position, and frankly he reminds me of Phil Cubeta (for Mefites with long memories; for others who want to relive the glory days of stiob on MetaFilter, see the MetaTalk post linked from his profile). He has useful things to say, but I don't like his attitude.
posted by languagehat at 12:12 PM on August 28, 2015 [4 favorites]