CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Ogula, Vladimir |
|---|---|
| Title | Anarchiving "Memory": Normativity, Aesthetics, and Creativity in Remembrance of the Great Patriotic War in Contemporary Russia |
| Summary | This dissertation is an autotheoretical and performative study of the relationship between normative power, everyday aesthetics, and creativity as it unfolds in “memory” of the Great Patriotic War in contemporary Russia. “Memory” of the war has increased in significance for Russia's national identity over Vladimir Putin's reign, most recently and visibly used to justify the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. However, “memory” of the GPW is irreducible to the well-studied official narrative of the war as a heroic sacrifice and the explicit, oppositional challenge to the regime and its policies. Rather, through the sheer extent of references to the war, which few of the living have witnessed, and their circulation across various disconnected contexts and sites, “memory” of the GPW constitutes an essential part of the everyday sensory background. As such, it is hardly possible to avoid and is important less for the specific meaning and more for the very fact of its punctuation as a component of “normal” life. Departing from this observation, the thesis offers a dual intervention on the conceptual-empirical and aesthetico-political levels. First, the dissertation argues that the aestheticisation of “memory” contributes to the reproduction of the equivalence between the capacity to “remember” the war and being a member of the national community. However, it also enables the proliferation of instances where “memory” is treated simply as an everyday resource for creative experimentation and its memorial side is suspended. The thesis demonstrates both of these effects by drawing the cartography of various memorial signs, symbols and popular expressions, conceptualised with Guattari’s term “refrain,” and showing their circulation in high politics, popular culture, everyday life, and contemporary art. Such refrains of remembrance are important not only as aesthetic background but also as a matter of aesthetico-political practices in fields such as music and performance art that feed on the normativity of “memory” to transgress it. Second, building on the tradition of autotheory and arts-based methods in IR, the text takes the creative attitude analysed here one step further and incorporates it into the research ethos and methodology to exhibit the process of disidentifying from “memory’s” normativity. It does that by translating Erin Manning’s concept of “anarchive” into the performative methodology of an aesthetic citational practice. As part of the anarchival process, the thesis experiments with ways of capturing and amplifying what in “memory” is irreducible to its “memorial” side. Through the wandering style of writing and situated techniques such as herbarium assembly and photographic performance, the thesis pursues an aesthetico-political task of articulating alternative discursive spaces related to “memory” in breaking with it. Ultimately, this thesis seeks to show the persistence and political significance of everyday creativity as the process of transgressing, trans- and de-forming social norms. |
| Supervisor | Strausz, Erzsébet |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/ogula_vladimir.pdf |
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