PhD defence Petar Odak: The affective remnants of the socialist past of twentieth-century Europe

On 3 May, Petar Odak will defend his PhD dissertation ‘Feeling Socialism Again: Affective Ambivalences of Socialist Legacies in the Context of the Experience Economy’.

State socialists pasts of twentieth-century Europe

Odak’s dissertation traces and analyses the affective, ghostly presences of state socialist pasts of twentieth-century Europe. He focuses on these presences within the vast field of experience economy, by analysing immersive museums, performative practices of historical re-enactment, and architectural remains.

Ambivalence

Odak looked into the bodily aspects of several case studies, and put them next to certain psychological mechanisms and political practices of emotions like nostalgia, hope, and fear. By analysing these aspects, this project detects and traces ambivalence as the fundamental affective attitude toward a relatively recent socialist past.

Affective capitalism

According to Odak, the affective curatorial and performative practices he is looking into belong to the broader context of affective capitalism. These practices are not only commodifying the past to profit from its market value, however, but they are also deeply invested in the political present, relying on the affective consumer-oriented trends of experience economy in order to frame possible political futures.