"Forgetting" plays an important role in the lives of individuals and communities. Although a few Holocaust scholars have begun to take forgetting more seriously in relation to the task of remembering—in popular parlance as well as in academic discourse on the Holocaust—forgetting is usually perceived as a negative force. In the decades following 1945, the terms remembering and forgetting have often been used antithetically, with the communities of victims insisting on the duty to remember and a society of perpetrators desiring (...) to forget. Thus, the discourse on Holocaust memory has become entrenched on this issue. This essay counters the swift rejection of forgetting and its labeling as a reprehensible act. It calls attention to two issues: first, it offers a critical argument for different forms of forgetting; second, it concludes with suggestions of how deliberate performative practices of forgetting might benefit communities affected by a genocidal past. Is it possible to conceive of forgetting not as the ugly twin of remembering but as its necessary companion? (shrink)

Most descriptive and normative theories of political identity can be plotted between two poles. At one end are accounts of particular cultural political identities, which are based on inherited and primarily homogeneous cultural elements. At the other pole are accounts of ‘civic’ identities, strictly political identities grounded in uncoerced consent to a set of laws, political procedures and institutions. My thesis is that to understand and to encourage the formation and maintenance of viable political identities within the context of multicultural, (...) democratic societies it is necessary to attend to the role that memory, and particularly memory of suffering and shame, plays in that process. Working through memories of suffering and shame is a precondition for developing the cross-cultural and trans-national empathy and understanding that are instrumental in creating stable multicultural, democratic nations and, eventually, a just cosmopolitan global order. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article critiques contemporary applications of the computational metaphor, popular among Silicon Valley technologists, that views individuals and culture through the lens of computer and information systems. Taken literally, this metaphor has become entrenched as a quasi-religious ideology that obscures the moral and political-economic gatekeeping power of technology elites. Through an examination of algorithmic processing applications and life-logging devices, the authors highlight the inequitable consequences of the tendency, in popular media and marketing rhetoric, to collapse the distinctions between processing and (...) judgment, storage and memory. Such distinctions are necessary for an ethical development of more equitable digital environments. (shrink)