Genocide memory, digital cultures, and the aesthetization of violence

Abstract

As teachers, scholars, and heritage professionals, we are in the business of aestheticizing violence. We might be writing yet another essay about the Holocaust, putting together an exhibit about World War I, helping produce a film about Dafur, or organizing live twitter coverage of President Obama’s visit to Yad Vashem.1 On all these occasions, we are engaging with violent pasts that we find disturbing, fascinating, and intellectually challenging. We are attracted to “the dark side” of history and are assuming, for good reasons, that our audiences share our curiosities and values.2 After all, we hope that our choice of metaphors, narratives, iconographies, and multi-media assemblages trigger self-critical reflections about humanity’s predilection for self-destruction. We want to help build collective fantasies of belonging that will not be implicated in the kind of mass crimes that our ancestors and contemporaries have committed on a regular basis. To that end, we render violence bearable, intriguing, and repellent—by aestheticizing it. The persistence of cultural engagement with violent pasts has resulted in a pervasive, selfreflexive memory landscape and mediascape, especially but by no means exclusively in the West. But the seemingly firmly established discourses and institutions, all part of the rush to memory since the 1970s, are up against significant challenges. Popular and academic memory cultures, including their self-critical late twentieth-century renditions, are the product of linear media and the catastrophes of the World War II era. Holocaust memory, still the backbone of our official collective memories, is a creature of film, television, the print media, and an extensive museum and memorial infrastructure. Moreover, Holocaust memory was crafted by generations whose members either experienced World War II violence firsthand or had emotional ties to people who did. Consequently, our memory culture has to come to terms with two powerful, irreversible trends. People with autobiographical investment in World War II memory are quickly disappearing, and the linear media of the 1980s are rapidly reframed and displaced by interactive digital networks. The contents and structures of our collective memories of violence will have to change. The challenges directed at conventional twentieth-century formats of collective remembrance and our attempts to respond to them are nicely captured in an innovative initiative of the University of Southern California (USC) Visual Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles, probably the most digitally advanced institution of Holocaust memory in the world. For a number of years, the Shoah