The ‘sites of oblivion’: How not to remember in a world of reminders

Abstract

While it is commonly accepted that forgetting may serve to accomplish worthwhile goals, relevant social technologies require detailed analysis. We examined the literature on the social practices of the collective inhibition of unwanted memories. Complimenting the term ‘sites of memory’ introduced by Nora, we applied the term ‘sites of oblivion’ to the areas intentionally designed to protect visitors from specific unwanted memories associated with the disturbing affect. This study proposed a preliminary classification of the ‘sites of oblivion’. This analysis identified four qualitatively distinct social politics aimed at evoking the transformation of existing sites of memory into memory-inhibiting areas. Each of these politics employs a specific psychological mechanism of memory inhibition and varies with concrete strategies to achieve the goal of not remembering. These basic high-level forgetting politics include: exploiting the natural fragility of human activity traces or destroying memorial sites, including various forms of ignoring (the ‘no traces’ politic); retracting attention from memory triggers to other intense stimuli (the ‘switching memory to’ politic); recasting ‘sites of memory’ into ‘sites of oblivion’ through functional replacement or reconceptualisation, including renaming (the ‘recasting’ politic); and the politic of ‘hyper-evocation’, that is, decreasing the probability of recall outside of memorial sites by rising the threshold of mnemonic response to those reminders that are weaker than hyper-reminders. The psychological mechanisms underlying the inhibitory mnemonic effect of ‘sites of oblivion’ are as follows: Pavlovian extinction, attention deployment, Pavlovian re-conditioning and Pavlovian discrimination, respectively.