Can you prevent the ghostings and erasures?
I am doubtful that ghostings and erasures can be prevented. I think the limitations of time and attention combined with the linear nature of narrative - the process of reading words sequentially, of scanning across the page - means that there will always be ghostings and erasures. We cannot recreate the moment, relive what has passed. The challenge is the selection, the recreation of the narrative as Hemings suggests and also Katie King in her book Theory in its Feminist Travels (Indiana University Press, 1991). This also seems to be exactly the anxiety Derrida encounters in Archive Fever. What do we do as scholars, historians, thinking people if we want to be conscious about our own engagements with ghostings and erasures?
And, of course, in my work, I also have talked with people like Bonnie Johnson who feel as though they have been erased. How do we ethically respond to those perceptions? How do we recognize our own complicity in the ghostings, in the language, in the archive?
And, of course, in my work, I also have talked with people like Bonnie Johnson who feel as though they have been erased. How do we ethically respond to those perceptions? How do we recognize our own complicity in the ghostings, in the language, in the archive?
This page comments on:
Where remembering and forgetting intersect with the internet (9 February 2014)
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