Remembering, Forgetting, and Learning Amidst a Time of Extraordinary Rendition: The Guantánamo Camp as a Museum of Forgetting

From the U.S. Holocaust Museum to Cambodia's Tuol-Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the imperatives "Never Forget!" and "Never Again!" frame how we are to value and deploy learning and remembering about past atrocities.Memorial museums frequently work with the belief that if we get people to remember better and harder, if we expose them to facts, artefacts, and even experiential role-playing activities that convey what happened in terrible past events, we will somehow both avert the repetition of this past and honour its memory.This premise, however, assumes a certain calculation of memory and an overconfidence that more knowledge will lead to predictable and favourable results."Making people remember tends to assume that you can calculate their responses to their memories," writes Adam Phillips."It tries to engineer solutions," he continues, "when engineered solutions are part of the problem." 1 While our best pedagogical intentions often marshal the memory of a terrible past with hopes of inoculating people against repeating the worst, Roger Simon, asks us to be wary of the bonne conscience of the educator administering remembrance. 2For Simon, as for Phillips, we need to grapple with a self-serving calculus that tends to accompany our desire to pedagogically manage memory.Appreciating the uncontrollable surplus of interpretations unleashed by memory, both Phillips and Simon urge us to consider how learning and remembering actually exceed instrumentality and manufactured outcomes, for "where memory might lead -both what we might do with it, and what it might do with us -is unpredictable." 3 However, contrary to Simon's emphasis on the ethical-pedagogical force of memory, Phillips prioritizes the significance of forgetting amidst a time obsessed with memorializing.If we are to attune ourselves to the displacements, fantasies, and oblivions that memorial museums tend to renounce in the name of a calculated and forced form of remembrance, we need, Phillips tells us, to underscore "the time-lag, the metabolism, the deferrals of forgetting." 4 While not dismissive of memorials per se, Phillips provocatively asks: "After so many memorials it may be worth wondering now what a Museum of Forgetting could be a museum of?" 5 Phillips's question is intriguing on various levels.He asks us not only to consider how we mostly forget, re-write, and fabricate memory through our memorial endeavours, but also to wonder about the potentiality of forgetting for now (during this worldwide "memory boom"), so that the prevailing instrumental sense of memory can lessen its hold on our interpretative possibilities.Phillips's appeal does not seek to tear down the museum, as it were.Rather, amid a time when the rhetoric of forced-remembrance has rendered the enigmatic activity of forgetting into an

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