This article aims to introduce the concept of „Invecticity“ as a new perspective for social and cultural studies. It understands phenomena of insult and debasement, of humiliation and exposure as - cross-cultural and epoch-spanning - basic operations of societal communication. Due to their disruptive, stabilising or dynamising effects on social order, invective communication have the potential to unite and shape societies. This article subsumes such phenomena under the term Invectivity. The term includes all aspects of communication (either verbal or non-verbal, oral or written, gestural or graphic) that are used to degrade, to hurt or to marginalize others. Manifestations and functions of the Invective are not systemised under strict patterns but medially, politically, socially and aesthetically contextualized depending on the diverse historical contexts and complex constellations they occur in. Thus, they can only be properly understood as performative events which develop through the interaction of ascription, response and follow-up communication as well as by means of the social, discursive and media conditions in which they arise.
In this chapter the phenomenon of deliberate ignorance is submitted to a normative analysis. Going beyond defi nitions and taxonomies, normative frameworks allow us to analyze the implications of individual and collective choices for ignorance across various contexts. This chapter outlines fi rst steps toward such an analysis. Starting with the claim that deliberate ignorance is categorically bad by the lights of morality and rationality, a suite of criteria is considered that aff ord a more nuanced understanding and identify challenges for future research.
Individuals and institutions in societies in transition face diffi cult questions: whether or not to seek, explore, and produce public knowledge about their harrowing past. Not disclosing painful truths can be a conduit to reconciliation, as in premodern memory politics, but it can also mask the past regime's perpetrators, benefactors, and its victims, highlighted in modern memory politics. Using the transformations of twentieth-century Germany as a case study, this chapter argues that deliberate ignorance has always been an element of memory politics, even in the twentieth-century approach to Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past), with its emphasis on knowledge, remembrance, and disclosure. Profoundly dialectic in nature, deliberate ignorance can modulate the pace of change in periods of transition and preserve social cohesion, while simultaneously undermining personal trust and institutional confi dence. Turning to individuals' decisions to read or not read the fi les compiled on them by the East German's Ministry for State Security, it is argued that offi cial memory politics and individuals' knowledge preferences need not concur. In the public records and in initial results of an empirical analysis of individuals' choice not to read their fi les, highly diverse and distinct reasons for deliberate ignorance have been observed.
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