Memory Degree Xerox

As memory becomes more and more “commodified” (and we should be conscious of the word’s etymological associations, i.e. “convenient” from the Latin), the dialectic between forgetting and remembering is rendered …. what? Obsolete? Impossible? Undesirable? Or is it, perhaps, the inability to forget that prompts this system’s obsession with “keeping track of things?” The system has produced Memory Degree Xerox as an immune response to Archive Fever. However, do not the symptom and the cure both resemble the vicious circle of pseudo-Hegelian dialectics? That is: the more infected the system becomes with “archive fever” the more it must rely on prosthetic forms of memory or “memory degree xerox?” This is to say that no break ever occurs between the two supposedly opposed fields of the Archive and of Memory.