Other Selected Publications

The debate on the right to be forgotten on Google involves the  relationship between human information processing and digital processing  by algorithms. The specificity of digital memory is not so much its  often discussed inability to forget. What distinguishes digital memory  is, instead, its ability to process information without understanding.  Algorithms only work with data (i.e. with differences) without  remembering or forgetting. Merely calculating, algorithms manage to  produce significant results not because they operate in an intelligent  way, but because they “parasitically” exploit the intelligence, the  memory, and the attribution of meaning by human actors. The specificity  of algorithmic processing makes it possible to bypass the paradox of  remembering to forget, which up to now blocked any human-based  forgetting technique. If you decide to forget some memory, the most  immediate effect is drawing attention to it, thereby activating  remembering. Working differently from human intelligence, however,  algorithms can implement, for the first time, the classical insight that  it might be possible to reinforce forgetting not by erasing memories  but by multiplying them. After discussing several projects on the web  which implicitly adopt this approach, the article concludes by raising  some deeper problems posed when algorithms use data and metadata to  produce information that cannot be attributed to any human being. 

Esposito, E. (2017) Algorithmic memory and the right to be forgotten on the web. Big Data & Society 4(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951717703996

The encounter between Umberto Eco and Niklas Luhmann has a biographical  side (mine and of the authors considered) and a theoretical side. The  first one (although complex for the people involved) is easier to  describe, therefore I will start from it: from the situation around the  eighties in which exchanges between disciplines and between theoretical  assumptions were more open and more frequent than in later decades  (probably also because there were much stronger and better acknowledged  theories). 

Esposito, E. (2013). Limits of Interpretation, Closure of Communication. Umberto Eco and Niklas Luhmann Observing Texts. In Anders la Cour and Andreas Philippopoloulos-Mihalopoulos (Eds.) Luhmann Observed. Radical Theoretical Encounters, pp.171-184. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 

>>> Download chapter

Fashion, apparently irrational and whimsical, presents on the contrary a  non-random way of managing the limits of rationality in the relations  between individuals. Fashion is an inherently paradoxical phenomenon, as  was observed at the beginning of its diffusion in the 17th century, a  time that discovered, like the recent theory of organization, the  necessity and the strategic role of disorder. Fashion relies on the  stability of transition (everything changes, and this is the only thing  we can rely on) and on the conformity with deviance (everyone wants to  be original, and in this desire is like everyone else). Fashion works  combining these paradoxes and neutralizing them in the form of banality.  What can the theory of organization learn from the trivial mystery of  fashion, that prevails on everyone just because nobody takes it  seriously? 

Esposito, E., (2011). Originality through Imitation: The Rationality of Fashion. Organization Studies 32: 603-613. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840611405424

The  topic  of  forgetting  has  always  accompanied,  like  a  kind  of  shadow, the  theories  and  techniques  of  memory,  and,  like  a  shadow,  it  highlights the  latter’s  dark  sides  and  dilemmas.  As  far  back  as  antiquity  there  was actually a widespread awareness that in order to remember it is necessary first of all to be able to forget—to forget the countless singular and irrelevant  aspects  of  objects  and  events,  but  also  the  excess  of  accumulated memories,  in  order  to  free  mnemonic  capacity,  and  to  permit  the  construction  of  new  memories.  Already  Themistocles  replied  to  those  who offered him the wonders of mnemotechnics that he was instead interested in lethotechnics, an art that would allow him to learn and practice forgetting.  And  actually  the  various  versions  of  the ars  memoriae also  implied some  form  of ars  oblivionalis – albeit  associated  with  a  certain  discontent and with inevitable practical difficulties. The topic has had a constant echo in  the  reflections  about  memory,  as  testified  in  more  recent  times  by Nietzsche’s well-known argument on the advantages and disadvantages of history  (1874),  which  can  be  read  as  an  apologia  for  forgetting,  which  is necessary especially to enable action and prevent being bound by the ties of the past.

Esposito, E. (2008). Social Forgetting: A Systems-Theory Approach. In Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Eds.), Cultural Memory Studies: An Interdisciplinary and International Handbook,  pp.181-189. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.

>>>Download chapter