A neomonadology of social (memory) production

The essay considers the example of the public memorial events commemorating the death of beloved musician Pino Daniele in the city of Naples in January 2015 as an example of 'social production', in this case of collective memory, such as theorized by theorists of social production and social cooperation addressing the relevance of the concept of the common(s) to the relation between economic (utility or exchange) value and other types of value (aesthetic, ethic etc). In as much as the production of value in digital networks involves the technological mediation of databases, interfaces and algorithms, the essay considers the potential of a revised version of German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz's monadology to conceptualize the relationship between the divisibility of data, the individuality of agents, and the common ground of the crowd. In particular, such attempts draws on the one hand on Gilles Deleuze's theorization of the monads in his work on cinema, and on Gabriel Tarde's economic psychology to elaborate a neo-monadological theory of the collective production of social memory as value in networked media.