Frequently Asked Questions
What does "imaginary property" mean?
Does "imaginary" mean, it is faked or unreal?
Isn't all property imaginary? Why should that matter all the sudden?
What is the problem with "social networking"?
What is at stake in "imaginary property"?
Does "imaginary property" try to advocate for creative commons or piracy?
What does "imaginary property" mean?
"Imaginary property" is a concept that can be read in at least two directions: Property produced by imagination, or Images turning into property:
While the bourgeois conception of property has been characterized by anonymity and pure objectivity, today it seems to be the opposite way. In the age of immaterial production, digital reproduction, and networked distribution - property relations need to be made visible in order to be enforced. Property exists first of all as imagery and rapidly becomes a matter of imagination.
A contrary way of reading "imaginary property" could also be understood as questioning of possession or ownership of imageness as such: It opens up to the question: "What does it mean to own an image"?
Does "imaginary" mean, it is faked or unreal?
There is no way out of the imaginary. Not because the "imaginary" is equal to the the fictitious, faked or "unreal"; rather than the opposite of "real" imaginary relates to the indiscernibility of real and unreal, as Gilles Deleuze mentions once in his very few remarks on this peculiar terminology. "The two terms don't become interchangeable, they remain distinct, but the distinction between them keeps changing round..."
This could lead to a first and fundamental characterization of imaginary property: As a set of exchanges it is based on the impossibility to discern anymore what is one's own and what not. Such indiscernibility certainly rests on the persuasive power of the digital image which promises to instantly provide lossless and cost free copies, while insisting on the identity of the copied content. But more importantly, it introduces the urgency of a constant re-negotiation and exchange of meanings of ownership which remain distinct.
Isn't all property imaginary? Why should that matter all the sudden?
In a society after the spectacle, the networked world of customized channels of so-called "social networking" - the fetishized character of non-things or absurdities (the means of immaterial production) needs to be inscribed directly into the process of imagination (the labor power of the creative industries of late capitalism).
The actual results are massive expropriations and re-appropriations of both the actualized and actual production of images and imaginary values associated with them. This is what the hype of "web 2.0" is about, but it also characterizes it as the response to the impact of pirate networks or file-sharing communities.
What is the problem with "social networking"?
As soon as one uploads some film or footage to, for example, one of those predominant video portals one signs an agreement that basically consists of handing over the ownership (at least, if there is any, in legal terms) of these images to a corporate (or not yet-corporate) entity. The example of YouTube and Myspace - just to name the two most prominent examples - leaves no doubt: Obviously, "sharing" is not a problem, it is even officially encouraged and essential part of the core corporate strategy.
The problem is a different one: The problem is multiplication. How can we imagine multiple forms of ownership that accomodate images that are multiplied rather than being shared, divided and fragmented?
What is at stake in "imaginary property"?
Based on the supposition that images are the products of struggles for imagination, the project "imaginary property" sets out to examine the ways in which social relationships are configured, designed and performed in reference to the objects that are supposed to be owned, used and displayed as one's property.
What is at stake is not at all the relationship between the owner of some thing and the object that a person owns. The juridical forms do not determine the content even of what they make effective, as Bernard Edelman wrote. "The relation between the expression of the content and the effectivity of the content is ideological and that is this relation itself becomes a mysterious power, 'the true basis of all property relations'."
"Imaginary property" deals with the imagination, the practical critique and the re-design of ideological relationships. Relationships between me and others who could also develop the will to use and enjoy it, modify or alter it, play it or play with it.
Does "imaginary property" try to advocate for creative commons or piracy?
The sweet dreams about the commons, about sharing and caring, in an organic, unselfish, platonic and idealistic fashion, as well as the romanticism of the figure of the pirate, the digital small-time criminal or gentleman-thief -- that is rather fiction and fantasy and smells like a sort of petit-bourgeois projection.
The project "imaginary property" defies a vulgar marxism or "Proudhonism" which seems quite popular today. It is not about the "abolishment of intellectual property" in an utopian manner, let alone coquetry with far too simple slogans like "property is theft". In the last instance both, the advocates of theft and piracy as well as the defenders of a pre- or post-capitalist concept of the "commons" are either entangled with fantasies about 'true' or 'fair' conceptions of property or just turn a blind eye on the social and political realities.
What is needed instead, is "a critical analysis of 'political economy,' embracing the totality of these property relations, considering not their legal aspect as relations of volition but their real form, that is, as relations of production." (Karl Marx on Proudhon). Therefor we have to turn the platonic world of image production upside down. If it is allowed to use a well-worn metaphor: We have to turn off the head, on which so-called "intellectual" property is standing, and place it upon its feet.
Or to once again paraphrase Marx: Instead of an utopianism which is hunting for a scientific or technological formula for the solution of the property question that is to be devised a priori, science needs to derrive "from a critical knowledge of the historical movement, a movement which itself produces the material conditions of emancipation."