Peer-reviewed conference paper presented at "Image as Vortex: An Interdisciplinary Conference on the Question of what an Image is by examining what it does" -- University of Oxford, 18th June 2016, 09:30 AM -16:00 PM, Headley Lecture Theatre, The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Beaumont St, Oxford, OX1 2PH:

The imaginary character of property relations in networked environments as well as the proprietary character of image production constitutes a dualism of the commodity and surveillance character of images. The charismatic performance of a self re-authenticates the image that is alienated from its object on the basis of the redundancies of its relational value; in return the image generates the consistency of a self that is in a permanent crisis due to the fugitive character of ownership of one’s own image under the conditions of constant self-surveillance.

The social synthesis of imaginary property oscillates between its two functions: Inasmuch as imaginary property results from a continuity of primitive accumulation, it is a real abstraction. The thing becomes an image by abstracting its use value and subjecting the alienated self to the regime of the market. But in imaginary property there is also the opposite movement, that of an immersion into the abstract reality of surveillance: the image becomes a thing due to the extraction of its relational value, while the self shifts from an alienated subject into an empathic object.

Imaginary property fills a gap between real and imaginary, constituted by the anti-optical character of visual experience for which Carl Einstein coined the term “transvisuality.” In the late 1930s Einstein mapped it as hallucinatory, opposed to the territories of perception and cognition where the rationalisation of the images of the world takes place and where a standardized continuity is generated. In certain ways the transvisual could be understood as the counter concept to Freud’s unconscious. For Einstein it is a mythological space that is “optically underdetermined.” In this paper i will argue, that today, by the concept of imaginary property, transvisuality reunifies both, the commodity and the surveillance character of the contemporary image as absent presence and present absence.