The Unbearable Lightness of Property - alastairhudson.com

At one level it is an egalitarian mission whereas at another it is project which hopes to
enrich us all without requiring us to pay for it.
CONCLUSION
The question of perception and of relativity
The perception of property which is maintained by property law, that of the tangible
object in space, is only possible as a relic of a time when perception was understood
as emanating from the individual. As Husserl put that viewpoint:
‘If walking begins, all worldly things therefore continue to appear to me to be
orientated about my phenomenally stationary, resting organism. That is, they
are orientated with respect to here and there, left and right, etc., whereby a
firm zero of orientation persists, so to speak, as absolute here.’
As Virilio says, this opinion of Husserl’s was written in 1934 before our perception of
the world changed; that is, before Einstein’s relativity and space travel explained to us
how our perceptions are based on phenomena which are in fact relative and not
absolute. 154
The nature of property as understood by property law must similarly be understood as
being relative to other social forces. It must be understood that those forms of rights
understood by the law of property which entitle the rightholder to take a benefit from
property or to transfer the benefit which might be derived from property even if the
property itself is not capable of transfer, are very different direct property rights which
attach immutably to an identified item of property. Further, property rights which
relate to items of property held only for investment purposes or only for the value to
be derived from that investment differ greatly from property which is held for its
intrinsic value. Each of these forms of property are relative to the intentions of the
property-holder but, further than that, each of the types of right are similarly relative
to the purpose for which the property is held.
The perception of lightness
The central metaphor of this essay has been that in some circumstances property is
heavy and that in others it is light. By lightness is meant the ability to abandon
property by turning it to value or simply by refusing to be bound by it and the
sensation in the owner that title in that property does not connote burdensome
responsibility.
In this essay we have encountered three principal situations in which such lightness
was apparent and in which it was deliberately sought by the property owner. First, the
cosmopolitans who organise their businesses by using franchising operations so that
their assets are merely the contracts they create with manufacturers, their property is
154 Virilio, Polar Inertia, London, Sage, 2000; L’Inertia Polare, Paris, Bourgois, 1990.
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