Problematic Objects of Property – Form, Materiality, Politics

In contemporary societies, we witness an ongoing extension of property regimes to data, cultural knowledge, human reproductive capacities, rivers, plant varieties, ecosystem services, academic teaching materials, and research results. At the same time, long-standing objects of property, such as land and housing, have been turned into chains of financial titles, such as debts and shares, that are linked to new modes of profiting and of everyday practice. In each case, the objects of property are newly delineated, transformed, and linked in favor of certain rights of use, exclusion, and income streams; they are also subjected to different forms of care or neglect. In this conference, we take the specificity of objects as a vantage point for understanding contemporary property relations. The world is not a passive material that can be transferred seamlessly into different forms of property. The (potential) objects of property follow a logic of their own that shapes the possible forms of owning them. While nearly everything can potentially become property, the peculiar materiality of things might also defy propertization. By focusing on the “problematic objects” of property, we envisage the processes of coding and re-coding property, the limits of property regimes, as well as their contestations. Our discussions are structured by these aspects:

Formatting and Re-Coding

What are the types of objectification that create the possibility to commodify, financialize or make common use of given or novel objects of property? How are different types of objectification linked to each other, transformed, and combined in order to fit different logics of exclusion or inclusion, control or autonomy, profitability and use?

Material Limits of Property

How does the materiality of property objects support or challenge their specific property status? How is the materiality of property objects linked to normative accounts of the limits of property? What material properties are foregrounded or ignored in the reconfiguration and creation of property?

Politics of Propertization

The coding and formatting of property objects is part of processes such as financialization, digitalization, ecological transformation, the reorganization of social reproduction and public infrastructures, and it is linked to contested divisions between public and private, distributions of use and gain, and access and exclusion. Counter-movements such as municipalization, cooperative production, and ecological conversion aim to re-format property objects and mobilize their material affordances against established property regimes. How is the materiality of the objects of property at stake in the politics of propertization and re- or de-propertization?