Image-Transaction

Abstract

In Knowing and the Known, a collaboration between pragmatist philosopher John Dewey and sociologist Arthur Bentley, the authors propose a ‘transactional view’ of the vital entanglement of humans, things and ‘milieu’ as cultural, social, commercial and individual parties. 1 Although developed in 1949, twenty years before the first email message was sent over the ARPANET (Figure 1), the ‘transactional view’ with its insistence on the transactional nature of human life (somatic, individual and social) as a continuous process of exchange with human and non-human partakers allows us to understand the condition of the image and of the human within digital networks in a new light.