ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the way that sight, both real and metaphoric, dominates the persuasive and rhetorical aspects of property. The most obvious and prosaic way to see property, of course, is to go and look. But one step away from that is to see property in pictorial representations. A notable example is a property metaphor in rather common usage: the analogy of property to a "bundle of sticks" —that is, a kind of visible, physical entity made up of other visible entities. The idea informing the metaphor is that property is not a single unitary thing but rather a group of rights, some of which may be added or removed under appropriate conditions. In property, vision and visual metaphor are essential modes of persuasion in the ways that human beings think they can and should interact with their environment.
