ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how property in land is being reformulated to facilitate the residential mortgage industry. I examine the history and political economy of the mortgage of land, from its doctrinally incoherent English law roots to its twenty-first-century digital form, arguing that that history has been accompanied by a shift in the status of the proprietor. Once the ideal citizen-subject within liberal democracies, the average proprietor today is a less privileged character, a mortgage borrower subject to the disciplinary power of the lending bank. With the move to fully digitised, securitised mortgages, it is increasingly difficult to say what object a proprietor of land ‘owns’, making Anglo-European ‘subject-controls-object’ theories of property incoherent, even on their own terms. Like property itself, movements towards its abolition are politically unaligned. The move towards an ever-more liquid mortgage market in the service of capitalist goals may ironically involve the destruction of property as we know it. The question that remains is how to theorise and work towards a different way for humans to relate to land.
