The founding grant of Stanford University dictates that this institution's expansive acreage can never be sold. The university approached bankruptcy in the 1930s until an engineering professor turned provost found a way to make money off the Stanford's generous land endowment after all. Unable to sell it because of the founder's wishes, he decided to rent it and in the 40s the Stanford industrial Park was born just south of the main quadrangle. Books have been written explaining this decision as the origin of Silicon Valley and Frederick Terman, our innovative provost, is often referred to as its grandfather.
When capital shifts from investing in spaces of extraction and production (factories) to spaces interested in the new kinds of profits available in financial transactions themselves a new kind of abstraction is at hand that is far from an academic matter. This fictitious capital or finance capital is absolutely disinterested in content, which becomes a mere marketing pretext, and is now solely concerned with the transformation of land into that which by definition has no use-value.
Today this process is synonymous with Silicon Valley, if not globalization itself: faced with the saturation of foreign markets, every region abandons that older industrial kind of production, along with its factories and trained workforce, and takes flight to the more profitable ventures of land speculation. The latter is oriented strictly to the expectation of future value. The goal of production no longer lies in any one specific market, or any specific set of social or individual needs, but rather the free-floating state of strictly performing (abstract, mindless, generic, contentless, bodyless) money relationships. The structural features of this new 'futures' market includes, on the one hand, a frenzied search for more profitable investments, and on the other, a planned obsolescence, disposability, and disinterestedness. Perhaps we have here a historical context for what is anthropomorphized as borderline personality disorder and has its earliest characterization in Frank Oz's "Tinman" (1939). Was all this already available to us to read into last month's blockbuster, Ironman? You let me know.
Of course, on entre city hope springs eternal. And leave it to the ever-positive Emily to cheer up my day once again by sending me this video. For let us never forget that there was not only the tinman in the Wizard of Oz, there was also the lion. Please go here and watch.
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