My apologies for the slow blog week. I have been tirelessly working on the first two chapters of my thesis, of which I’ve completed about two-thirds of. Anyhow, now that classes have ended I can relax a bit and begin to post on the Howler with greater frequency (at least for the time being). Tomorrow I’m leaving for Atlanta, GA, and so I’ve been walking back and forth across campus in order to get my stuff packed and ready to go.

One annoying thing that I’ve noticed is that, perhaps as a result of certain purely “virtual” changes in the city’s political economy, all sorts of spaces are being transformed. More chains are moving in to “public” university space, such as a Pizza Hut and Taco Bell in the student union. For a while, there hadn’t been any major fast-food chains in the city, especially on campus, and so it’s weird to see these things appearing en masse. Moreover, multi-million dollar apartment complexes keep appearing out of nowhere, especially as the university tears down old buildings. This summer, the city government lifted a tax that was placed on Hollywood studios, which made it more expensive for them to shoot films in Ann Arbor. Not so anymore—and the virtual changes have entered into “concrete space” with the appearance of dozens of movies being shot on campus.

But the most hideously extravagant and indulgent piece of architecture is—by far—the new business school, which I am sure will contribute its fair share towards furthering ethical-universal maxims in the world-community. And it wasn’t as if the business school was, exactly, struggling for cash, unlike a variety of other departments on campus who are being slowly strangled to death due to a lack of interest on behalf of a certain class of financiers and technocratic university managers.

But even more so, the construction of these new, elaborate, and extremely decadent private spaces are beginning to cripple the public space of the city. On my walk over, for instance, the main sidewalk that is used to enter from student housing to the main sidewalk that cuts across campus is almost inoperable thanks to a long series of metal construction gates. The encroachment of neoliberal zones onto once-public space is even more daunting given the huge amount of snow we’ve received over the past few days, which is piled up alongside the street, where those who are excluded are forced to walk in the mud and even on the road to get anywhere.

On the one hand, these concerns seem very self-indulgent to me. It’s hardly the case that, because I’m being forced to walk in mud-snow that I’ve somehow been reduced to the status homo sacer at the cruel, murderous hands of neoliberal capitalism. On the other hand, though, there is something strange about detecting the way in which virtual economic changes take on such a concrete, visible form, especially as they begin to erode public space in favor of neoliberal “green-zones” across the city. It’s a tragic sign of the times, even as we seem to be entering into a new era of liberal Keynesianism, which will surely do all that it can to cure capitalism of its nefarious ills.