another novel about Work (Arjun Appardurai)

[Fiona Shnapple]

So how can I argue with people here who have never been on the Upper
West Side, never seen NYC, never lived here...if images that have gone
global, of places and spaces of nearly every block in and around here,
on Law and Order, on Seinfeld, making my neighborhood a Simpsons
Springfield, my works space a memorial and museum, a nostalgic image,
that they have no memory of, that they never lost?



He describes his articulation of the imaginary as:

The image, the imagined, the imaginary - these are all terms that
direct us to something critical and new in global cultural processes:
the imagination as a social practice. No longer mere fantasy (opium
for the masses whose real work is somewhere else), no longer simple
escape (from a world defined principally by more concrete purposes and
structures), no longer elite pastime (thus not relevant to the lives
of ordinary people), and no longer mere contemplation (irrelevant for
new forms of desire and subjectivity), the imagination has become an
organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of
both labor and culturally organized practice), and a form of
negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined
fields of possibility. This unleashing of the imagination links the
play of pastiche (in some settings) to the terror and coercion of
states and their competitors. The imagination is now central to all
forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of
the new global order.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arjun_Appadurai
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l