ABSTRACT
Examined through a Cultural Political Economic framework of analysis as semiotic threads in the emergent 'economic imaginary' fully extended to the entire spectrum of cultural activity, these developments become linkable non-economic narratives we would anticipate being replicated across other fields. Returning to the potential agency for non-economic discourses such as architecture and its mediated representation in establishing new 'economic imaginaries', and not just mutely abutting them at given points in the political cycle, Clinton's reference to Gehry is revealing. However, if we develop several themes running through the work of Bob Jessop and implement them in the realm of the built environment, this 'mute' interpretation of 'image agency' is opened to a gradated reading of what we could refer to as 'economic agency'. The chapter presents arguments that illustrate the variegated mechanics by which architecture operates in the explicitly political realm, and the intricacy and complexity of its fuller inculcation in the symbolic order of that realm's contemporary ideological matrix.
