on Fetish

 The word "fetish" is used in different ways in psychology, culture and social theory. At its core, it means giving special emotional or symbolic power to something that is actually just an object or detail.

1. Freudan

object or detail becomes more important than the whole person

eg: someone feels especially attracted to shoes, or is very focused on the hair/fabric, or someone feels excitement mainly because of a uniform...

2. Cultural / Religious

an object believed to have special powers. The object itself is ordinary, but people believe it has hidden power.

eg: A statue thought to contain spiritual energy, a necklace believed to protect someone, etc.

3. Social/Economic Meaning (Marxist)

The commodified object looks magical..

eg: a phone might feel desirable, but one forgets the workers who made it, the factory, the conditions of working in valourising it. 

4.  Everyday Use

people having an intense liking for something.

eg: coffee, fitness

to summarise:

Fetish happens when we give too much meaning, power, or emotion to something small, symbolic or ordinary

German School and the French School of Critical Theory

I was introduced to the two schools of Critical Theory during my masters at Yale School of Architecture. While Peggy Deamer, our teacher mentioned that her course would be more to do with Marxist analysis of architecture (and that those who did not believe in it should strongly reconsider being in the course); and that there were two schools of Critical Theory - the Frankfurt School (German Tradition) and the French School - I had not quite understood what was the difference between the two.

Over the last many years after doing the course, the question took a back seat, and did not come to resolution even if I must have tried to relook specifically what separates the two in their ideological orientation. Finally last week, as a matter of time pass, I asked this question to ChatGPT and it gave me some of the most convincingly understandable response, which I want to note down here for my own understanding.

Very briefly, 

The German tradition of the Frankfurt School of critical theory has Marxist roots with strong engagement with capitalism and class. It is focused on the critique of mass culture that emerges out of it - how media and consumer culture shape consciousness. It is also concerned with the question of reason and emancipation - in other words "rationality". This is necessarily the Western notion of scientific rationality that developed through the renaissance. 

In summary, they analyze how modern society produces domination especially through capitalism, bureaucracy, technology and culture industries. Their work is generally systematic, moral-political, and reform oriented.

The French tradition mainly develops after the 1950s reacting against structuralism and classical Marxism. 

Their core features can be located in their distrust of universal explanations (like Marxism or Enlightenment theory) - in other words, the suspicion of "grand theories". They focus on how meaning, truth, and knowledge are constructed with a focus on discourse and language. They conceptualize power as "diffused", meaning, power is not only in the state of economy, rather everywhere. Furthermore they are anti-essentialists, with no belief in fixed "human nature" or stable subject. 

They examine how power operates through knowledge, language, institutions and norms. Their work is often fragmentary, experimental, and skeptical of political blueprints 

ChatGPT articulates for me that in simple terms.

German Critical theory asks:

How does capitalism and modern rationality dominate us, and how can we overcome it.

whereas, French Critical theory asks:

How do language, knowledge and institutions produce what we think is normal or true.

I came to articulate then that, the essential different between the two is that one emerges from the critique of mass, whereas the other from the critique of the body. The AI helped me lay out that the key entry points for the German and French theory  are mass/system versus body/micropower. In a more precise academic formulation, the German critical theory begins with the problem of mass domination, while French theory begins with the problem of bodily and subjective regulation. One critiques how power works from above and through systems, the other how power works from within and through bodies. 

Idea to Translation / Architecture in Urban Archipelagoes

Opolis at 25 / The _Opolis Lexicon

The _Opolis Lexicon

To be sure, one of the first impulses of the _Opolis alumni on receiving this booklet would be to look for the project that they may have worked on during their term at the office. Between images and texts, our eyes will roll between the lines that one of us may have repeatedly drafted on the computer. And in absorbing those lines, we may remember the discussions, deliberations, differences that have now settled not merely on these pages, but also in space. This book is much more than just a memoir or an intermittent archive, but a record of the collective efforts of twenty five years of “homing” by Opolis. In appreciating them, we may perhaps begin to observe certain values that now dwell in our own consciousness, our way of world-making.

To begin an architectural practice in a rapidly globalising city at the onset of a new millennium comes with its own challenges. The lure of the market, the risk of “missing out”, the seduction of shimmer, the lurch of luxury - have been the global forces that have fundamentally influenced most architectural practices during the last three decades of transforming India. As fellow participants in parsing this transformation, we may observe how Opolis lends its lexicon in attending to these forces with a contemplative stillness. The houses from geographies presented here, shaped within a forest of global choices over the last two-and-a-half decades, invite us to consider three vantage points, amongst others, from which we may choose to look back while thinking ahead in our own respective practices of spacemaking:

1. Holding the Ground

The ridge is not merely a topographical condition rather an philosophical indulgence in the works of Opolis. Many houses consciously sited along this line where two surfaces meet at an angle, do not seek attention; instead they firmly hold the ground behind them. Built as large retaining walls, the houses then appear to reserve the ground while descending us into a large open shelter on the other side. With no real “insides”, they become architectural acts of conservation. Could these be gestures of impressing oneself firm into landscapes of transition while bringing us to quietly contemplate upon the openness ahead?


2. Alignments and Deviations

Within plotted properties, the projects often establish a primary axis along which subsidiary spaces are distributed, offering a sense of order and orientation. This axial ordering is complemented by deviating roofs and deflecting walls that subtly resist alignment, introducing moments of departure within the plan and section. The axis, in this sense, functions less as a fixed directive and more as a guiding force—one that invites return rather than demands obedience. Does this dynamic tension between structure and drift serve as a compass for addressing the architectural contemporary?


3. The Open Alcove

By pushing and pulling walls, the houses offer different degrees of containment, while remaining open. Within the domestic schema, most projects demonstrate an architectural mediation of the western fireplace and the oriental tokonoma into an recessed room that is receptacle for the intermediaries of everyday life. Taking different forms within the inside and outside, these spaces become open alcoves, reversing the gaze within, and serve as internal windows into our own lived realities/lives.


When seen through the above lenses, the twenty-five homes and their drawings not only bring us together in our respective interactions with Opolis, but also revisit the values shared and learnt silently from the practice. Many of our thoughts got realigned to a certain modernist ethos assimilated by the practice from various masterful experiences from across the globe. The focus on showcasing only houses is not to overlook the important institutional and urban spaces that the firm has designed, rather celebrates architecture’s primary purpose of homing. If we must collectively look at these houses, and their drawings as an intellectual enterprise, we may be able to trace the distinct strands we carry ahead in our own practice. Ultimately, the compilation gestures to twenty-five years of professional companionship and familiarity - direct or indirect - that informs a small corner of our conceptual home.


- Anuj Daga