Challenging the skills fetish

The Fetish of Geopolitics

Gopal balakrishnan is one of the foremost experts in the Anglo-American world on the life and work of Carl Schmitt, and I am grateful for his response in nlr 68, ‘The Geopolitics of Separation’, to my essay on the thinker, ‘Decisions and Indecisions’, in nlr 67. Balakrishnan’s intellectual biography of Schmitt, The Enemy, remains, according to one eminent voice in the field, ‘the best English-l...

Photography and Fetish

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The Fetish of Technology: Causes and Consequences

The Consulting Arcade: Walking Through Fetish-Land

This paper presents autobiographical images of management consulting that are juxtaposed with a variety of historical images of modern capitalism. The method employed in this paper, montage[1], has been inspired by Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, which is a materialist philosophy of the history of modernity that was constructed with ‘utmost concreteness’ out of historical material of the Par...

Made in the USA: Rewriting Images of the Asian Fetish

My voice reveals the hidden power hidden within." A woman of Asian descent appears to be an entertainer, possibly a courtesan or geisha, wearing a pseudo-Chinese dress and hairdo; her hands are curled in front of her in an "Oriental-like" gesture as if she is dancing, and her head is tilted coyly with a cryptic smile (Figure 1). She gives a sexually suggestive expression and gaze but hesitates ...