Rang Yan Review: On the Name, and On Letting Be
The name Rang Yan comes from the Tibetan expression rang yan (རང་ཡན), which carries meanings such as “to let be, to abandon, to treat casually,” “naturally expansive, naturally unfolding, naturally dissipating,” and “free and relaxed.”
We were drawn to the phrase because it names a disposition toward things that is genuinely difficult to sustain. There is something generous in it, but also something exacting. To let something be is to allow it to remain, at least in part, outside our control — to relinquish, if only for a moment, the satisfaction of knowing precisely what a thing is, where it is heading, and what it is destined to become. This has consequences for how we think about language, culture, and the political.
The left has always had a complicated relationship with the desire for mastery. It has wanted to understand history, to organize collective existence, to give shared life a direction — and there is something to admire in that desire: the refusal to accept exploitation and humiliation as simply given facts of the world. Yet this same desire becomes dangerous the moment the future is imagined with too much clarity, the moment a political project begins to speak in the name of people who have not yet found occasion to speak for themselves.
The twentieth century makes this difficult to set aside. Again and again, emancipatory hope became entangled with apparatuses of discipline, with political languages that demanded certainty, with the conviction that a better society could be designed in advance and then simply installed. The state and capital, for their part, possess their own versions of this same certainty. What James Scott, in his account of high-modernist statecraft, called legibility — the reduction of a complex, illegible social reality to a set of standardized categories that can be counted, mapped, and administered — describes a form of power common to bureaucracies of every political colour: the world becomes governable to precisely the degree that it becomes legible.
We do not think the answer is withdrawal from collective life. We need solidarity, organization, institutions, material transformation. People need housing, healthcare, education, time, dignity, and the freedom to shape their own existence. The question is what kind of politics can pursue these things while still leaving room for what cannot yet be anticipated.
It is this space that interests us.
A materialist attentiveness begins by looking at what is already taking shape beneath the dominant order: forms of life that have not yet found a language, desires disciplined nearly out of existence, forms of solidarity that appear insignificant until someone learns how to perceive them at all. History is crowded with things that seemed impossible until, almost overnight, they became ordinary. Giorgio Agamben's notion of potentiality — the capacity of a life to remain not-yet-actualized, to retain the power not to pass into any single determinate form — offers one way of naming what such attentiveness watches for: not the actual as opposed to the possible, but the possible considered in its own right, before it has been foreclosed into one outcome among many.
This is where rang yan becomes useful to us. It suggests patience, but of a particular kind — not passive endurance, but a waiting that remains attentive, that allows something to unfold without presuming, in advance, to know its destination.
The distinction matters. Leaving existing relations untouched can simply mean accepting the world as given. Rang yan asks something considerably more demanding: how can we intervene in the conditions of life while resisting the temptation to determine every one of their possible outcomes in advance?
Nothing unfolds in a vacuum. Every life is shaped by material conditions — by bodies and institutions, by history, money, borders, language, memory, and power. Freedom has never existed outside these determinations. What matters is the possibility of altering the conditions themselves, so that lives might assume forms previously unavailable to them.
We also inherit a world before we are given any chance to choose it. We inherit languages we did not invent, histories we did not make, wounds we did not cause, and forms of beauty that were already waiting for us before we arrived. Some of what we inherit sustains us. Some of it wounds us. Often the two cannot be pulled apart.
We inherit the most luminous layers —
and we spend our lives learning to accept the rest.
This is among the genuine difficulties of cultural inheritance. We cannot simply preserve everything, and we cannot simply discard everything. A living culture is produced through precisely this uncertain movement between attachment and critique, memory and transformation. Roberto Esposito's account of the munus at the root of every collective bond — a debt or obligation that precedes and exceeds any individual will — captures something of why inheritance cannot be a matter of pure selection: we do not simply choose what to keep, because what we inherit already, in some sense, has a claim on us before we have decided anything. Sometimes we keep something because it is beautiful. Sometimes we keep it because we have not yet found the words that would let us set it down. Sometimes we discover that what we believed belonged safely to the past is still, quietly, alive within us.
Perhaps letting be has something to do with this too: allowing an inheritance to remain complicated, rather than resolving it prematurely into either reverence or rejection.
Capitalism has very little patience for such complications. It wants to know what a thing can do, what it can produce, how quickly it can circulate, what it is worth. Jonathan Crary has described a contemporary order that no longer even tolerates the interruption of sleep, let alone the interruption of unproductive thought — a regime under which time is reorganized into schedules and attention is extracted as a resource, and under which waiting comes to be experienced as failure, slowness as a species of inefficiency. Byung-Chul Han, in a related register, has diagnosed a social order that pathologizes rest itself, treating any withdrawal from productivity, positivity, or self-optimization as symptomatic of a deficiency requiring correction.
There are moments when doing nothing is treated as something close to a moral defect.
We find this pressure everywhere: in work, in education, in cultural production, and increasingly in the very way people are asked to understand themselves. We are asked to optimize our bodies, our careers, our relationships, even our thoughts. The question “What are you doing with your life?” typically carries a second question folded beneath it: “What are you producing from it?”
There should be room for another answer.
There should be room for uselessness, hesitation, opacity, wandering, and unfinished thought.
The state has an appetite for legibility all its own. It wants names, categories, documents, identities, statistics. Institutions require information in order to function, but information can just as easily become a form of power in itself: a person becomes easier to manage precisely to the extent that they can be reduced to a category that already exists to receive them.
This is why we are interested in opacity — not as mere obscurity, but in something closer to what Édouard Glissant called the right to opacity: the claim that a person, a language, or a form of life need not render itself fully transparent, fully translatable into the terms of a dominant order, in order to be entitled to exist and to be recognized. A person should be allowed to contain more than the description assigned to them. A desire does not always need to congeal into an identity. A collectivity does not have to make itself completely transparent in order to deserve recognition. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, writing on forms of collective life that refuse the terms on which they are asked to become legible to the institutions surrounding them, describe something structurally similar: a mode of being-together that survives precisely by declining full disclosure.
There is a form of freedom that lives in the parts of ourselves that remain untranslated.
This also changes how we think about literature.
We have no particular interest in turning literature into an instrument of correct opinion, of political instruction, or of persuasion. Literature can certainly enter political life. It can disturb a language, expose an unexamined assumption, preserve a memory, give shape to an experience that had previously seemed impossible to articulate. But its value does not depend on its capacity to deliver a message.
Sometimes a poem matters precisely because it refuses to tell us what to think.
Sometimes a novel gives us something we cannot immediately put to use.
Sometimes a sentence stays with us for years without ever hardening into an argument.
This is one reason we want Rang Yan Review to remain open to difficult, contradictory, unfinished writing — texts that take risks with language, that do not always explain themselves, whose meanings may shift depending on who reads them, and when. We want criticism, too, to retain something of this same uncertainty. A critic can illuminate a work without closing it down. Reading can be a form of companionship: one stays with something long enough for it to alter one's understanding of what one thought one already knew.
Perhaps this is where literature begins to complicate the very idea of ownership. A writer makes a work but cannot determine the whole of its subsequent life. Once a poem enters another person's memory, it has already travelled somewhere beyond its author. A translation changes it. A misreading changes it. Time changes it. A stranger may find in it something its author never intended and could not have foreseen.
Literature has always moved this way: across borders, languages, generations, classes, bodies. It is inherited, translated, borrowed, transformed, misread, given away.
Capital would prefer to convert all of this movement into property. Institutions may try to fix literature permanently to nations, traditions, identities, markets, or reputations. And yet something in literature keeps escaping these arrangements. A book printed by a corporation can still become someone's private refuge. A poem written in one century can suddenly become necessary to someone living in another. A language that once seemed marginal can become the very language in which a stranger finally recognizes themselves.
This is why we think literature matters politically: it produces forms of relation that cannot be entirely predicted or administered.
Perhaps this is also what we mean by solidarity. Jean-Luc Nancy's account of a community that remains, in his term, inoperative — never fully realized as a single unified substance, never completed into one collective identity — offers a way of naming the kind of togetherness we have in mind: we do not have to become identical in order to stand beside one another. We do not need to agree about everything before we can recognize another person's vulnerability, imagination, or right to exist. A collectivity can hold disagreement inside it. It can leave room for its members to remain, to some degree, strange to one another — closer, perhaps, to what Maurice Blanchot called an unavowable community than to any community organized around a shared confession of identity.
We are aware of the irony at work here. A journal devoted to “letting be” is itself an institution. We select texts. We edit them. We publish them under a name. We inevitably make choices about what enters this space and what remains outside it — and in this sense we too participate in exactly the operation of legibility we have just described.
We cannot escape that contradiction, and we have no wish to pretend otherwise.
Perhaps Rang Yan is valuable precisely because it gives us a way of remaining conscious of this contradiction rather than resolving it. We will inevitably shape the space we create. The real question is whether that shaping leaves room for surprise.
We want this journal to be such a space: shaped, but not sealed; political, but not doctrinaire; attentive to history without pretending that history has already disclosed what comes next.
Perhaps the left begins somewhere near here — with the willingness to listen before presuming to speak for others; with curiosity about forms of life that do not yet possess a recognized political vocabulary; with the possibility that the people who will eventually transform our understanding of freedom may not yet know that this is what they are doing.
We do not know in advance what freedom will look like.
That uncertainty can be frightening. It can also be a source of hope.
We are interested in what might emerge once there is enough space for something unanticipated to become possible.
And so we return, finally, to literature.
A poem cannot belong entirely to its author once it has entered the world. A language cannot remain permanently owned by those who first spoke it. A story can cross a border without asking anyone's permission. A sentence can outlive the person who wrote it and find a home in someone that person never knew and never could have known.
Literature does not belong to anyone.
Literature belongs to everyone.
Perhaps that is the small paradox at the heart of Rang Yan Review: what cannot be possessed can still be shared. What remains singular can become collective. What begins as one person's voice can become part of another person's life.
We do not want to close this possibility with a final definition.
Rang Yan is not an answer.
It is a way of keeping the question open.
