Section
Long-form essays on philosophy, politics, intellectual history, culture, and the conditions of critical thought.
Setting the niche perfume industry’s reified vocabulary of notes, pyramids, and status against the sensuous use-value of scent as it returns through the body’s own labor and memory, Sophia Dax-Kerr’s bilingual entries build a “third language” that makes the commodity’s smooth idiom stutter and, in doing so, reclaims sensation from the market that sells it.
ReadThe apparent dematerialisation of intellectual labour under artificial intelligence exposes a deeper contradiction of contemporary capitalism: as texts become cheaper and faster to produce, the human labour of interpretation, verification, translation, and dissent risks becoming economically invisible, even as it remains indispensable to the production of knowledge, cultural meaning, and public trust.
ReadWhat we call privacy is itself a cultural construction, shaped by the material organisation of everyday life; through the Iban longhouse and its contrast with domestic architecture in Kerala and urban Malaysia, this reflection exposes the ideological assumptions embedded in private property, individual autonomy, and the spatial boundaries separating personal life from the collective conditions of human existence.
ReadThe running body becomes a site of insurgent knowledge, reclaiming the streets from the apparatuses of policing, enclosure, and capitalist dispossession, while transforming physical movement into a collective practice of resistance and political self-determination. Against the privatisation of space and the alienation of human life from its ecological and social foundations, this text advances an embodied poetics of emancipation in which the individual body becomes porous to the multitude, revolutionary memory, and the generative intelligence of the living world.
ReadRose Bhaskar reads Los Angeles as a lived geography of American capitalism, where precarity and conspicuous consumption, racialised class experience and the mythology of individual self-invention coexist in an uneasy intimacy that continually unsettles the fantasy of meritocratic distinction. Through an interrogation of the survival mindset inherited across generations, she explores how the internalisation of scarcity and competition shapes our perception of others, opening toward an ethics of attention in which solidarity, ordinary pleasure, and receptivity to the irreducible complexity of human experience become ways of inhabiting a world that exceeds the demands of productivity and self-optimisation.
ReadRose Bhaskar interrogates the exhaustion produced by a political economy that commodifies attention, instrumentalises collective suffering, and increasingly delegates the burden of systemic crisis to those already dispossessed of security, time, and autonomy. Reclaiming joy as a practice of refusal, she advances a radical reconfiguration of political engagement in which the defence of interior life, ordinary pleasures, and uncommodified human connection becomes a challenge to the extractive logic of capitalism and its demand that resistance itself be rendered an inexhaustible resource.
ReadOn the political economy of attention as a system in which digital platforms convert collective affect, social antagonism, and the manufacture of consent into profitable instruments of capital accumulation. Tracing the entanglement of algorithmic design with the historically persistent dynamics of crowd behaviour, the essay challenges individualised accounts of digital dysfunction and calls for a structural reimagining of the online public sphere beyond the imperatives of engagement, monetisation, and ideological polarisation.
ReadThis essay explores how experimental poetics can unsettle fixed identities, disrupt habitual structures of thought, and reconceive language as an open-ended field of relational becoming. Its significance for contemporary art lies in its resistance to the instrumental rationality that governs both capitalist production and cultural consumption, proposing instead a poiesis grounded in indeterminacy, reciprocal attention, and the ceaseless transformation of the relations between artist, artwork, and reader.
ReadOn est toujours au milieu. We are always in the middle — between codes, identities, and meaning, in the dazwischen-sein.
ReadOn bodily co-presence, movement, and the conditions of political speech. Aleksey Porvin is Editor-in-Chief of The Rang Yan Review.
ReadFrom The Call of the Wildflower — on orchids, snapdragons, perfoliates, and the fritillary's strange charm.
ReadFrom The Home: Its Work and Influence — on domestic service, celibacy, and the waste of household industry.
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