Circulation

Circulation, as a theme, is both life’s flow and the choke of repetition – a dance of eels and asteroids, rivers and rubber bands. In his 1955 Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin wrote, “People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them”, referenced in Okwui Okposili’s ‘Why’. This idea feels increasingly apt in an era where the past never truly recedes but continuously reverberates through the present. Similarly, Zygmunt Bauman, reflecting on ‘liquid modernity’, observed that the accelerating flows of information, people and goods dissolve the structures that once anchored our lives. This issue probes that entrapment: when are we moving, and when are we just spinning in place? When is circulation a channel for vitality, and when is it a pipeline for sewage?

Take Hana Pera Aoake’s meditation on water as ancestor. For the Māori, rivers pulse with mauri – a life force of their own. In contrast, London’s previously sacred rivers now act as toxic veins carrying industrial effluvia. Water, a symbol of purity and renewal, now often stands for everything we’ve broken, a fetid undercurrent of decay. This shift from life-giving to life-threatening mirrors our circulatory and exchange systems – able to sustain life but equally adept at recycling and multiplying rot. Aoake’s essay traverses the waters of disconnection, weaving together Indigenous epistemologies and late-stage capitalism’s commodified landscapes. She proposes granting rivers legal personhood, a kind of last-ditch CPR attempt for the mauri-less, and invites us to truly listen to the voices of the waterways we’ve silenced.

Listening, however, is easier said than done when the world’s noise is so “unforgivingly smooth”. Enter Aria Dean’s narrator in ‘The Line’, a man whose life feels like “a rubber band ball, melted onto itself with nothing at its centre”. He stands in line for coffee, but also for meaning, in a city where circulation isn’t just a mode of existence – it’s mandatory. Dean captures the oppressive texture of the modern city: slick, impenetrable and endlessly demanding. Authenticity? Intelligibility? Overburdened concepts. If water left unchecked stagnates, so too does thought when trapped in the circular economy of attention, where every idea is a remix and every remix forgets the original tune.

Even as we map these contemporary flows, history’s burden is still lodged in the pipes. In ‘Why’, Okwui Okpokwasili tackles the erasures that haunt us, interrogating the foundational violences of colonialism and slavery. She asks us to reckon with what we’ve inherited – whether we name it trauma or love, silence or song – and to envision how we might transmute those legacies into something productive. Her writing hums with a griot-like insistence, urging that we ask: what marks do we carry, and what stories are hidden in their codes?

Meanwhile, in ‘The Compulsion’, Tosia Leniarska tangles with the eel, whose contorted body is a metaphor for interconnectedness from geological time to the properties of salt. Her essay is a wilding tour through the material world, linking bloodletting, biofilms, fracking, and even the inhalation of iodine. It’s as if the natural world is trying to speak to us in a language we’ve half-forgotten, its persistence a rebellion against human hubris. Life, even in its most toxified forms, refuses to die.

If we are all implicated in one another, and circulation happens within and beyond us, how might our political systems reflect this? History is nothing if not predictable… Right? The losers of one era rise to power only to make new losers, ad infinitum. Biden gives way to Kamala, Kamala gives way to the TikTok bratocracy, but Trump trumps all. The fallacy of American exceptionalism ensures that even as the empire decays, it believes itself destined to defy entropy, a phoenix immune to ash. Meanwhile, the rest of us within and beyond the margins of empire perform a collective human centipede act – consuming, regurgitating and recycling the same cultural detritus in an unbroken chain. Well, I digress, if only for a bit.

Gary Zhexi Zhang’s ‘Who’s Afraid of a Multipolar World?’ shifts the lens to global power dynamics, navigating Cold War bipolarity, unipolar American hegemony, and the messy potential of multipolar futures. Zhang warns against the pitfalls of nativism and nationalism while exploring the idea of ‘negative cosmopolitanism’, where solidarity is built not on collective dreams but shared grievances. As Bauman suggests, “The flows of power may shift, but circulation remains the constant through which control is exerted”[1]. Even as the world shrinks into a globalised village, our divisions remain fractal.

And then there’s the disruptive projectiles that throw things off course. ‘Throwers (space-rock notes pt.1)’ explores throwing as both a literal and metaphysical act – from a man hurling a rock at a border wall to an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Nolan Oswald Dennis’s essay leaps through time and space, taking aim at the unpredictability of chaotic systems, the power inherent in naming, the uncertainty of seeing, and the possibility that ‘worldlessness’ might be a kind of liberation. The stone, like history – often perceived as static and solid – is always in motion.

So, given that we exist on this rock spinning through empty space, granting ourselves the illusion of progress based on time which is a construct in itself – what do we do with all this circulation? Accept it as inevitable? Resist it? Dance with it? This issue doesn’t pretend to answer those questions. Instead, it invites you to sit with them, to reflect on the patterns in which we’re ensnared and the ways we might reroute their flow. Circulation, after all, isn’t just about movement; it’s about transformation. As Deleuze and Guattari remind us, “flows are not determined by what they circulate, but by the ways they cut across and transform territories.”[2] Whether we’re talking about rivers or identities, eels or empires, the question is the same: can we find a way to move forward without simply spinning our wheels?

To do so, we should remember that not all cycles are curses. As Okpokwasili reminds us, love has the strange power to break loops and reimagine flow. Love, she writes, makes us “sway” and “carry on”, injecting a sense of direction into an otherwise formless orbit. Love is subversive precisely because it resists stagnation. It doesn’t ignore history; it simply reshapes it.

This isn’t the end of the world – it’s just another reboot. Everything now is fragments of what came before: the 50s rebranded as the 80s, the 80s as the 2020s, all politically marked by a similar neoconservative, racist and silly-hairdoed vibe. History is an ouroboros, chomping its tail like a chamoy pickle.

We started this Reader to feed a dying medium. Video killed the radio star. IG killed the video star. TikTok killed attention spans, and now we’re left chasing echoes in a post-literate algorithmic wasteland. Yet here we are, stubbornly rooting for the written word, not as a relic, but because it remains the most enduring medium we know for thinking, connecting and making sense of the chaos. Or, maybe, because it’s all we know how to do.

So, as this first issue of Serpentine Reader goes into circulation, we ask you to do the work of history: to acknowledge the loop while looking for the gap, to wade into the current and listen for what it might be trying to say. After all, as the saying goes, those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. And those who do? Well, they’re doomed to repeat it, too – but at least they’ll do so knowingly.

– Hanna Girma

[1] Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000)

[2] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Brian Massumi (trans) (Minneapolis & London: University
of Minnesota Press, 1987)