Capital still feeds.
Nations are still imagined.
Identities are now curated.
From factory smoke to fibre optics — theory is not past. It is present tense.
From Factory Smoke to Fibre Optics
Labourers we are —
white collar, blue collar,
calloused hands or flickering screens —
across centuries that refuse to rest.
From the nineteenth to the twenty-first,
Karl Marx rises again
through factory smoke and fibre optics:
“Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like,
only lives by sucking living labour…”
And somewhere in the glow
of our laptops at midnight,
we feel the bite.
The factory has changed its walls.
The vampire has learned new routes.
But the hunger remains.
Let us give theory
a pulse,
a tremor,
a lyric.
Here comes Jacques Derrida,
whispering that language
is never whole —
only traces,
only gaps,
only silences
stitched into the blankets
we call certainty.
Every word carries
its own undoing.
Culture.
Carved in temple stone,
painted on stage faces,
braided into rituals.
But even stone remembers erasures.
“Culture is a whole way of life,”
declares Raymond Williams
and so it is:
Kathakali’s painted gaze,
Margamkali’s circling grace,
Mangalamkali’s rhythm.
Sadya blooming on banana leaves,
biriyani fragrant with migrations,
kalluputtu rising like memory.
Dress.
Accent.
Makeup.
Education.
All of it — culture.
All of it — contested.
Nations shimmer like heat above asphalt.
“Nation is an imagined community,”
murmurs Benedict Anderson,
and we print ourselves into belonging.
From ink to television light
to pixel and algorithm,
the nation flickers
always mediated,
always rehearsed.
The 1990s arrived like thunder:
liberalisation,
walls collapsing,
red flags lowered,
borders redrawn.
Routes multiplied.
Homes shifted.
Identities packed and unpacked.
At the turn of the century,
Zygmunt Bauman spoke of "liquid modernity" ,
“Thrown into a vast open sea with no navigation charts,
the marker buoys sunk and barely visible,
we have only two choices:
to rejoice in the breathtaking vistas of discovery
or tremble in fear of drowning.”bonds melting,
certainties dissolving,
solid futures turning fluid.
Now we scroll through
echo chambers of belonging,
tribes curated by algorithms,
flags waving inside glass screens.
Neo-liberal nationalisms bloom
in the glow of notifications.
Who am I?
Who are you?
Who are we?
Once declared autonomous,
stable, essential.
Now we speak of intersections,
of entanglements,
of bodies porous to history and species,
of selves reinvented
with every login.
From homo sapiens
to homo economicus
to homo authenticus
branding the self,
tracking the self,
curating the self.
Second-order selves emerge
simulated,
hyperreal,
hovering between flesh and data.
Labourers still
but now of attention,
of emotion,
of clicks.
Marx still speaks.
The vampire still feeds.
But we mutate.
Endless,
formless,
shapeless
a species in revision,
writing and rewriting itself
through theory,
through labour,
through language
that never fully closes.
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