A landscape of time in which events suddenly take the place of relief, of vegetation; in which the past and the future loom up together in all their obvious simultaneity; a place where nothing follows on from anything else any more and yet where nothing ever ends, the lack of duration of the perpetual present circumscribing the cycle of history and its repetitions.

Everything became softly amorphous, as if the china of the plate flowed and the steel of the knife were liquid.

(Social) space and (social) time, dominated by exchange become the time space of markets; although not being things but including rhytms, they enter into products.

The 'short term' has replaced the 'long term' and made of instantaneity its ultimate ideal. While promoting time to the rank of an infinitely capacious container, fluid modernity dissolves - denigrates and devalues - its duration.

The everyday establishes itself, creating hourly demands, systems of transport, in short, its repetitive organisation. Differences induced or produced by repetitions constitute the thread of time.

Let us take our mind off the space subtending the movement and concentrate solely on the movement itself, on the act of tension or extension, in short, on pure mobility. This time we shall have a more exact image of our development in duration.

Now you can see that it is a very tiny quantity, and conclude that gravity is a far, far weaker force than electromagnetism. If it were much stronger, we – everything – would all be in a big black hole together (and not know it).

The cenobite is, in this sense, first of all a total hourly scansion of existence, in which every moment has its corresponding Office or duty [ufficio], either of prayer and reading or manual labor. In the Rule of the Master, the “holy art” that the monk learns must be exercised “continuously day and night”.

People who move and act faster, who come nearest to the momentariness of movement, are now the people who rule. And it is the people who cannot move as quickly, and more conspicuously yet the category of people who cannot at will leave their place at all, who are ruled.

Roundabouts are designed to keep people away. The continuous flow of traffic around them creates a wall of speeding vehicles that prohibits access. While providing open spaces these island are meant to be seen but not used.

The alphabet is a construct of fragmented bits and parts which have no semantic meaning in themselves, and which must be strung together in a line, bead-like, and in a prescribed order. Its use fostered and encouraged the habit of perceiving all environment in visual and spatial terms—particularly in terms of a space and of a time that are uniform, c,o,n,t,i,n,u,o,u,s and c-o-n-n-e-c-t-e-d. The line, the continuum — this sentence is a prime example — became the organizing principle of life.

The relations of the cyclical and the linear – interactions, interferences, the domination of one over the other, or the rebellion of one against the other – are not simple: there is between them an antagonistic unity. They penetrate one another, but in an interminable struggle: sometimes compromise, sometimes disruption. However, there is between them an indissoluble unity.

1. The arrangement or disposition of people or things in relation to each other acoording to a particular sequence, pattern, or method.

2. An authoritative command or instruction.

Middle English from Old French ordre, from Latin ordo, ordin- ‘row, series, rank’.

These ambiguities, redundances, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, ( i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (I) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.