Centrifugal Motion

Abstract

This chapter argues that beginning around 5000 BCE, alongside the rise of cities and written language, a new regime of motion came to dominate ontological practice in the West: centrifugal motion. Clearly visible in the Bronze Age (3500 BCE) and culminating in ancient Greece by 500 BCE, a newly powerful kinetic pattern of ontological practice emerged that descriptively and inscriptively relied on a centrifugal movement from the center to the periphery. This is not to say that the dominantly centripetal motions of the Neolithic period disappeared or were sublimated, but rather that they were transformed and taken up by another motion.