The Ontology of Motion

We live in an age of movement. More than at any other time in history, people and things move longer distances, more frequently, and faster than ever before. All that was solid melted into air long ago and is now in full circulation around the world like dandelion seeds adrift on turbulent winds. We find ourselves, in the early twenty-first century, in a world where every major domain of human activity has become increasingly defined by motion.1 We have entered a new historical era defined in large part by movement and mobility and are now in need of a new historical ontology appropriate to our time. The observation that the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first was marked by an increasingly “liquid” and “mobile modernity” is now something widely recognized in the scholarly literature at the turn of the century.2 Today, however, our orientation to this event is quite different. Almost twenty years into the twenty-first century we now find ourselves situated on the other side of this heralded transition. The question that confronts us today is thus a new one: how to fold all that has melted back up into new solids.3