It is impressive how, in Prasenjit Duara's paper, Asian regions are understood and presented—in the breadth of the world, not as objects with sharp edges, or compact entities of cultures, economies, and politics, as blocks of which the present and the global so often are still thought to be made. Reading Duara's paper, I was made to think of the successful Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki's recent grand plan for Singapore, the epitome of Asia today, a design conceived not as a space made of buildings, offices, and flats, not of blocks, but of flows—bridges and flyovers, “links,” as Maki calls them. These links are there and the most powerful part of the whole, making the city-state space by cutting through it, over the blocks, and along them. The links are empowered to make everything in the city-state face the open, and to move into the open. A skeptic, of course, may ask, “into what open?” Indeed, the “links” of Singapore, at least those already in action, often lead from offices, flats, and blocks into one mega-supermarket and then into another.

The notion of speed came to my mind first as I read the paper—the speed of political movement, of ideology, of development, the myth of speed, the fear of speed, speed continually increasing as well as the possibility of speed deceleration and sudden stops, the history of speed, the structure of speed. In Duara's Asia, I missed most of this. His Asia, the web of it, the model of interconnectedness, “inter-referencing Asia,” as he calls it, the intriguing plethora of extraterritorial metropolises, biopolises, fusiopolises, as he presents it (or “Disney Land with the death penalty,” as William Gibson might call it), the nebula, in all the intensity and sophistication of Duara's paper, to me, is not much else but floating. No gears shifting.

I can hear too much clicking in this history, the steady rhythm that makes machine owners happy, but that, to me, at one moment becomes uninteresting, at another boring, and yet at another scary.