The tension that is central in much of this book is the tension between a spatialized ordering principle seen by many to be central to modernity, and a sense of fluidity and mobility emphasized by others. Following Foucault, many commentators have focused on the rise of surveillance and discipline in modernity. The modern world, they argue, is one in which new constructions of space and time have functionalized and rationalized everyday life. Thus Henri Lefebvre notes how modern time has been abstracted and rationalized. Before modernity, he argues, time was etched into life like markings in a tree. With the coming of modernity, however, time becomes separated from life and nature and is instead a property of measurements—an abstraction. James Scott’s critique of high modernity emphasizes the spatial ordering of society. His argument is that high modernity has been characterized by a particular way of seeing, which sought to impose order on the chaos of life. The straight lines of trees in modern forestry and the grand plans of Brasilia and New Delhi are all examples of this. At the heart of the project of modernity for Scott is a process of legibility, making the chaotic and localized world of the premodern intelligible by imposing order on it—by replacing the “view from somewhere” and the kind of practical knowledge he calls metis with the “view from nowhere,” which comes with rationality and science.