Book Review: The Time Regulation Institute
Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s The Time Regulation Institute is a novel about a (fictional) Institute founded to synchronize every clock in Istanbul, and then in all of Turkey. The book is generally read as a satirical allegory of modernization in Turkey. The Institute is bureaucracy par excellence with its preference for the appearance of work over the work itself and its founder’s motto that “The Institute as a modern organization is going to create its own work instead of working on something concrete.”
Reading The Institute reminded me of a blog post about Ludwig Klages and Nick Land. The author was talking about Klages’ definition of Geist as the adversary of soul (Seele). According to Klages, Geist seeks to capture Seele by counting, measuring, digitizing life. Time is at the core of this dichotomy. Klages distinguishes two types of time: Rhythm and Takt. Rhythm is the time form of living experience; it’s regular as in breathing. Ezan, the call to prayer in Islam, is rhythmic. It occurs five times a day but the times are not fixed. They move with the cosmos. Takt, on the other hand, is punctual. It’s the tick of the clock, the beat of the machine, the sound of industrial production. It’s almost impossible to ignore the parallel with Tanpınar’s Institute1. Its primary goal is to ensure Takt’s reign over a society that for centuries lived according to rhythmic cycles of the sun.
For Klages, Geist is the desire to measure. The apperceptive cut that severs the moment. The Institute is the embodiment of Geist and the watch is its apparatus. So which comes first, the desire or the apparatus? For the Institute, the answer is the latter. The synchronization of time is not desired as something meaningful. The watch, as technology, is the source of meaning for the Institute. In this context, the Institute can be seen as a Kittlerian reversal of Klages. Friedrich Kittler argues that media precede and produce the ‘spirit’ that imagines it commands them. The Institute fabricates a narrative (“a modern well-ordered society requires synchronized clocks”) and a myth (“Sheikh Ahmet Zamani”) all based on the technology: the watch. There is no primordial will-to-measure; the apparatus produces its own desire. The desire requires a discourse network, and the Institute’s innovation is building that network around a device that previously lived peacefully inside Seele.
The book resists Klages’ prelapsarian nostalgia. The binary distinction of Geist as bad and Seele as good is not found in the book. The time before the Institute, the “old world”, is not pristine Seele. The main protagonist, Hayri İrdal, lives a life full of delusion, superstition, poverty and cynicism before the Institute. Klages was right in his diagnosis of Geist’s onslaught but was there ever a paradisiacal soul to mourn for? The orientalist idea was “the West is the world of Geist and the East is the world of Seele”. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, being a Turkish author, is in the perfect position to reject this naive distinction. Turkey is adjacent to both East and West while refusing to be assimilated into either.
The best explanation of Hayri’s character might be found in one of Tanpınar’s most famous poems: “I’m neither inside time nor wholly outside.” He feels like a surplus wherever he stands. It’s possible to sense this as we read the story directly from his mouth. He’s unable to believe in the fiction while not being able to face reality either. He’s a great example of Lacan’s “les non-dupes errent"—he’s the one who errs the most because he’s unable to fully get caught in the fiction. Even before the Institute, whether in the Spiritualist Society or among treasure hunters, he’s never all in. Halit Ayarcı, the founder of the Institute and Hayri’s benefactor, is his complete opposite. Halit knows the power of the narrative and the effect of discourse. With Halit Ayarcı, the story takes a post-modern turn. With him everything becomes volatile. He doesn’t care if the Institute stands on stable ground or not. For him everything is about controlling the discourse and regulating the optics.
If a modern, well-ordered society requires clocks to be synchronized, then let’s regulate them and fine unsynchronized clocks. Clocks-to-be-regulated immediately cease to be indicators of a modern society and turn into targets in themselves. Halit Ayarcı understands that the metric was always detachable from reality and uses the detachment as his business model. Thus he weaponizes Goodhart’s Law. He also understands that a societal system is not made of people but of communications. The Institute’s purpose is to perpetually produce communications. It only outputs more institute. The Institute, in Luhmann’s terms, is autopoietic. Ayarcı is a cynical dupe—he knows what he’s doing but does it anyway because he never doubts why he’s doing it. He’s cynical in his means but not in his ends.
Ayarcı genuinely believes the Institute is a facilitator of modernization. His problem is that he’s too caught in the fiction. From all this chasing the metric and perpetual communications, a new type of person is supposed to emerge. But the Institute’s only real output is more of itself. The Institute’s projects—even the most useless and excessive ones—are applauded by its members and supporters until the time comes to design houses for its members. Then everyone around Ayarcı turn their backs on novelty. They want something traditional, something safe. Hayri explains this to him: “They’ll support everything as long as it’s someone else’s money we waste.” The Institute is a fun spectacle until it reaches the place they sleep in. They refuse to be objects of the Institute. This devastates Halit Ayarcı and leads him to shut down the Institute.
The harmony produced by the Institute instantly disintegrates at this news. Halit Ayarcı disappears and everyone turns against each other. The harmony is restored when Ayarcı reappears and creates a perpetual liquidation committee. Thus the system metabolizes its own negation. The permanent liquidation committee is autopoiesis at its peak. The system produces a new component to keep going. Dissolution is a task that doesn’t need to be completed; you can always keep liquidating. The committee might be seen as Geist’s machinic repetition or the system’s autopoietic desire to reproduce itself.
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I’m aware of the canonical reading of the book through a Bergsonian lens. I’m not going down that road for the sole reason that I know nothing about Bergson. ↩︎
I like people who put their money where their mouth is.
Today I got an email from Imperfect. They noticed I linked one of their posts in my Junited page and asked me what I think of it.
This was the paragraph that really resonated with me:
I told them this is why I blog: to share and enable people to share their stuff with me.
Going back to their website to copy this, I read the paragraph quoted above. It’s agency-inducing. It made something click inside me: I make myself available but I don’t reach out. I say I search for “my” people but I expect them to notice and come to me. I don’t stay idle, of course. I put myself out there, link to their stuff, make myself available and approachable, but still… I wait. Months ago I wrote about a text-based community that I want to have: ‘This is not something that I might just land on. This type of community requires someone to build it from the ground up. “Somebody has to, and no one else will.”’
Somebody has to write that first email, and no one else will.