The Time Regulation Institute: The transition from the Muvakkithane to the Institute

English (OpenAlex)

Western modernity has configured and consolidated its temporal category around linearity. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s The Time Regulation Institute (1961) offers us a farcical thought experiment on whether linear temporality can function in the lives of the local people in the absence of modernity in the western sense. To impose this imported temporal category on daily mundane reality, Halit Ayarcı establishes an institute. The Institute cannot regulate temporality of the local people as they need another category of time that manages to offer continuity between their objective materiality and mental processes. When Ayarcı dies, his protégé Hayri Irdal loses his spatial and temporal discipline and ends up in a cognitive bewilderment. His bewilderment may represent the collective experience too; therefore, this article claims that both suggestions of temporality, the one coming from the West and the one from the East, cannot function in the context of Istanbul in the novel.