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A review by blackoxford
The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar
5.0
On Turkish Sarcasm
I have reached a stage in my life at which almost everything I read provokes memories of things I have done, many of them toe-curling in their naive arrogance. This is not always, therefore, a welcome experience. But it is also often instructive.
In my younger days, a thoughtless ambition led me to accept a position as a senior executive of an international stock exchange. This was a profound error - on their part as well as mine. I assumed the job would benefit by my interest in abstract thinking; they thought I would be good at corporate politics. We all were enmired in our own fantasies.
Consequently there were few happy professional moments. But there was one. I had written a letter to the managing director of the Istanbul Stock Exchange suggesting a meeting to explore the possibility for a joint venture in the trading of financial options. In response I was invited for a weekend visit. Right up my street I thought. There is nothing more abstract, not even quantum physics, than options theory; and I’d have two full days to pontificate on the subject.
My experience had been that finance-types tend to be part of their own unique global culture. They know they’re selling largely hot air - like options theory - so they tend to overcompensate by adopting an attitude of confident aloofness and even disdain for the non-financial aspects of human existence, things like art, and philosophy, and non-instrumental relationships, including families. I had learned the drill and was determined to meet professional expectations.
So putting on my finance game face, I walked out of Customs at Atatürk Airport and was met by a delegation of three Exchange executives and bundled off to a venue whose name I can’t remember but which could certainly rival the Topkapi for elegance. An elaborate dinner was served, organized, I presumed, for my visit, although this was never made explicit. Most remarkable, however, was that the space was populated not just with exchange officials but also with their respective wives and children, including infants in arms. For the rest of the evening we talked and ate, and listened to an excellent local ensemble and never once mentioned finance, much less financial options.
The entire weekend was a continuation of the same themes: families, food, and interesting conversations. A boat trip, a city tour, several museum visits, and a half dozen Türk mutfağı restaurants, but not a word about business. At my departure, the same little band which had met me, waved me off. Although we all had seemed to get along well, there was no further interest expressed by the Turks in cooperation. I wrote a standard thank you note but received no reply. Decades later it still wasn’t clear to me whether I had spoilt a potential deal, if deal there was to be done, or been subject to a very civilized, very kind, very enjoyable send-up.
Reading Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, with an excellent introduction by his translators, provides some clues which I think unlock the hidden meaning of my experience. Turkish sarcasm is a wonder to behold if Tanpinar is representative of the genre. It is witty, but gentle and civil, and although very, very sharp, it is not overtly disrespectful. It is obviously a highly developed style through which to communicate to power without incurring its wrath, at least when it is produced by the pen of someone as skillful as Tanpınar.
I think I might well have been exposed to this style on my short junket, with a similar intent to that of Tanpinar in The Time Regulation Institute, namely to put me (or more likely the institution I represented) in my place without the slightest impropriety, bad taste, or overt hint of malice. I suspect my hosts were as practiced socially in this as Tanpinar is in his art.
I now can see myself then as an avatar of Tanpinar’s protagonist and narrator, Hayri Irdal, an hapless senior executive of the Time Regulation Institute, which is eerily similar to the institution of international finance that I represented. Both are impositions on the ‘natural’ cultures of the world, by which I mean that organic set of relationships which develop their own reason (and reasons) without any central direction.
Like the eponymous Time Regulation Institute, the financial institutions of the world set, enforce and manage arbitrary conventions of value entirely in their own interests. Also like the Institute, these financial institutions are supported by a complex establishment of academics, social scientists and administrators whose careers depend on their political dominance. To achieve this, they insist relentlessly on the reality of their conventions.
I am struck, for example, by Tanpinar’s characters who write learned articles with titles like “The Effect of the North Wind upon the Regulation of Cosmic Time” and “Time and Psychoanalysis.” My financial colleagues were writing equivalent pieces about “Future Investment Opportunities and the Value of the Call Provision on a Bond” and “Empirical Studies in Portfolio Performance Using Higher Degrees of Stochastic Dominance.” None of these are benign much less objective intellectual achievements. As Hayri Irdal says, “You must agree that it would be unthinkable to describe things as they are.”
Finance theorists, just as Tanpinar’s theorists of time, like to claim that they have simply revealed truths which have always controlled our lives. By raising awareness of these truths, they maintain the conceit that they are promoting human rationality, and therefore the orderliness and efficiency of society. Their ideas may appear new, sometimes even foolish, only because of their unfamiliarity in daily life. Or so they would like the world to believe - mainly because it hides the way they make their living, which is by controlling the standards by which value is measured.
Tanpinar lays out the scam succinctly in his parody of time inspection. The accuracy of clocks is a legal duty of the Time Regulation Institute. Fines are payable for any timepieces that are registering either fast or slow according to the nearest public clock. If said timepiece is in proximity to more than one public clock, and there should happen to be disagreement among them, there are set procedures in place to protect the integrity of the system of time as a whole... and to ensure that fines are still paid. Quite simply: time, like financial value, is what some authority says it is. Any deviation is punishable without limit.
The situation is analogous to that of financial value as indicated by different methods of calculation in different markets, all of which are arbitrary. Goldman Sachs, for example, has a sophisticated statistical ‘model’ which it uses to value the options it sells to its customers. These customers are unaware of the details of this model since it is a proprietary secret. So they are actually buying the model not some associated options contract.
Ratings agencies have different models, as do government regulators, and other financial institutions. As a matter of convention all of these diverse sources are correct in principle despite their discrepancies from each other. Whichever model is sold the hardest becomes the industry standard and defines value... until its arbitrary conventionality becomes obvious as it did in the financial crisis of 2007. The ‘fines’ are paid by the customers.
Time and money. The more we become accustomed to the fixed conventional reality of these two somewhat illusive concepts - as presented by the likes of Hayri Irdal or Goldman Sachs, or... well me - the more fulfilling our lives will be. For a person to obey the minute hand of a watch or to submit to the iron laws of financial efficiency, is to follow “immaculate pathways, bringing him ever closer to the dream of eternal bliss.”
Time and money. Different names for the same spiritual journey toward social bliss; the nexus is in language. Control the language and one controls the culture. Tanpinar knew that this is what Atatürk was up to with his insistence on uniform ideas of time, among many other things, in his ‘modernization’ of the Turkish state after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The Chinese know this in the radical transformation of their society using financial theory which asserts a uniform calculation of the value of money.* The rest of the world suffers cultural deterioration largely in silence.
It requires a certain attitude toward one’s fellows to want to control language in this way. Goldman Sachs has it, as does Donald Trump, and Hayri Irdal who summarizes it well: “I began to look at people with eyes that wondered, ‘Now, what use could he be to us?’ and to see life as dough that could be kneaded by my own two hands.” I don’t think it’s too far fetched to say that my Turkish hosts saw me as having just this attitude as well. To communicate that directly would have been ineffective in educating me and likely offensive. So I was treated to a justly deserved dose of what I take to be Turkish Sarcasm. It has required more than three decades to decipher what they probably intended.
I think I’ll write another note of thanks, permits more apologetic than my last one.
*See for example https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1701948109 and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2355524027
I have reached a stage in my life at which almost everything I read provokes memories of things I have done, many of them toe-curling in their naive arrogance. This is not always, therefore, a welcome experience. But it is also often instructive.
In my younger days, a thoughtless ambition led me to accept a position as a senior executive of an international stock exchange. This was a profound error - on their part as well as mine. I assumed the job would benefit by my interest in abstract thinking; they thought I would be good at corporate politics. We all were enmired in our own fantasies.
Consequently there were few happy professional moments. But there was one. I had written a letter to the managing director of the Istanbul Stock Exchange suggesting a meeting to explore the possibility for a joint venture in the trading of financial options. In response I was invited for a weekend visit. Right up my street I thought. There is nothing more abstract, not even quantum physics, than options theory; and I’d have two full days to pontificate on the subject.
My experience had been that finance-types tend to be part of their own unique global culture. They know they’re selling largely hot air - like options theory - so they tend to overcompensate by adopting an attitude of confident aloofness and even disdain for the non-financial aspects of human existence, things like art, and philosophy, and non-instrumental relationships, including families. I had learned the drill and was determined to meet professional expectations.
So putting on my finance game face, I walked out of Customs at Atatürk Airport and was met by a delegation of three Exchange executives and bundled off to a venue whose name I can’t remember but which could certainly rival the Topkapi for elegance. An elaborate dinner was served, organized, I presumed, for my visit, although this was never made explicit. Most remarkable, however, was that the space was populated not just with exchange officials but also with their respective wives and children, including infants in arms. For the rest of the evening we talked and ate, and listened to an excellent local ensemble and never once mentioned finance, much less financial options.
The entire weekend was a continuation of the same themes: families, food, and interesting conversations. A boat trip, a city tour, several museum visits, and a half dozen Türk mutfağı restaurants, but not a word about business. At my departure, the same little band which had met me, waved me off. Although we all had seemed to get along well, there was no further interest expressed by the Turks in cooperation. I wrote a standard thank you note but received no reply. Decades later it still wasn’t clear to me whether I had spoilt a potential deal, if deal there was to be done, or been subject to a very civilized, very kind, very enjoyable send-up.
Reading Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, with an excellent introduction by his translators, provides some clues which I think unlock the hidden meaning of my experience. Turkish sarcasm is a wonder to behold if Tanpinar is representative of the genre. It is witty, but gentle and civil, and although very, very sharp, it is not overtly disrespectful. It is obviously a highly developed style through which to communicate to power without incurring its wrath, at least when it is produced by the pen of someone as skillful as Tanpınar.
I think I might well have been exposed to this style on my short junket, with a similar intent to that of Tanpinar in The Time Regulation Institute, namely to put me (or more likely the institution I represented) in my place without the slightest impropriety, bad taste, or overt hint of malice. I suspect my hosts were as practiced socially in this as Tanpinar is in his art.
I now can see myself then as an avatar of Tanpinar’s protagonist and narrator, Hayri Irdal, an hapless senior executive of the Time Regulation Institute, which is eerily similar to the institution of international finance that I represented. Both are impositions on the ‘natural’ cultures of the world, by which I mean that organic set of relationships which develop their own reason (and reasons) without any central direction.
Like the eponymous Time Regulation Institute, the financial institutions of the world set, enforce and manage arbitrary conventions of value entirely in their own interests. Also like the Institute, these financial institutions are supported by a complex establishment of academics, social scientists and administrators whose careers depend on their political dominance. To achieve this, they insist relentlessly on the reality of their conventions.
I am struck, for example, by Tanpinar’s characters who write learned articles with titles like “The Effect of the North Wind upon the Regulation of Cosmic Time” and “Time and Psychoanalysis.” My financial colleagues were writing equivalent pieces about “Future Investment Opportunities and the Value of the Call Provision on a Bond” and “Empirical Studies in Portfolio Performance Using Higher Degrees of Stochastic Dominance.” None of these are benign much less objective intellectual achievements. As Hayri Irdal says, “You must agree that it would be unthinkable to describe things as they are.”
Finance theorists, just as Tanpinar’s theorists of time, like to claim that they have simply revealed truths which have always controlled our lives. By raising awareness of these truths, they maintain the conceit that they are promoting human rationality, and therefore the orderliness and efficiency of society. Their ideas may appear new, sometimes even foolish, only because of their unfamiliarity in daily life. Or so they would like the world to believe - mainly because it hides the way they make their living, which is by controlling the standards by which value is measured.
Tanpinar lays out the scam succinctly in his parody of time inspection. The accuracy of clocks is a legal duty of the Time Regulation Institute. Fines are payable for any timepieces that are registering either fast or slow according to the nearest public clock. If said timepiece is in proximity to more than one public clock, and there should happen to be disagreement among them, there are set procedures in place to protect the integrity of the system of time as a whole... and to ensure that fines are still paid. Quite simply: time, like financial value, is what some authority says it is. Any deviation is punishable without limit.
The situation is analogous to that of financial value as indicated by different methods of calculation in different markets, all of which are arbitrary. Goldman Sachs, for example, has a sophisticated statistical ‘model’ which it uses to value the options it sells to its customers. These customers are unaware of the details of this model since it is a proprietary secret. So they are actually buying the model not some associated options contract.
Ratings agencies have different models, as do government regulators, and other financial institutions. As a matter of convention all of these diverse sources are correct in principle despite their discrepancies from each other. Whichever model is sold the hardest becomes the industry standard and defines value... until its arbitrary conventionality becomes obvious as it did in the financial crisis of 2007. The ‘fines’ are paid by the customers.
Time and money. The more we become accustomed to the fixed conventional reality of these two somewhat illusive concepts - as presented by the likes of Hayri Irdal or Goldman Sachs, or... well me - the more fulfilling our lives will be. For a person to obey the minute hand of a watch or to submit to the iron laws of financial efficiency, is to follow “immaculate pathways, bringing him ever closer to the dream of eternal bliss.”
Time and money. Different names for the same spiritual journey toward social bliss; the nexus is in language. Control the language and one controls the culture. Tanpinar knew that this is what Atatürk was up to with his insistence on uniform ideas of time, among many other things, in his ‘modernization’ of the Turkish state after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The Chinese know this in the radical transformation of their society using financial theory which asserts a uniform calculation of the value of money.* The rest of the world suffers cultural deterioration largely in silence.
It requires a certain attitude toward one’s fellows to want to control language in this way. Goldman Sachs has it, as does Donald Trump, and Hayri Irdal who summarizes it well: “I began to look at people with eyes that wondered, ‘Now, what use could he be to us?’ and to see life as dough that could be kneaded by my own two hands.” I don’t think it’s too far fetched to say that my Turkish hosts saw me as having just this attitude as well. To communicate that directly would have been ineffective in educating me and likely offensive. So I was treated to a justly deserved dose of what I take to be Turkish Sarcasm. It has required more than three decades to decipher what they probably intended.
I think I’ll write another note of thanks, permits more apologetic than my last one.
*See for example https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1701948109 and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2355524027