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The Stranger to Time: What a Collector Stands for in a Hurried Society

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Abstract

City-dwellers who are threatened by the risk of natural or social disasters are in search of safer houses. Each attempt to satisfy their need for safety, however, turns into another version of the security problem; so much so that, escaping from risk itself turns into different (yet nevertheless more powerful) risks. The film 10 to 11 (2009) focuses on the socio-spatial conflict between a stranger and his neighbours who are anxious about a possible earthquake risk in Istanbul. Mithat, the protagonist of the film, is a stranger not only to place but essentially to time. He lives within time and understands place as an essential means loaded by temporal experiences and memories. This paper deals with the multiple dichotomies between time and memory, between risk and fear, between aesthetics and security, and between attachment and profit in the context of urban transformation. The stranger, who is analysed for the first time as a temporal being in this paper, is discussed using Zygmunt Bauman’s concepts of uncertainty and liquid modernity, Richard Sennett’s capitalism, Ulrich Beck’s risk society, Frank Furedi’s culture of fear, Stephen Bertman’s hurried culture, Elias Canetti’s death, Giorgio Agamben’s forgotten and gone, Svetlana Boym’s nostalgia, and Halbwachs, Assmann, Connerton, and Arendt’s memory, as well as around the temporal spaces of museums, bibliopoles, antique shops, and cemeteries.

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Notes

  1. There are two types of land which are mainly targeted by these projects: the ‘historic centres’ and the ‘suburban areas’ (Perousé 2011: 368f.).

  2. 10 to 11, directed by Pelin Esmer, is a Turkish, French, and German co-production. Nothing is in a hustle and bustle in this film. Similarly, the camera is not in a rush. Dialogues are short and simple. Acting is natural, artless, and literal. It is a minimalist film that follows on the same path that Nuri Bilge Ceylan paved.

  3. Perhaps that is why the apartment is named Emniyet, a Turkish word meaning “safety”.

  4. According to Orhan Pamuk, real museums are places where accumulation is not transformed into demonstration (2009). Real museums are naturally fictionalised by modest collectors. This notion of real museums, which Pamuk indicates, corresponds to Mithat’s flat and his personality.

  5. This quote is a reference to Charles Baudelaire’s poem, ‘Anywhere out of the World’ (N’importe oú hors du monde) in “Paris Spleen” (Le Spleen de Paris). The original text: Il me semble que je serais toujours bien lá oú je ne suis pas” (It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not) (Baudelaire 1968: 83).

  6. “The more things change, the more they stay the same”. This epigram, written by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, a journalist and novelist, was published in 1849 in the journal Les Guêpes (The Wasps).

  7. “But where what saves grows, there also grows danger” (Baudrillard 1996: 49). This quotation refers to the point at which Jean Baudrillard disagrees with Friedrich Holderlin, a German lyric poet. According to Holderlin, ‘Da, wo die Gefahr wächst, wächst das Rettende auch’ [But where there is danger, there grows also what saves].

  8. This metaphoric expression is inspired by Leibniz’s theory of the Monad. According to Leibniz, “each bit of matter is not merely infinitely divisible, as the ancients already realized, but is even actually subdivided, every piece into further pieces, each of which has some motion of its own. Otherwise it would be impossible that each bit of matter could express the whole universe… Every bit of matter can be conceived as a garden full of plants or a pond full of fish. But each branch of the plant, each member of the animal, each drop of its bodily fluids, is also such a garden or such a pond” (Rescher 2013: 25f.), (Paragraphs 65 and 67 in “Monadology”).

  9. Perhaps it is for this reason that Mithat gives ear to the sounds and voices of the city, whereas the apartment dwellers focus more on what they see.

  10. “Every soul shall have a taste of death,” which is a verse that is repeated three times (Surat ‘Ali’Imran [verse 185], Surat Al-’Anbiya’ [verse 35], and Surat Al-’Ankabut [verse 57]) in the Quran, is written on the entrance gates of cemeteries in Istanbul. Inhabitants in the city see this verse everyday.

  11. A Latin phrase which means, “remember that you will die”.

  12. Another Latin phrase which means “remember to live”.

  13. “How dated everything is here! Not old, ancient, antique, or even old-fashioned, but dated!” (Brodsky 1986: 414; Pamuk 2005: 215).

  14. In antiquity, the cypress tree was a symbol of death, because it no longer grows after it has been cut down (Becker 2000: 77).

  15. Kundera also deals with the future in a negative sense: according to him, “the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear” (1996: 4).

  16. Harvest the day!

  17. Gurbilek benefits from the book, Western Attitudes toward Death: from the Middle Ages to the Present (1975), written by Philippe Ariès.

  18. This is due to the fact that, according to the current legal regulation, in the event that a technical committee decides that constructions are unsafe and risky, what dwellers think and want to do about the building becomes unimportant and null in terms of the law.

  19. There is no certain end to this film, so we do not exactly know whether Mithat left or stayed there. It seems to me that he will have to move into another flat in order to save the collections which are even more valuable than his own life.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr. Bülent Diken and Dr. Graeme Gilloch at Lancaster University for their guidance in improving this paper.

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Correspondence to Sertaç Timur Demir.

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Demir, S.T. The Stranger to Time: What a Collector Stands for in a Hurried Society. Hum Stud 40, 43–59 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-016-9408-2

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