TIME and its OBJECTS  by Yesim Ozsoy Gulan

 The distinction between daily lives and performances of roles, actions on stage, performances through papers or speeches is constituted of a very delicate and breakable thin shred of paper. Our lives can express lineages of political action in numerous ways if they manage to end up in a paper like this or in a performance.

Time is not real, time does not exist, there is no such thing as time. (1991, 24)

According to de Certeau “users -commonly assumed to be passive and guided by established rules- operate” through their “everyday practices.” (The Practice of Everyday Life,1988,xi) Such practices according to him should not be considered as merely an “obscure background of social activity.” (The Practice of Everyday Life,1988,xi) Later on, in his introduction, he explains the possibilities of resistence to power systems within the society in such delicate and specific places and contexts which normally appear as apolitical and are considered as a given in a  matter of factly manner.

Along these lines I would like to assert that  a journal, a diary can be political. If it underlines the ambiguous line between sanity and insanity, knowledge and lack of knowledge and, in my case, between a “normal” sister and a “mentally retarded” one. Through my journey in my diary about my mentally retarded sister, Ipek and my relationship with her I gradually started questioning my life which in many ways coincided with hers.

My meditation on our relation clarified that I, as the “normal” and “clever” sister who studied and practiced performance art, share the same worries, explore or try to adapt to the same concepts of life with her who is the “mentally retarded” and the “abnormal” sister.I believe that finding out about and underlining these shared elements in our lives will enlighten the reader about their own similarities and shared experiences with Us. This in return will help us to understand the dichotomy between having knowledge and lack of knowledge or more simply, knowing and not knowing.

Time manifests itself into the visual world in numerous ways. Clocks, watches and calenders are some of the most used physical representations of time rendered through visuality.

It will also raise the question of the futile necessity of knowledge along with our firm but slippery faith in our systems of knowledge. In the light of these assertions I regard our relationship not as a regular one between two sisters but as the reflection of a statement about life and the society’s set values and systems of knowledge about life.

Time is not real, time does not exist, there is no such thing as time. (1991, 24)

Time does not exist yet we ceaselessly perform the concept of time in our everyday lives. Our life is a repetition of such a performance. If it were not for the watch around our wrists it would not be possible to know the difference between seconds, minutes and hours. There are millions of people in this world adjusting and re-adjusting their watches according to an announcement in a radio or a television program. Time manifests itself into the visual world in numerous ways. Clocks, watches and calenders are some of the most used physical representations of time rendered through visuality. This visual representation is in itself a social performance.

The concept of performance is a site of memory where certain forces, concepts in the society find their way, their outlets to become visually recognisable and expressible in our everyday lives. However the word solidification might suit this phenomena better since some performances might deal with the audible too. For example the concept of time finds its outlet both visually and audibly. We listen to the announcements of time, look at time and talk about time.

We can trace the visuality or solidification aspect of resistence through examining the performance of individuals acting in response to different power systems in their society. Wole Soyinka’s resistence to his imprisonment is an example of such a resistence from its outlet through a visual performance of the body.  According to Sarah E. von Fremd the hunger strike of a political prisoner and a writer, Wole Soyinka, is an example of the way individuals create their own miniscule resistence within a power system by doing something “other than what the system had planned.” (11) In that respect the shrinking body of Wole Soyinka reveals an individual creation, a “re-possessing and re-authoring of his own body” within the system by expressing the oppression, the violence visually.(9) The hunger strike is literally a performance of the oppression on the body. It is a visual representation of violence, a solidification, a performance of Wole Soyinka’s state as an individual in prison. In the same way we can assert that the visual representation and therefore performance of time in our everyday practices is a solid manifestation of the violence that time has over our lives?

 For Ipek time is definitely violent. It may be the most violent thing in her life because she cannot comprehend what time is. Her insistent incomprehension is understandable and perfectly “rational” if you believe that “time does not exist” as many theorists do. Our knowledge and certainty about the next hour or the next day, the next month does not work for Ipek. Concepts like next year or next week are especially hard to grasp for her. In contrast to her uncertainty the rest of the world’s certainty about time brings about violence and frustration in her life.

For Ipek time is definitely violent. It may be the most violent thing in her life because she cannot comprehend what time is.

When she wakes up she cannot be certain what time it is. You can explain to her what “tomorrow” is only by saying that “it happens when we sleep and wake up and it’s morning.” Consequently she has a hard time understanding why we have to hurry to go to a certain place or dress up an hour earlier not to be late. I believe that her frustration stems from the fact that the rest of the world is so sure and certain to obey these concepts of time. The ongoing performance of time violates her existence in numerous ways. In her case this violence is made visible through her repetition of the same questions about time and programs of her daily ritual.

This violence also appears in her frustration and despair in trying to get ready to go to a certain place or simply understand time and consequently the “to-be” existence of a certain future event in her life. Since there is no visceral reference to make she does not believe that certain events will take place in the future. Her disbelief manifests itself again in her repetitive questions about the time and the certainty of that particular event.

For her the clocks, calenders, watches are violent. However in her case this violence is drastically  underlined because the rest of the world insists on the non-violence of time and its objects. We deny such a violence and moreover we enact and perform the violence of time over our lives through our reproductions of the concept of time. We perform and therefore re-affirm, create the concept of time in our everyday life practices. We carry violent clocks in our hearts. We don’t recognise the metallic and strange tick of our clocks. We take them as granted. We even think it’s our heartbeat.

Through writing about my experiences with Ipek I came to realise that unconsciously I have adopted such uncertainties about time. As a result I regard my performances as parallel performances to my sister’s bold and insightful performances in her everyday life practices. My worries about time is on a much more minimal level but I share the same problems with Ipek.

Through writing about my experiences with Ipek I came to realise that unconsciously I have adopted such uncertainties about time.

First of all although I know all concepts about time like years, weeks, days, months I tend to mix them up as I am speaking about them. I almost always mix these concepts as the words come out of my mouth. If I don’t think about it I mix weeks and years, months and days. Apart from this little mixed up position and hesitence in my mind all my writings and performances involve the concept of time. Repetition is another prevailent constant in my performances and writings. I also regard my existence as inseperable from her existence. As sisters we are both a continuation of each other.

The continuous and flowing nature of time coincides with the spaces we share in between people. There is an ongoing continuous flow of knowledge and interaction between us and the people who share the same spaces with us. This is not to say that “we are all the same.” This is only an assertion to make clear that we do not exist alone and that our lives consist of this flow of habits, knowledge and feelings in between the solidified appearances of our bodies. However we usually like to believe that we are different from others and are too busy underlining the differences rather than the similarities.

In this respect I do not see my life as different and separate from my sister’s. If you, as the reader, have been feeling any kind of an estrangement to the concepts that I’ve been writing about my sister’s perception of life and time you should start questioning your own take on such subjects and your certainty about your difference, about your otherness to us.

As sisters we are both a continuation of each other.

Time is solidified and visualised most violently in historical writings where our pasts are seperated from our presence. Performance of time in historical texts underline one of the most fierce expressions of resistence to time’s own existence. In this resistence dead people are seperated from the living. However no such rigid boundaries exist between the dead and the living, the past and the present.  Just as time, relationships between people are free flowing and continuous. It is hard to draw lines between people just as it is impossible to regard the past and the dead as an “other” separate from our presence.

In his book entitled The Writing of History, De Certeau argues that the past is not seperable from our current (present) writing of history. He states that usually the historians take the past as a solid objectified script separate from their own identity and existence which can be read and evaluated with a distance. The inseperability of such categories is explained in detail in the introduction of de Certeau’s book:

 ... founded on the rupture between a past that is its object, and a present that is the place of its practice, history endlessly finds the present in its object and the past in its practice. (36)

In the same way we cannot take other people as objects of study separate from our current presence, namely our practice of interpreting them. Especially in a case where we are trying to deal with the people that live together by sharing a life. Our lives are a continuation of our objects of study and the people surrounding us.
 Mental retardation in its genuity and everyday practices pictured here through my sister’s experiences, questions the deadness of others (in our case the mentally retarded) and therefore their non-effectual existence, and informs us to become aware of our visual and solidified resistence to the concept of time.