Ecem Arslanay
The term “ruler” in English, denoting a measuring instrument, also carries the meaning of “lawgiver.” But how does a ruler enact laws? A ruler strives to reduce the earth’s convoluted and twisted folds to a straight line, measuring this exciting choreography and constantly creating new forms with maneuvers, speed changes, turns, and pauses. It divides, fragments into static parts, and governs. It regulates trembling sand dunes, refracted water waves, quivering underground rocks, thundering streams, murmuring hills, and restless leaves.
Regulation’s Latin origin is “rectitudo,” meaning “straight” and “right.” It implies not being curved, curly, complex, or chaotic; it signifies being stable, being the shortest distance between points A and B. Hair, both a design material and an object of design in itself, exemplifies this concept. Animal hair is a material, while human hair is an object. The former undergoes processing in various industries, while the latter is predominantly shaped and disciplined by the cosmetics industry.
Afro hairstyles that freely sway today were a battlefield of suffering for centuries. In the 1960s, the tide turned; those with “sheep” hair became “panthers.” A community highly disturbed by ongoing economic and social inequality, despite the civil rights legislation, ignited with the assassination of Malcolm X, founded that revolutionary organization considered the greatest threat to U.S. internal security: the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.
This obsession with “right and proper” doesn’t just affect marginalized communities. The regulation of all bodies continues with bras, corsets, botox, injections, lift surgeries, and many other inventions. It constantly tries to be more “erect” to reach the more pristine points of the sky. With each new object and concept reached, the world, measured inch by inch and league by league for centuries, is being measured with the most meticulous “rulers” in this new digitalization era we have entered.
Time and space, meticulously monitored since the Industrial Revolution, are calibrated unit by unit worldwide for the flow of production. All time-measuring devices are based on an oscillator, a frequency that ticks regularly, something that returns to its starting point in the same duration each time. This could even be a group of flowers. Today, we use very precise measurements averaging the values of more than four hundred atomic clocks in over fifty laboratories worldwide.
In Johannes Buno’s universal history (1672), each millennium before Christ is depicted with an allegorical image. The fourth millennium BC is portrayed as a dragon. The chronological ruler model that governs our perception of time is merely 250 years old, but our sense of linear time is undoubtedly ancient and has permeated all aspects of daily life production.
Take a book, for example: both its unidirectional typographic flow and the tenses of the language it operates within (past-present-future) are linear. In the trajectory of Apollinaire, particularly in poetry, the breakdown of linearity can be captured; however, these instances did not become canonical and remained “experimental.”
An interesting source to observe the time of Kronos is board games. Its archetype can be traced back to the flat and perforated stones of the Neolithic period. John Marshall’s 1818 game “The Chronological Star of the World, An Entertaining Game,” starts with the Garden of Eden and ends with a warrior woman holding the British flag, announcing the abolition of the slave trade, depicting “the path of reason” step by step.
This narrative prompted Francis Fukuyama in the 90s to proclaim the much-debated “end of history” by declaring liberal democracy as the ultimate point of political evolution. Perhaps it is “right” to propose plural formations, spontaneous interactions, and variable meanings instead of an absolute truth. Perhaps history moves not like workers’ bodies driven to perform tasks in the best possible way, but more like “The Movements of a Fly on a Window Pane between 8 AM and 7 PM on May 1, 1967.”
From the observable to the unobservable, from the linear to the nonlinear, our perception and measurement of time shape the very fabric of our existence. Homogeneous time and heterogeneous time—Henri Bergson distinguishes between the measurable time of the external world and the time specific to the inner world of consciousness. Our vague time measurements always accompany our standard time measurements; within the homogeneous narrative of history, we are composed of the unity of heterogeneous moments.
Perhaps, like the intricate dance of a fly on a window pane, our journey through time is a complex, unpredictable choreography, shaped by myriad unseen forces and fleeting moments.
This text was produced as part of the “Sustainable Relationships with Zeynep Sayın: Collective Artistic Production Project” conducted under the auspices of the Nesin Art Village with support from the SAHA Sustainability Fund.