Chronometrics in the modern metropolis: The city, the past and collective memory in A.H.Tanpinar

This article provides a comparative reading of the Turkish modernist A.H. Tanpinar and the German intellectual Walter Benjamin’s writings on city and urban transformations. Published in 1946, only six years after Benjamin left the manuscript of the Arcades Project behind, Tanpınar’s collection of essays on five historical capitals, Five Cities, particularly the Istanbul segment, maps a cultural history of modernity within urban landscape and material objects. Both authors figured the city as a ‘shocking’ site of rupture despite the disparate histories of these two cities. Istanbul, on the one hand, exhausted with grand histories of multiple conquests and emperors, and Paris, on the other, imagined as the locus of national pride—offer for both authors “shocking” sites of rupture from historical continuity. Using Benjamin’s method of bringing the past into constellation with the present as a point of departure, this essay explores Tanpınar’s direct or unintentional questioning of modern illusions, cultural myths of progress, historical causality, a sanctified tradition, and of a dead past. It revamps Tanpınar studies in light of a discussion on “the ruins of modernity,” inspired by the rediscovery of Benjamin in the field of literary theory in the post twenty years. This article shows that despite their divergent methodologies and vocabularies, which developed around the same time, the two thinkers illustrate the subversive force of memory traces in the urban topography of two imperial capitals in the nineteenth century. The article concludes by demonstrating that against the commercialization and transformation of urban life, Tanpinar and Benjamin’s experiments in the chronometrics of urban histories explore nameless squares and other obsolete urban forms that are not tied to the historical time of the nation and its urban renovation. Instead, their reflections on the memory politics of little squares can tell us much about today’s discarded past of the city and its subversive, if not revolutionary, potential.