The Multiple Simultaneous Temporalities of Global Modernity: Pamuk, Tanpınar, Proust

This essay proposes the theory of multiple simultaneous temporalities as a constitutive feature of global modernism. It spotlights varieties of heterogeneous time—outside but alongside the homogeneous empty time of clocks and calendars—in modernist literature. These overlapping temporalities replace the linear succession of past, present, and future with a principle of nonteleology. The multiple simultaneous temporalities of these works analogize the multiple simultaneous temporalities of global modernity. Thus the temporalization of difference that separates developed nations from developing ones is refuted by the pluralization of temporality. The simultaneity of these temporalities denies, a priori, the ideology of progress. The essay makes this point through a series of interlaced epiphanies about time, across time, staging an East-West comparison that reflects the creole nature of global modernity. It does so via readings of interconnected novels by Orhan Pamuk, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, and Marcel Proust.

Philosophy of Boredom

Even the most cursory of glances at the history of boredom reveals that boredom has been a topic of immense discussion. That same glance also reveals that there is not just one kind of boredom. There is the fastidium of Seneca, the horror loci of Lucretius, and the religious boredom of acedia. There is the sadness and listlessness of tristesse and melancholy, the void of Pascal, and the emptiness of La Rochefoucauld and of 18th-century Versailles. There is the ennui of Mme Du Deffand, of Chateubriand’s René, and of Goethe’s Werther. There is the despair of Schopenhauer, the monotony of factory workers, the empty time of leisure, the existential meaninglessness of Sartre’s Roquentin, and the profound attunement of Heidegger. And, of course, there is the simple and democratic boredom of the rest of us—that ubiquitous affective state that permeates and colors our everyday existence. The aim of this entry is to provide the reader with a philosophical map of the progression of the concept and experience of boredom throughout the Western tradition—from antiquity to current work in Anglo-American philosophy. By focusing primarily on key philosophical works on boredom, but also often discussing important literary and scientific texts, the entry exposes the reader to the rich history of boredom and illustrates how the different manifestations of boredom—idleness, horror loci, acedia, sloth, mal du siècle, melancholy, ennui, monotony, and emptiness—are grounded in the historical context in which they arise.

Abstracting time in memory

Planning the future relies on the ability to remember how long events last, yet, how durations are stored in memory is unknown. Here, we developed a novel n-item delayed duration reproduction task to assess whether elapsed time is stored as a continuous feature or as an abstract item in memory. In three experiments (N = 58), participants listened to non-rhythmic sequences composed of empty time intervals (durations), which they had to reproduce as precisely as possible following a delay period. We manipulated the number of time intervals (n-item) and the overall sequence duration to separate their effects on recall precision. The precision of temporal reproduction systematically decreased with an increasing number of items. Our results suggest that the number of time intervals, not their duration, determines recall precision. We interpret this as evidence towards an abstract representation of duration in working memory.

No Wild Iris

The Philippines, as a tropical archipelago, is “concurrently a country of premodern, modern, and postmodern societies[:] our rural areas, small communities, and villages, while we may sweepingly characterize them as premodern, possses at the same time some of the trappings of postmodern cities like Manila, Los Angeles, or Paris” (Cruz-Lucero, 2007, p. 7). And yet, as a nation, this concurrence of temporalities is ultimately flattened, so as to turn it into “a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time” (Anderson, 2006, p. 26). What emerges, therefore, is a Philippine time that is also a disjuncture: multiplicities that insist on a singularity, or a singularity that insists on being multiple. Keeping time with this contradiction between the diverse temporalities in the archipelagic tropics (see Carter, 2013) and the adamant dream toward a nation-state, this poem meditates on the concurrence of various events that happen in the archipelago nation during the 2020 COVID-19 global pandemic. Taking cues from the 1992 poem “The Wild Iris” penned by the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature recipient Louise Glück, “No Wild Iris” attempts to interrogate the experience of homogenous and empty time in the longest lockdown in world history. By interweaving the personal, the political, and the ecological, it harnesses the lyrical while also disclosing its limits, if not outrightly refusing the tendency to sentimentality and universality as a poem.

The Tuition Payment Queuing System Uses Android-Based First in First Out (FIFO) Algorithm

Queuing is an important component of a process in service. Queues are formed in a company or institution due to customers. Disorderly queues are a big problem for all concerned. Where, disorderly queues occur at University Prima Indonesia at the time of tuition payment so that the campus has to carry out a crowded queue process and students have to stand waiting for the next call resulting in less effective and efficient even waste of energy for students and employees. This research designed a system of tuition payment queues using the First In First Out (FIFO) algorithm which aims to reduce the time students are queuing at the checkout at the time of tuition payment so as not to wait too long so that the time of students and campus employees is not wasted too much and reduce the crowded queue time. The result of this study is an android-based tuition payment system, which is useful for reducing student build up when paying tuition. Thus it can be said that the calculation result of P0 queue has a result of 0.25%, and the number of customers 3 people, the average customer in the queue has a value of 2.25, the total customer time is 20 minutes, and the average customer time in the row is 15 minutes, the server busy time is 0.75, and the server’s empty time is 0.25%.

Loneliness in prison

At first glance, contemporary prisons are environments defined by an ‘enforced collective’ (Goffman, [1961] 1991) and prisoners are, if anything, plagued by ‘life en masse’ (Sykes, 1958), yet the depth and weight of loneliness in prison can be intense. Prisons are often associated with metaphors of loneliness, disruption and empty time, and, as Armstrong (2018) highlights, imprisonment is an exemplary symbol for being stuck in space and time. Based on empirical data from a study of imprisonment in England & Wales and Norway, in this article we analyse several forms of loneliness found in prisons and beyond, from the visceral, immediate sense of being physically alone and separated from loved ones to the ethical or existential experience of abandonment and hopelessness. We conclude by pointing to the fact that the two otherwise very different penal contexts yield similar findings when it comes to the experiences of loneliness. This implies that the sense of not fitting in, of being ‘ethically alone’ (Stauffer, 2015) and essentially misrecognized (Lister in Fraser and Bourdieu, 2007), goes beyond specific prisons and jurisdictions. We also note that, as well as evoking feelings of loneliness, in some circumstances imprisonment can provide some respite from it.