Harris 2009

Harris, Jonathan Gil. Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

Palimpsested Time: Toward a Theory of Untimely Matter

"national sovereignty model of temporality" -- "Although it licenses trade between different moments (allowing, say, the 'modern' to import elements from the 'early modern' and to export others to the 'postmodern'), it grants each moment a determining auuthority reminiscent of a nation-state's: that is, firmly policed borders and a shaping constitution. As a result, any historical phenomenon tends to be regarded as a citizen solely of one moment-state. And from the vantage point of the rpesent, the past becomes a foreign country, or rather several foreign countries." (2)

"'Time' can refer to a moment, period, or age -- the punctual date of chronology. Hence 'the time of Shakespeare' can be demarcated and numerically represented as a finite temporal block (1564-1616, or the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). But 'time' can also refer to an understanding of the temporal relations among past, present, and future. In this sense, 'the time of Shakespeare' is not a historical period but rather a conception, or several conceptions, of temporality." (3)

"Contrary to our either/or habits of local and universal reading, English Renaissance theorists of matter regard it as neither an age nor for all time. Rather, they see it as out of time with itself -- that is, as untimely. In the stone tablets of religious typology, the city walls of urban chorograpy, the compounded substances of vitalist philosophy, and the matter of the Shakespearean stage -- histrionic actors' bodies, malodorous special effects, and even trifling hand properties -- time is repeatedly, to use Hamlet's well-known phrase, out of joint." (4-5)

Supercessions

"what is superseded survives its own supersession and can thus call into question the very progress it is enlisted to facilitate. And once the past is no longer regarded as having passed but is instead understood to reside in the now, we can start to take stock of its agency. That is, we can start seeing the past not as dead and buried or even as a spectral visitor from beyond the grave, but as alive and active. We can see it, in other words, as untimely matter." (31)

Explosions

"In explosive time, the traces of the past acquire a living agnecy within, and against, the present. This agency is illuminated by the specific connotations of 'explosion' in the time of Shakespeare." (91)

Conjunctions

"Whereas the practitioners of supersession treat only the rpesent as active and the past as dead or obsolete matter, and whereas the proponents of explosion grant agency primarily to the live traces of the past that dispute and shatter the present, those who practice the temporality of conjunction recognize the combined activity of all is polychronic components." (143)