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)

"Even as theoretical invocations of fetishism -- whether indebted to Marx or to Freud -- ostensibly seek to divert attention from the object to the primacy of the subject, I would argue that they respond, albeit in disavowed form, to a temporal conundrum posed by objects and matter itself. That is, things are often shrouded in anachronism. This is not simply because many objects are time travelers from the past (think, for example, of family photo albums with their frequently embarrassing evidence of out-of-date hairstyles and other fashion no-no's). Nor is it because present objects are sometimes coded as temporally obsolete in order to assert their social unacceptability or pathological nature (think of the hijab, or veil, which has in much of the west become an overdetermined figure for Islam's supposedly 'medieval' attitude to women). It is, more precisely, because the objects of material culture are often saturated with the unmistakable if frequently faint imprints of many times." (6-7)

"The discourse of the temporally retrograde fetish, when applied to the study of material culture, can thus work to displace and dismiss the specter of anachronism that haunts objects in general. But the relations between matter and temporality have been largely occluded in recent scholarship on objects, which has tended to transform the 'material' of material culture into a synonym for 'physical' -- thereby freezing not just the object in time but also time in the object." (7)

"For Aristotle as much as for Marx, matter is both past material that has been reorked as well as present, reworkable potential that presumes a future. Materiality thus articulates temporal difference. But in collating the traces of past, present, and future, it also pluralizes and hence problematizes the time of the object. In this respsect, materiality is not simply some kind of raw physicality prior to language and culture. It is rather a site of inscription and of differance. Matter is a surface that can be written on; but it is itself a species of 'arche-writing' in Derrida's sense, inasmuch as it is characterized by an ontological and temporal self-differentiation and hence deferral. Far from being an actuality endowed with self-identical presence, then, 'matter' or 'material' might instead be understood as designating a play of multiple temporal traces." (7-8)

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)

Touching Matters: Margaret Cavendish's and Helene Cixous's Palimpsested Bodies

"Cavendish's writing of matter thematizes here theory of matter: both entail a compounding of self and other, a production of figures that seem to possess singular integrity yet are palimpsested -- or 'nested' -- mixtures." (164)

"one of the greatest gifts that feminism continues to offer, whether to historical study in general or to early modern studies in particular, is its commitment to a conjunctive sensibility. That is, it presumes conversation -- but not identity -- between women (and, for that matter, men) across time. This sensibility has been increasingly disguised or disallowed in the name of situating the past within its historical moment. The dialogue between Cixous and Cavendish, however, suggests that it is time for both feminism and Renaissance studies to question time -- at least the purified, linear time of historicism -- and to imagine a temporality grounded ni the queer touch that conjoins past and present." (167-8)

Crumpled Handkerchiefs: William Shakespeare's and Michel Serres's Palimpsested Time

"Rather than a singular progression that can be geometrically plotted, time in Othello is a dynamic field whose contours keep shifting, bringing into startling and anachronistic proximity supposedly distant and disparate moments." (168)