Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (review)

It is hard to imagine a more timely book than Jonathan Gil Harris’s deftly staged turn to “things” in early modern studies and beyond. As Harris observes, “For a growing number of Shakespeare scholars, the play is no longer the thing, the thing is the thing” (1), and he worries at the apparent blind faith in a singular conception of matter that this pseudoempiricism appears to evince. But it would be wrong to think that this is a book only for those readers who are speeding by in their thing-fueled critical jalopy, for as Harris’s juxtaposition of “play” and “thing” makes clear, one of his aims is to reopen discussion of what we might call the referential economy at work in our modes of reading. What kind or order of “world” (supposedly extratextual outside) are you modeling in your writing? What sense of the “past” are you trading on or in?

In this sense, Untimely Matter marks the latest attempt to reckon with the legacies of the new historicism. If for new historicism things were more or less transfer tickets to (synecdochal fragments of) a putative cultural whole (the “Renaissance”), Harris offers a mode of reading that fractures the appearance of synchrony that informed such renderings of historical “periods” with news of the constitutive polychronicity or polytemporality of objects or things in general. Taking aim at what he rather alarmingly names “the national sovereignty model of temporality” (2), Harris discerns how this sovereignty model “licenses trade between different moments (allowing, say, the ‘modern’ to import elements from the ‘early modern’ and to export others to the ‘postmodern’)” (2). Harris points out the complicity of this static, linear conception of human making and manufacture with an ethnocentric hierarchy that produces the West’s apparent modernity by the production of its non-Western others as variously belated or archaic. “How might things chafe against the sovereignty of the moment-state? What do we do with things that cross temporal borders—things that are illegal immigrants, double agents, or holders of multiple passports? . . . What, in short, is the time of the thing?” (2).

In the manner of philosopher of science Michel Serres and sociologist Bruno Latour, Harris’s “things” are essentially networks or Deleuzian rhizomes, pleated folding-togethers of variously animated actors or actants (human and not), ongoing performances which reorder their constituent parts as they go or accrete new actants. What animates the study, however, are those lineaments of the “thing” that appear variously “untimely” or, to reprise Harris’s reprising of Hamlet’s bony phrase, “out of joint” (12). And the book is structured as a staging of three “types” for responding to and processing such untimely manifestations of matter that refuses to sit quietly: “the logic of supersession—that is, of preserving, negating, and transcending rival religions and cultures deemed to be no longer coeval but ‘old’ and of the past”; “the temporality of explosion: the apparition of the ‘old’ text shatters the integrity of the ‘new’ by introducing into it a radical alterity that punctures the illusion of wholeness or finality”; and a “dialogic temporality” that is “the temporality of conjunction” (15, 16).

Harris stages these three types or modalities in a description of a fascinating manuscript, the Archimedes Palimpsest, held by the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. This manuscript is “flagrantly polychronic,” he writes, “medieval liturgical script, modern forged image, and classical philosophical text are all legible in its matter” (13). Beyond the palimpsest as an artifact that makes available potentially contradictorily timed texts, however, it is palimpsesting itself as a practice of writing and reading that ultimately matters, providing the key emblem for the book’s interests and objects. “Derived from the Greek palimpsestos, meaning ‘scraped again,’” (15) palimpsesting stages reading and writing as a refolding of matter, a type of erasure that is never thorough, that cannot and may never be adequate to the presence of that which it seeks to...