Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare

Part 3: Conjunctions

P A R T I I I Conjunctions Fig. 9. Henry Peacham, sketch of Titus Andronicus in performance, c. 1595; courtesy of the Marquess of Bath, Longleat House, Warminster, Wiltshire, United Kingdom. It is not only the Bedouins and the !Kung who mix up transistors and traditional behaviours, plastic buckets and animal skin vessels. What country could not be called a ‘‘land of contrasts’’? We have all reached the point of mixing up times. —Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern How might we characterize the relation between the temporality of conjunction and those of supersession and explosion? They are in one crucial respect similar: all are materialized by palimpsest-like entities that conjoin multiple times. What distinguishes the temporality of conjunction, however, is its distribution of agency within the palimpsested object. Whereas the practitioners of supersession treat only the present 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 its polychronic components.1 Perhaps the most compelling advocate for the temporality of conjunction and polychronic agency is the actor-network theorist Bruno Latour. In We Have Never Been Modern, Latour argues that the fantasy of modernizing time, in which the present progresses from a primitive past toward an improved future, is enabled by a mapping of the supposedly insurmountable split between subject and object onto a sharp partition between now and then. This twin separation concentrates agency in one pole of each opposition at the expense of the other. In the process, modernity disavows hybrid actants— what Latour calls ‘‘quasi-objects’’—that blur the boundaries between subject and object or present and past. The quasi-object (e.g., a greenhouse gas that is equally a natural and a cultural event, or Latour’s toolbox that is both antique and modern) mixes up ‘‘different periods, ontologies or genres.’’2 Because these multiple ingredients are all active, the quasi-object demands to be seen not as a singular entity but rather as an ‘‘actor network’’—or, to use Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s better known term, a rhizome. In botany, the rhizome is a sprawling, subterranean plant system—the potato tuber is the most familiar specimen—without a singular root; it functions by establishing connections between multiple nodes. For Deleuze and Guattari, the 144 part iii rhizome is a suggestive metaphor for any symbiotic system comprising supposedly disparate elements that act in concert. In their discussion, a wasp and an orchid constitute a rhizome, as do a human and her viruses. Deleuze and Guattari use the rhizome primarily as a figure with which to critique hierarchy and identity: unlike ‘‘arborescent’’ models of development such as the family tree, the rhizome’s connections are horizontal rather than vertical, and presume a dispersed heterogeneity.3 But the rhizome’s difference from other plant forms is suggestive also for understandings of temporality and agency. Indeed, the three temporalities I discuss in this book might each be profitably compared to a different model of plant life. The temporality of supersession is figured by Hegel’s arborescent model of historical progress in The Philosophy of History: ‘‘It may be said of Universal History, that it is the exhibition of Spirit in the process of working out the knowledge of that which it is potentially. And as the germ bears in itself the whole nature of the tree, and the taste and form of its fruits, so do the first traces of Spirit virtually contain the whole of that History.’’4 Like supersessionary time, Hegel’s tree follows a singular course from origin to end. The germinal matter of the tree’s beginning predicts its fulfillment in the future; and the growing tree at each stage of its development retains its past forms in the material residue of its rings. Agency is thus located only in the tree’s present life, which builds on the matter of the past simply to ensure progress into the future. The temporality of explosion invites a rather different model of plant life. In a critique of nineteenth-century historicism that draws heavily on Benjamin’s ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’’ Dipesh Chakrabarty argues for the critical power of what he calls ‘‘subaltern pasts,’’ polychronic events that have been...