Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare

Shakespeare, Time, Theory

“…Harris' Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare offers a redress to the problems of new materialist (and by extension new historicist) criticism, which he identifies. In this book, Harris argues for the diachronic, or what he terms, the “polychronic” or “multitemporal” nature of material objects and their inherently unstable signification, drawing on the temporal philosophies of Bruno Latour and Michel Serres (3).…”

Minds in and out of time: memory, embodied skill, anachronism, and performance

“…In this historical cognitive ecology, theatrical traces, like other objects, memories, and events, are often 'shrouded in anachronism', as Harris argues, 'saturated with the unmistakable if frequently faint imprints of many times'. 57 In one sense, this reading might seem hopelessly historicist, mired in the particularities of one obscure moment in theatrical history. Are we simply 'fine-tuning our estrangement from Shakespeare's era?…”

“…As Harris cautions, to invoke an object's biography across sequential time is not a sufficient departure from a merely synchronic treatment of the exotic, frozen thing, entire to itself at its own historical moment: we need also to account for 'the multiple traces of time embedded in things' all at once, where these distinctive and often disruptive traces 'play an active role in the present object'. 31 But the approach to distributed cognitive ecologies which we have sketched has the resources to address these interactive, assembled, and polytemporal aspects of untimely matter. Within a coupled system involving internal processes, social interaction, and cognitive artefacts, all changing at different rates and in webs of continuous reciprocal causation, the traces of these interactions are not erased as the system moves into new states, or as some of its elements migrate.…”

“…The effective presence of the past, as bodily sedimentation on a number of timescales, animates ongoing movement possibilities: as Jonathan Gil Harris argues, 'a time out of joint can reside in living organic matter'. 12 The phenomenologist Elizabeth Behnke identifies a class or stratum of micro-movements as 'ghost gestures', the inner vectors or tendencies towards movement which persist as active residues in the wake of some entrenched temporary or long-term movement pattern: ghost gestures really colour the enacting of habitual movements and bodily style, and can sometimes be reinhabited or reworked into new kinaesthetic patterns. 13 Skilful activities such as stage performance, like sporting or musical performance, are notoriously difficult both to learn and to describe in part because we have limited access through explicit and conscious memory to the flowing dynamics of grooved and multi-level embodied movements.…”

Reproducing <i>Iphigenia at Aulis</i>

“…Jonathan Gil Harris's book Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare has rightly criticized what he terms the 'national sovereignty model of temporality', where we understand texts, things, and objects as part of the given moment, attaining meaning only in relation to the people and practices of that period. 2 As a translation, Lady Jane Lumley's script inevitably reproduces Euripides's tragedy in the early modern present. Critics have noted the play's relationship to Lady Jane Grey's execution in the Tower of London in 1554 3 and my essay explores how Lumley's translation functioned as a palimpsest through which her audience of readers, particularly those within her family circle, might recognise the emotional consequences of this traumatic event.…”