Dan Vitkus asked me to compose a very short piece on the uses and problems of the term "early modern" for a forum ("What do we mean by 'Early Modern'?") in a forthcoming issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. I'm already up against the 2K word limit, so adding the nuance that this project really requires wasn't an option. My assumption is that because this is a position piece readers will know that I am stating things rather too starkly and will know that critical praxis is typically more complicated.
Well, it's a draft at least. Let me know what you think.
“Early modern” is sometimes deployed to indicate
a bounded and distinct span of human history. This alterist approach to
periodization emphasizes that whatever years the term brackets will be
understood to differ substantially from the centuries that precede and follow. Or
“early modern” might signify a commencement, the time during which
institutions, epistemologies, and subjectivities familiar today found their
first articulation and burgeoned, an inaugurative and continuist mode of
temporal partitioning. Though in critical practice these temporal frames tend
to blend quietly into each other, neither serves the period very well -- and
not simply because both begin by abjecting the Middle Ages. Medievalists
learned long ago that when you carve your scholarly habitation out of time’s wilderness
of flux and declare this secure home exclusively yours, you may as well have
retreated to the monastery. Or if instead of attempting to live apart from
modernity you enter its conversations by insisting that "All your base are belong to us" (or AYBABTU, as the kids write) -- that it
all started c. 750 or 1200 or 1500 or whatever -- you will be the person in the
corner attempting to be cool by citing old internet memes while really just give
those nearby an excuse to step quietly away. I’ll say a few words about each
approach, alterist and continuist, both of which are as familiar in medieval as
they are they are in early modern studies, before offering a third possibility.
Derived from the
Latin word modo (“just now”), modern demarcates a temporal break as
well as a changed way of being, a distinct mode of cultural and subjective
existence. If time is a forward moving line, then “early modern” is in the
alterist framework an autonomous segment cut from that vector and stabilized
into self-containment. The detritus of a surpassed history will, of course,
remain visible, as will some seeds of a future to come (early modern intimates a more modern modernity yet to arrive), but when
time is cut into supersessionary periodizations each section of history will also
stand as fairly discrete.[1] Each
well-delineated temporal expanse must then be approached through the precision
of historicism, with its insistence upon the contextual and relational determination
of meaning. At its worst, historicism’s discontinuist method of interpretation can
freeze a period into potential stasis. Historicist pronouncements of inherent rigor
and the singularity of truth have made life rather difficult, for example, for
feminists, queers, those who believe a text might demonstrate a polychronicity
irreducible to inscription of the present, or those who hold that no temporal
moment is an ethos. Newer historicisms may be friendlier to scholars who once had
been outliers, but historicism is in its foundational acts exclusionary. The
early modern is not medieval, and so a great deal of what becomes legible or
earns the esteemed label of emergent is going to depend upon what gets sloughed
into the Middle Ages. Dissolving text into context or human subjectivity into
disciplinary discourses is also, in the end, a rather impoverished way of
apprehending how a work works. As
Graham Harman has recently written of New Historicism and its “fiesta of
interactivity,” relational readings of texts imagine that works are exhaustible
through emplacement into context.[2] Yet
like any object a text holds reserves of unplumbed relations that ensure its resistant
vitality.
Arguing for the
absolute difference of one’s time period is also an excellent way of requesting
that those outside its parameters ignore work conducted within. Why enter a
conversation with someone who assumes you have little to say to the texts they
study, who propounds that the world is not shared? Alternatively, “early modern”
might declare that “It All Starts Here,” that modernity commences around the
time of Shakespeare and those who study his plays are as au courant as scholars whose research focuses upon global
literature, ecological theory, disability studies, and the critique of
neoliberalism. “Early modern -- modern -- postmodern” neatly align into a
progressive narrative so that everything today familiar may be spotted rising
into view in some early modern text or other. The problem with such a
culminating story is fourfold. If it is narrated to capture the attention of
those who work in modernism or postmodernism, it is doomed to fail: no one
cares about the scholar who insists “It all started in my time” – medievalists have
learned this lesson the hard way. Second, this version of “early modern”
commences by obliterating the millennium that precedes. The Middle Ages become a
long span of intransigent piousness that obstructs classical learning from
making its transformative and affirmative return. Third, “early modern” quietly
subscribes to a Eurocentric timeline, since modernity never gets evenly allotted.
Narratives of cultural progress like those implicit in both “early” and
“modern” possess an invidious colonial history – and what does early modern
look like when viewed from Beijing, Mumbai, Ankara? Last, now that modernity
has been abandoned for a series of designations which bear the prefix “post” but
do not necessarily deploy that designation as a temporal marker, the reasons
for hooking the flourishing of Milton or Cavendish to them have dwindled. Postmodernity,
the postcolonial, and the posthuman have each been critically redefined
nonlinearly as an “always already” rather than an apex or temporal rupture.
Those who study
the Middle Ages face a rather different situation. Manuscript culture can be
strikingly different from print, demanding an account of the varied time of
objects rather than of anthropocentric history. An inherent multitemporality
ensures that medievalists can seldom dissolve their texts into historical
relations. Medieval works typically survive in multiple manuscript versions that
postdate their putative origin by decades, even centuries. Some like the
fourteenth-century travel narrative known as the Book of Mandeville arrive as a polyglot plethora.[3] We
are fairly certain the Book was first
composed in Anglo-Norman French, but a variety of English Mandevilles also erupted, leading to a tangle of versions from
which no urtext can be reconstructed. We do not know who composed the “original”
book (other than its author was unlikely to have been John Mandeville) or where
the work first found words (France has been guessed, but there is no way to
know for certain). Manuscript history suggests the third quarter of the
fourteenth century as its date of composition, but the cultural conditions
under which it was produced cannot be excavated – and would not, at any rate,
enable us to know why Walter Raleigh was citing Mandeville when describing his
adventures in Guyana. The text is not anchored in a moment of origin, and
continued to reproduce, mutate, and proliferate itself for several centuries. Its
narrative is a collage of borrowings, rendering its imagined peregrinations from
the start a temporally thick archive. We have a profusion of Books of
Mandeville, each of which brims with the pasts it condenses and gestures
towards the futures it is opening up as it moves restlessly through the world.
Because they work
in the “Middle Ages” (a plural and imprecise designation for the times left
behind so that our Now could arrive), medievalists are not responsible for
explaining modernity. They can ignore it, if they wish. This temporal disconnect
has made it far easier for them to ally with the critical “post-,” especially
posthumanism. The new journal postmedieval,
for example, makes the vitality of these confederations across time clear. If
the Middle Ages mark a kind of non-teleological middle, more possibility inheres
in the medieval than, say, describing the period as the “very early modern” or
“extremely late classical.” What if the medieval were not middle to anything?
Instead of a historical lacuna sandwiched between the fall of Rome and the rise
of the early modern, what if the medial adjective in the Middle Ages does
necessarily signify as intended? In the introduction I composed for the edited
collection The Postcolonial Middle Ages (“Midcolonial”), I traced the transformation of
post-colonial to postcolonial, “an intermediacy that no narrative can pin to a
single moment of history in its origin or end.”[4] What
if the “middle” of the Middle Ages were likewise a nontemporal designation?
What if, “both ‘in and of themselves’ and through their constitution as a
distinct object of study, the Middle Ages in their mediacy confront the modern
with powerful trauma conjoined to the possibility of transhistorical alliance
and mutual transformation” (“Midcolonial” 5)? The past is not past, is not an
absolute difference; nor is the past conjoined to the present in continuity, in
sameness. Past, present, and future are a temporal knot, thick with possibility
even while impossible to fully untangle. Time is irregular, history is queer. A
medieval that is middle to nothing in particular suits many of the scholars who
work within its designation just fine.
[1]
On the reduction this linearization of history demands and the explosive
temporalities that might still inhere within, see Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). I’ve also written about various modes
of conceptualizing temporality in the first chapter of Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2003).
[2]
See Graham Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism,”
New Literary History 43 (2012): 183–203, quotation at 192.
[3]
On the Book of Mandeville’s
multiplicity see Iain Macleod Higgins, Writing
East: The ‘Travels’ of Sir John Mandeville (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1997). For an excellent translation that surveys the recent
scholarship on the Book, see Anthony Bale, The
Book of Marvels and Travels (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
[4]
“Midcolonial,” in The Postcolonial Middle
Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000) 1-17,
quotation at 3.
