Abstract
This essay considers the uncannily persistent figure of the Mechanical Turk, a spectre that haunts medieval theology, early modern theatre and modern philosophy alike. In all three cases, it functions as the mechanical, inhuman antitype of a futurity figured as meaningful and human. These attributes are materialized also in the Renaissance ‘mammet’ or mechanical puppet, an object whose name bears the trace of a supposedly lifeless and regressive Islam. Turning to Romeo and Juliet, the essay concludes with a consideration of how Shakespeare's play deploys the mammet to counter-intuitive, untimely ends: by figuring Juliet as a mammet whose mechanical compulsions enable a messianic refusal of the old patronymic law, Romeo and Juliet explodes the temporal as much as ontological distinctions between human and machine, Christian and non-Christian, pre and post.
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Notes
Biddick's ‘When Typologies Meet: Undeadening Messianic Time’ (2008) is a development of ideas first broached in her important book, The Typological Imagination: Circumcision, History, Technology (2003).
All citations of Romeo and Juliet are from The Norton Shakespeare (2007), by act, scene and line numbers.
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Harris, J. Mechanical turks, mammet tricks and messianic time. Postmedieval 1, 80–87 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2010.10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2010.10