Performing Science and the Virtual (review)

In her foundational Essays on Science and Gender, Evelyn Fox Keller asks, "How much of the nature of science is bound up with the idea of masculinity, and what would it mean for science if it were otherwise?" (3). A variation on Fox's inquiry, Sue-Ellen Case's Performing Science and the Virtual questions how much of science is linked to performance and how gender and sexuality are constructed by select intersections of these fields. On the whole, the book combines a deeply selective history and an embarrassment of riches. In spite of its lacunae and campy inclusions, however, Performing Science and the Virtual should be heralded both for its rich interdisciplinary engagement and for its wide-ranging exploration of the porous boundaries of science and performance.

The book contains an "Introduction," "Prologue," four "Acts," and an "Entr'acte." Readers may note the allusion to the theatrical pie`ce bien faite with Act Five notably absent (hence, no de´nouement): a curious structure from the scholar who has decried realism and its Scribean foundations as a "prisonhouse of art for women" (Feminism 124). Case defends her well-made form by arguing that her headings serve not to reproduce but only to "imitate the performative structure of acts and scenes" (3; emphasis added). Moreover, in a rejection of her linear design, Case advises her audiences to "read the book as they read the web" (4). For the record, this reviewer took the nineteenth-century approach. Yet it becomes clear why Case advocates the Web-based approach to encountering her book: its topological format allows the author to jump seamlessly from the alchemical discourses of Jonson and Goethe to the Darwinian lexicons of P.T. Barnum and Madame Blavatsky without mentioning Francis Bacon's Promethean vision of science as humanity's key to mastery over nature.

In the most insightful chapters, the "Prologue" and "Act One," Case establishes her major argument that, whether in a laboratory or on a proscenium stage, both science and performance construct "virtual spaces" and "avatars," liminal sites and characters that either collude with or resist dominant ideologies through a process of "iteration." "Science and theatre," writes Case, "offered an organization of knowing and managing as a viewing apparatus, a lens, through which the appearance of the object was translated, with the assumption that its translation would provide a more accurate vision of it" (13). In other words, the Renaissance oriented "man" as a privileged spectator, one who renders objects as static by virtue of his all-encompassing gaze. Supported by both the perspectival theatre and the "new science" of Linnaeus, such classification opposed itself to alchemy, a pseudo-scientific paradigm in which "the scientist takes part in the dynamic change of all things, rather than remaining an observer of static elements" (19). Within the early alchemical models undertaken by scientists as prominent as Sir Isaac Newton, gender attributes were "distributed across elements," but by the time Jonson and Middleton were writing their plays, gender had become a characteristic "assigned only to the human agent" (30). Thus, observes Case, "As an attribute that bounded identity, gender became one of the most crucial and socially devastating codes of partition that accompanied the rise of science and theatre" (27).

Within "Act One," Case interprets Goethe's epic Faust alongside the poet's own gendered notions of science. Case argues that Faust represents the alchemist as a figure "in league with the devil" (17), his experiments on par with illusory designs of the theatre itself, which are, in turn, associated with the feminine. In Faust II, Goethe celebrates the "apotheosis of the feminine gender" (46) in the character of Helen, whom Case views as an early example of the avatar or, to be more exact, "an animation of the code of the feminine gender" (47). In contrast, Goethe's Homunculus exemplifies a condemnation of "virtualizing the form of the masculine" (46). Case does not address the character of Faust's son, Euphorion, whose androgyny (reminiscent of Ion and Tasso...