This volume began life as a series of eventsâalso titled Staging Scienceâheld across 2 days at the University of Westminster in December 2013. Both the location and date are important, as the events were organised around a re-staging of Henry Pepperâs ghost illusion first performed at the University of Westminster when it was the Royal Polytechnic Institution in the 1860s. The re-staging was undertaken by Richard Hand and Geraint DâArcy, both academics working in the Faculty of Creative Industries at the University of South Wales in Cardiff. It was, in fact, their Faculty Research Director, Ruth McElroy, who first suggested the collaboration and believed Richard and Geraint would be ideal contributors to Staging Science. So it proved. Their digital updating of the Pepperâs ghost illusion, along with their adaptation of Charles Dickensâs short story âThe Haunted Manâ (which Pepper had used in his original script) came together to provide the audience with an uncanny return to mid-Victorian scientific performance. Readers interested in seeing the re-staging can still get a taste of it in an online video.1 Pepperâs ghost provided a potent central symbol for the other eventsâa round-table discussion of science and performance and a symposiumâin which the contributors to this volume took part. The events, and especially the re-staging of Pepperâs Ghost, spoke particularly to the centrality of performance in presenting science to new audiences. It is in response to the significance of this that this present volume brings together scholars from the disciplines of literature, history, and media studies to investigate the different methods and meanings of performing science. Most analyses of science as praxis ask what it is that science, and science scholarship, gains from the altered perspective that performativity provides. This is explicitly the case, for example, in the ground-breaking work of science studies scholars Bruno Latour and Andrew Pickering, who ask what it means to science to think through practice as well as what it might mean for science and technology studies to look at scientific action through this lens.2 Similarly, in the influential work on popular science by Jim Secord and Jonathan Topham, it is both what science accrues by thinking of popular and elite science as part of a continuum and what history of science criticism might learn from rethinking outside of diffusionist understandings of scientific knowledge-making that is under discussion.3 This collection of essays builds on that work by asking complementary but different questions. What kind of knowledge does performance elicit, and for whom? Who performs and for what reasons? In what ways does performance alter the relationship between science and its audiences? What relationships exist between the aesthetic and the epistemic, and between the imagination and the sciences? For all the writers here, such questions are at the heart of their investigations into the staging of science regardless of period or form. The significance of their work, while apparent in each chapter, also comes from the cross-fertilisation of the ideas and methods of multiple disciplines. Indeed, it is that multiplicity that the volume offers as a new approach to science and performance; it is one that connects the different disciplines of the humanities in a fresh form of critical encounter with science. Although not (yet) a commonly used phrase, the volume may well be described as a pathfinder for a âscience humanitiesâ that endeavours to think carefully about science through the multivalent knowledges that the humanities can bring to bear.
In turn, the questions offered above emerge from a specific principle about the role of imaginative performance in the sciences: that it is the imagination that, at least in part, enables knowledge-production to occur and which is far too often obscured or erased from stories of scientific understanding. John Tyndall, for example, to whom Bernard Lightman returns in his Afterword to this collection, understood the importance of the imagination in scientific work, but ascribed to it, ultimately, a role only as a mode of transport towards a place where knowledge might be uncovered by rational investigation.4 Similarly, in the twentieth century, Peter Medawar drew attention to the importance of the imagination in originating speculations about the world but, like Tyndall, saw it only as a vehicle taking the scientist towards more mature evidence-based theories.5 To take issue with Tyndall and Medawar is a matter of emphasis rather than outright difference. Both, in complementary ways, acknowledge the imagination as a vital spark (I draw on Shelleyâs novel, Frankenstein, consciously here) in the early stages of scientific investigation.6 Yet, in the end, they both also see the imagination as a handmaiden to science and its rational discoveries. It is the latter position which this collection interrupts, disrupts, and overthrows, and which a science humanities would continue to reject.
Indeed, central to the collection is the belief that the imaginationâeffected through and as performanceâhas far greater force in mobilising science than has previously been accepted and that this deserves further study. Mobility is the key word here and it requires some additional definition in this context. For the writers in this collection, mobility has many features: it registers the movement of scientific knowledge from one group to another; it tracks the exchange of ideas between performative and scientific sites and actors; and it notes how science itself is transformed into performance and vice versa. What is elided in thinking about such imaginative mobilities is a hierarchy of different realms of knowledge, most often resulting in the prioritising of scientific knowledge-making over the epistemes of performance. The inspiration for thinking through the idea of mobility can be found in Secordâs important call for the renegotiation of the relationship between elite and popular science, where he argued that historians should be looking at âknowledge in transitâ rather than the top-down bestowing of knowledge from a privileged arena to one without power or status.
Other scholars have also made important interventions into the realm of performance, even when their focus has ostensibly been elsewhere. The work of historian of science Gerald Holton in the 1970s, for example, stressed the imaginative underpinning of three aspects of scientific workâthe visual, analogical, and thematicâwhich, taken together, have clear connections to some of the ideals of imaginative performance: the necessity of creating something visually striking for an audience, of showing rather than telling, and of making a performance that is cohesive. In a very different way the work on seventeenth-century scientific writing and its dissemination by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer in Leviathan and the Air Pump (1985) revealed how works of science often used pictorial illustrations of new scientific instruments in action to promote their recognition by readers.7 These illustrations were, in fact, imagined performances captured on the page and their importance to the new science illuminates the centrality of performance to the proper dissemination of new knowledge.
More recently and with a focus decidedly on issues of performance, Iwan Rhys Morus, whose work appears in this collection, gathered together a group of historians of science to reflect in the pages of the journal Isis on how performance might be studied anew. It is there that Morus suggests how the work of performance studies scholars might be employed to give alternative perspectives on the place of performance in science.8 At the same time, Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, another writer to feature here, and Carina Bartleet conducted a new examination of science in the theatre across two issues of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews.9 For them, this new work had emerged out of a desire to see how new performance modes had energised theatrical practice as well as how this had led to further cross-fertilisations between science and theatre. Equally influential has been the work of Sadiah Qureshi on scientific display, most forcefully in her 2011 book Peoples on Parade. Qureshi, taking a slightly different perspective, revealed how human exhibitions and performances were vital in the formation of sciences like anthropology.10
What, then, might performance studies offer to the historian of science, the science studies scholar, and the literature and science expert? As itself an interdiscipline, formed between drama and cultural studies, performance studies is sympathetically aligned to the ongoing projects of these scholarly groupings. Performance studies also has a distinguished history (reaching back to the work of critics such as Richard Schechner in the 1960s) in university theatre studies departments seeking new ways to articulate the different kinds of performances developing around them. In particular performance studies extended the range of what could be regarded as performance, looking not only at artistic performances conducted in authorised spaces such as theatres but beyond them at performances embedded in everyday life that took place on the streets, at work, or in the home. These cultural performances not only took place within cultural locations they also represented and even re-enacted cultural forms. Drawing on the so...
