Inquiry and performance:

analogies and identities between the

arts and the sciences
ROBERT P. CREASE
Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University, NY, USA

The concept of performance can be used to explain and elaborate key aspects of various issues often neglected
within traditional philosophy of science, including among others artistry, technique, and aVective power. The word
‘performance’ has a spectrum of meanings, but one important sense in which it is applied, especially in the dramatic
arts, is to the conception, production, and witnessing of material events the experience of which gives us something
more than what we had before. When viewed in this way, the structure of performance is not a metaphor extended
merely suggestively from the theatre arts into experimental science; it is the same in both. In both contexts, the
representation (theory, language, script) used to programme the performance does not completely determine the
outcome (product, work), but only assists in the encounter with the new. The world is wilder and richer than we
can represent; what appears in performance can exceed the programme used to put it together, can even surprise
and baZe us. An experiment planned and programmed on the basis of a certain theory can disclose things that
trigger changes in that theory.

F ew subjects seem to invite more loose talk about
weighty subjects than supposed aYnities between the
arts and the sciences. It is easy to be seduced by the
inessential, to focus on surface similarities, and to
come away from discussions entertained but not
enlightened. Locating and exploring the aYnities is
more diYcult than it appears.
Why should this be? One reason arises from
the obvious fact that the arts and sciences work in
and with vastly diVerent media and languages. The
theories of modern physics, for example, are couched
in mathematical languages that require years of train-
ing to understand and are opaque to outsiders.
The languages of art, meanwhile, have very diVerent
structures and lay hold of their subject matters in
quite other ways. The languages of art are generally
much more associative, and rely more directly on Ž rst
person tactile-kinaesthetic experience; they are hence
also dependent on training. A director or choreo-
grapher, for instance, may give the performers a set of
images to respond to, and may have to give another
set if these do not produce the desired result.
H ow, then, may we possibly compare the arts and
sciences? If we begin by attempting to translate the
works of each into a common, non-technical language,
we inevitably introduce distortions. Imagine com-
paring museum exhibitions and concerts by studying
newspaper reviews – wouldn’t the outcome inevitably
owe less to deep structures than to coincidence or
idiosyncracy? And it would be equally a waste of
time to seek analogies by examining the exteriors –
by describing the beauty of scientiŽ c instruments or
images, say, or by trying to unearth theories of the
world from paintings or pieces of music. Yet we do
sense deep analogies between the arts and the sciences
– involving the presence of creativity, technique, and
an aVective dimension, among other things – and
we also sense that identifying and analysing these
analogies is ultimately essential to understanding both
the arts and the sciences.
The undertaking must begin from Ž rst principles.
But where to Ž nd a footing? In vain would we try to
pull down from the sky some criterion for comparing
the arts and sciences; for where would it come from?
Instead, we must seek our starting point in what
philosophers call phenomenology, by explicating what
leads us to sense such aYnities in the Ž rst place. So
we begin by examining three interrelated dimensions
that we Ž nd in both the arts and the sciences – the
pursuit of inquiry, the production of material objects
and events, and the generation of meaning.
Inquiry, material products, and
meaning generation
Both the arts and the sciences are forms of inquiry, a
term which refers to a particular mode of interaction
between a person or community and the world. Simply
put, in inquiry some vague feeling of dissatisfaction
with a situation or (when more explicitly amenable
to articulation) some question provokes human beings
to do something that may lead to an answer. The pro-
cess of inquiry leads to a deepening and enriching of
human engagement with the world, to what philosopher
H ubert D reyfus likes to call an improved ‘grip’ on
the world.1

266 INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, 2003, VOL. 28, NO. 4 © 2003 IoM Communications Ltd DOI 10.1179/030801803225008668
Published by M aney for the Institute of M aterials, M inerals and M ining
 We fail to take this process seriously if we charac-
terise it as either arbitrary or logical. Experiments do
not get performed by chance, and there is no more
an automatic experiment to be performed (however
‘natural’ it may seem in retrospect or in the history
books) than there is a sculpture hidden in a piece of
marble waiting to be cut out, an image on blank
canvas waiting to be coloured in, or a piece of music
on a page whose notes are waiting to be inserted.
But we also misunderstand the experimental process
in both arts and sciences if we label it simply ‘trial
and error’. For the way in which we pursue an inquiry
via a series of interventions, some of which go as
expected and others not, leading to a deepening and
enriching of our engagement with the world, can
itself be more fully elaborated.
Inquiry has a quite speciŽ c, tripartite structure,
whose features can be characterised in terms of the
‘hermeneutic circle’.2 One moment is the presence
of an existing set of involvements and abilities that
I already have, and which gives me my present grip
on a situation. A second moment is the often vague
sense – suspicion, hope, expectation – that I can
acquire more of a grip; that I can get more out of
this situation than I have already, that there is
something to be discovered. A third moment is the
presence of a sense of how to begin to get what I
want from the situation given the grip I already have
– how to go about struggling with the situation in
order to disclose what I am seeking, even if what I
eventually arrive at is diVerent from what I originally
envisioned. The point is that this process of inquiry
is not an arbitrary, robotic, or stepwise aVair in
which one Ž nds knowledge, then applies it, then Ž nds
more, but a continuous motion in which all three
moments are at work all the time. Each moment –
even simple pottering around, jamming, tinkering,
toying, improvising – is already a movement of
interpretation, a making explicit of what I already
understand, which assures, enriches, and deepens my
involvements and expectations.
Take something as seemingly simple as seeking to
produce a certain sound on a violin. We cannot
seriously describe this as a process of trial and error.
I simultaneously have an ability, however rudimentary,
to make some noise, however dreadful. I also have
an idea of a sound I want to be able to make which
I cannot yet. F inally, I have an intuition of how I
might be able to go about trying to transform my
ability on the instrument so as to get that kind of
sound, on the basis of the sound I can make now. In
learning to play the violin, I have all three dimensions
in play all the time, and only because I do am I able
to develop, deepen, and enrich my interaction with
the instrument.
This kind of inquiry process is structurally similar
in the arts and sciences, regardless of whether what
we seek is speciŽ c and realised in more or less the
form in which we imagine it, or something indistinct
and realised much diVerently than we imagine. N o
artwork or experiment springs into being entirely
Athena-like, out of the head of its creator. Try follow-
ing the evolution of the Ž nal form of an artwork or
experiment in the notebooks or logbooks of its creator.
That Ž nal form is generally preceded by day after
day, even year after year, of conversations, drafts,
plans, in the course of which it evolved – and before
that, by the prior history of generations of workers
in the same Ž eld. In both the arts and the sciences
this prehistory is an explorative, interrogatory process
whose structure can be described philosophically.
This feature is one reason why we sense a deep
kinship between these activities.
A second feature that we Ž nd in common between
the arts and the sciences is that the inquiry is carried
forward by staging the creation of some new material
product, and only such creation can further the inquiry.
In the arts, philosopher M aurice M erleau-Ponty notes
that ‘‘‘conception’’ cannot precede ‘‘execution’’. There
is nothing but a vague fever before the act of artistic
expression, and only the work itself, completed and
understood, is proof that there was something rather
than nothing to be said’.3 And in the sciences, experi-
ments are Ž rst and foremost material events in the
world, except in the peculiar case of thought experi-
ments, which test the consistency of theory and the
known; it is not enough merely to think them
up. Even when we seek something as apparently
abstract as a number, this number is a byproduct of
an elaborate staging. Events do not produce numbers
by themselves – they do so only when the action is
properly planned, prepared, and witnessed.
A third feature common to the arts and the sciences
is that they are meaning generating. The inquiries of
both the arts and sciences, when successful, are world
building; they change human culture and knowledge
by adding new things to them. Experiments in this
sense can be contrasted with demonstrations, which
recapitulate already existing knowledge for a purpose:
to inspire members of a small class into further
investigations; to dazzle members of a large class into
learning the material; to convince sceptical colleagues;
to impress reporters and politicians. Oversimplifying
a bit, artworks in this sense can be contrasted with
entertainment, which leaves the way we experience
our pleasures unchanged.
These three dimensions, I claim, are a large part
of what is behind the common intuition of a deep
kinship between the arts and the sciences. They are
also interrelated and overlapping, and elaborating
them will provide a key to further exploration of the
deep analogies between the arts and sciences.
Performance
These three dimensions are also aspects of conceiving
performance. The word has a broad spectrum of
meanings.4 N evertheless, one important way in which
it is conceived, especially in the dramatic arts, is as the
conception, production, and witnessing of material
events the experience of which gives us something more
than what we already have. When viewed in this way,
INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, 2003, VOL. 28, NO. 4 267
as I argued in T he Play of N ature: Experimentation
as Performance, the structure of performance is not
a metaphor that is extended merely suggestively from
the theatre arts into experimental science; it is the
same in both.5 In both, the representation (theory,
language, script ) used to programme the performance
does not completely determine the outcome ( product,
work), but only assists in our encounter with the new.
The world is wilder and richer than we can represent;
what appears in performance can (indeed, must )
exceed the programme used to put it together, and
can even surprise and baZe us. An experiment, for
instance, that has been planned and programmed on
the basis of a certain theory, can disclose things that
cause its creators to change the theory. The activity
of putting together a performance in the dramatic
arts can take us in directions that were unanticipated
by the performers and playwright, even when the
script is hallowed and frequently produced. That, in
fact, is why we stage performances. What, otherwise,
would be the point?
Thus in what follows, I shall discuss performance
as something that happens alike in the dramatic arts
and the sciences; to think otherwise would be to
interpose a false boundary. As a result the discussion
is bound to sound abstract or vague to those trained
to respect disciplinary boundaries, but it is no more
abstract than the kind of reasoning routinely practised
by professionals throughout the arts and the sciences.
A performance, conceived in this speciŽ c way, is
more than the application of a praxis, the application
of a skill or ability like carpentry or surgery; it is a
poiesis, a bringing forth of a phenomenon, something
with presence in the world, something which can be
returned to and which can appear in diVerent ways
in diVerent circumstances, thus exhibiting some law-
like behaviour. By ‘phenomenon’ I mean only some-
thing that can be returned to and recognised again
and again. I know this sounds vague, and assumes
sameness in diVerence, but that’s how I mean it and
how it is in real life. This deŽ nition of phenomenon
merely expresses the fact that in both our ordinary
living as well as in our scientiŽ c laboratories we
encounter the world not as something chaotic and
random, but as something having a certain structure,
as ordered, as full of things we can Ž nd again. In the
dramatic arts, we speak – loosely but not wrongly –
of seeing the same play, even though it is never done
twice in exactly the same way. And in the sciences
we speak of redoing an experiment, or doing it again,
or conŽ rming a result – even when the materials,
setup, and personnel are diVerent.
Performances have three features: they are pre-
sentational, are related to a representation, and
involve recognition. They are presentational in the
sense that they aim at being original, disclosive, and
revelatory rather than imitative or echoing. Were it
otherwise, performances would be super uous; the
performance of a drama would simply illustrate or
illuminate the words, and the performance of an
experiment would re ect merely the theory with which
268 INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, 2003, VOL. 28, NO. 4
it was staged. But because the world is richer than
we can represent, performances exceed what goes
into them – and that excess is why we stage them.
Instruments and theories that we understand well can
be set up and operated to show us things that may
lead us to improve the instruments or change the
theories. In this sense we may speak of a primacy of
performance: what occurs in performance orients and
sustains the skills and theories that went into it. Yet
successful performances promote the illusion that their
fruits precede them. This is what philosopher John
D ewey called the ‘philosophic fallacy’; taking the
results of inquiry as existing prior to it, when inquiry
creates rather than recalls these results.
Performances are related to a representation in that
this lawlike behaviour is represented or ‘programmed’
in part by texts, scripts, scores, frameworks, and so
forth, which are then correlated with techniques
and practices so that a phenomenon appears – the
work. Even improvisations take place in prepared
and familiar frames that structure and assist the ‘free’
performance that emerges. In the most formal cases
– a work of theatre, say – the representation structures
both the performance process and the work itself.
The script, for instance, both structures the actions
of the performers on the one hand, and describes
what transpires on stage (the work) on the other.
Expressed in phenomenological language, a repre-
sentation read noetically (with respect to its creating)
is something to be performed; read noematically (with
respect to the product, the creation), it describes the
object appearing in performance. My argument is that
something similar to this feature of theatre can be said
to hold true of the experimental activity of science.
A theory both tells us how to realise a phenomenon
(a n electron beam, for example) materially in a
laboratory, and also describes the phenomenon that
appears. But theories, to exaggerate somewhat to
stress the point, are fragile. Scripts are not inviolate
and sacred, but in actual use are changed to Ž t what
works in performance. An important complication,
however, is that a scientiŽ c term (such as ‘electron’)
can have a dual semantics, for it can refer both to an
abstract term in a theory and to a physical presence
in a laboratory. The diVerence is like that between a
‘C’ in a musical score and a ‘C’ heard in a concert
hall.6 Con ating these two usages has confused many
a philosopher of art, and of science.
Third, performances are staged in front of an
audience suitably prepared to recognise phenomena in
it. The philosophical literature on recognition stretches
all the way back to Aristotle, for whom recognition
is a transition from ignorance to knowledge, consists
of a perceptual act, is the result of a concernful
engagement with the world, and has unanticipated
consequences. It is possible to develop a concept of
recognition adequate to the kinds of performances I
am discussing here that would show how recognition
concerns the existence of a phenomenon or its presence
in the world, is dependent on the background context
or state of readable technologies, is temporal, is world
transforming, and involves the ever present possibility
of misrecognition. ScientiŽ c objects, for instance, often
have to be recognised amidst a confusing background.
The process can be likened to the experience described
by M erleau-Ponty of approaching what seemed to be
a tangle of poles and trees on the beach and suddenly
realising that amongst them were the remains of an
old, wrecked sailing ship. At Ž rst, the spars and masts
are latent and mixed confusingly with the forest border-
ing on the sand dune, producing a vague tension and
unease, until suddenly our sight is recast and we see
the ship, accompanied by a feeling of satisfaction
as the tension is relieved.7 ScientiŽ c objects are often
recognised via an analogous process. In the laboratory,
however, there is an important diVerence, for what
is at Ž rst latent and then recognised is brought
forward in an actively structured way. We are staging
what we are trying to recognise – we build both the
ship and the background environment in which we
try to separate it out from its surroundings. As a
result, the very way we are staging it may interfere
with our ability to recognise it, and we may have to
alter how we stage the experiment before what we
are seeking comes into relief.8
F inally, performance cannot be thought of in terms
of its product alone; performances must be produced,
that is, prepared by an advance set of behaviours
and decisions. Production refers to the set of decisions
made in advance of a performance necessary for it
to take place at all – which standardises the back-
ground, and makes it possible to speak of many of
‘the same’ kind of performance. For the conditions of
an experiment, like those of a theatrical production,
do not have a single solution. Confusing performance
and production has misled many a combatant in the
‘science wars’.
Artistry, technique, affect
The concept of performance can be used to explain
and elaborate various issues often felt to be similar
in the arts and sciences, including among others
artistry, technique, and aVective power.
Artistry
Performances can be classed in three kinds: mechanical
repetitions, standardised performances, and artistic
performances. M echanical repetition is exempliŽ ed
by CD s, videos, and player pianos, which are encoded
with signals that cause a device to recreate a perform-
ance. D emonstrations in science museums are often
like this. But the result, no matter how beautiful or
striking, is not a creation, only the echo of one. N o
uncertainty exists about the outcome. Standardised
performances are discussed below under technique.
Artistic performance is a special type that coaxes
something into being, something that has not pre-
viously appeared. It goes beyond the standardised
programme, it is action at the limit of the already
controlled and understood, it involves engagement
and risk. It brings something into material presence
via the hermeneutical process described above.
Technique
The concept of performance can also be used to
explain technique, which refers to a standardisation
of a performance practice. To speak only of science
for a moment, a technique is something that results
in measurements or in preparations of objects for
measurement or further manipulation. A technique
is to be distinguished from an eVect on the one hand,
and from a standardised technology on the other. An
eVect can be deŽ ned as a characteristic, instructive,
or useful consequence of a scientiŽ c phenomenon
(R utherford scattering, the D oppler eVect, the piezo-
electric eVect, and so forth). When an eVect is
sensitive to some soughtafter parameter of a system
(R utherford scattering is sensitive to charge and mass
distribution, the D oppler eVect to relative speed, and
the piezoelectric eVect can produce short, high voltage
bursts of electricity), the eVect is potentially useful as
a technique, because it can be used to alter, analyse,
or measure that parameter, or it can be put to use in
other performances. A technology can be thought of as
a technique transformed to be suYciently standardised
to become a ‘black box’, something whose principles
do not have to be fully grasped by a user. A black
box can be plugged in and used not only without
understanding its insides but also independently of its
context. A ‘D oppler gun’, for instance, can be used
to check the speeds of cars without understanding
wave mechanics, and under many diVerent kinds of
conditions.
Techniques in science, therefore, can be thought of
as part of a trajectory of increasing standardisation
and decontextualisation in which eVects are trans-
formed into techniques and techniques into tech-
nologies.9 A technique is not a Ž nal product, for we
are not interested in it per se but rather in what new
it enables us to do. But it is also not a black box,
automatic, entirely mechanical, a mere instrumental
means to an end, whose principles we have forgotten
and do not need; for we still have to have some
appreciation of what goes in to it. A technique is the
standardisation of a performance ability – something
we know how to do – well enough so that it fulŽ ls
expectations, and reliably enough so that instead of
using it to linger over and explore a phenomenon,
we can put it to the service of some other performance,
using it to deliver us to a situation where a new kind
of performance ability – a new kind of interplay with
phenomena – becomes possible. R ather, a technique
can be thought of as something we use, but whose
principles are still perspicuous to us, and thus still
under our control. Techniques, unlike technologies,
can be thought of as performance abilities that are
still ‘thick’, not transparent as a pane of glass is to a
viewer admiring a garden.
In theatre, the analogues of ‘eVects’ are spontaneous,
self-taught, ‘natural’ abilities to dance, play, or act;
INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, 2003, VOL. 28, NO. 4 269
recall, for instance, Chaliapin’s ‘natural genius’ in the
eyes of Stanislavsky, and the latter’s desire to develop
a technique which would enable actors who did not
have this ‘natural’ ability to perform as though they
did. The analogue to ‘some other end’ is the ability
to transfer this technique beyond one speciŽ c context
into others.10
Affective power
Performances can be enthralling; they are able to
exert aVective power over us, both in the arts and
sciences. We are invested in them; something is at
stake for us in their execution and outcome. We human
beings, who are predisposed to seek knowledge, Ž nd
ourselves moved to inquire into things in ways that
we can pursue only by planning and staging perform-
ances. Performances thus matter to us, for they aVect
our perceptions of nature and our place in it, in both
the arts and sciences. The thrall of performance is
often described in the arts, but happens in the sciences
as well. Experiments can enthrall not just students
but even and especially seasoned scientists, as is clear
from numerous stories from the history of science:11
In 1937, Tracy Sonneborn, a 32-year-old biologist at
Johns Hopkins University, was working late into the night
on an experiment involving the single-celled organism
Paramecium. For years biologists had been trying to
induce conjugation between paramecia, a process in which
two paramecia exchange genetic material across a cyto-
plasmic bridge. Now Sonneborn had isolated two strains
of paramecia that he believed would conjugate when
combined. If successful, his experiment would Ž nally
overcome a major obstacle to studies of protozoan
genetics. Sonneborn mixed the strains together on a slide
and put the slide under his microscope. Looking through
the eyepiece, he witnessed for the Ž rst time what he
would later call a ‘spectacular’ reaction: The paramecia
had clustered into large clumps and were conjugating. In
a state of delirious excitement, Sonneborn raced through
the halls of the deserted building looking for someone
with whom he could share his joy. F inally he dragged a
puzzled custodian back to the laboratory to peer through
the microscope and witness this marvelous phenomenon.
In 1965, Lawrence Passell, a physicist at Brookhaven
N ational Laboratory who was working at that lab’s
G raphite Research Reactor, was attempting to measure
a spin state of uranium, using polarised neutrons
(neutrons whose spins all point in the same direction)
and polarised uranium nuclei. After years of laborious
preparation which required building an elabora te
refrigerator to polarise the uranium, he and a
coworker Ž nally succeeded one night:12
I remember it well. It was about 10 o’clock when we
Ž nally got the thing cooled down, and we sat there
waiting to see whether we’d see any spin dependence …
The way this thing works is, you line up the nuclei in
one spin orientation, then you run it for about 10 minutes
with the neutrons like so [pointing his index Ž nger up],
then you  ip the neutron spin and you run it 10 minutes
that way [pointing down], and back and forth [alternating
up and down] … We waited 10 minutes, and realized –
wow! – the count rate was down! Could we be seeing
something? M aybe! So we sat there watching, and sure
270 INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, 2003, VOL. 28, NO. 4
enough every 10 minutes we’d see this change in the
count rate. And we sat there until about 2 o’clock in
the morning, till we really believed that this was not just
a statistical  uke, it was real. I remember I went home that
night, and, boy, I could hardly sleep I was so excited …
We knew we had it … The whole thing sort of fell into
place. It was one of the great moments in my life.
And R ichard Taylor once recalled the impact that
the Ž rst results of an experiment had on those who
participated when, after years of preparation, it Ž nally
began to run in 1978. The experimenters had created
polarized electrons, accelerated them, and shot them
into a batch of protons and neutrons. They were
looking for evidence of parity violation, which would
appear in the form of a diVerence in the counting
rate for electrons polarised in diVerent directions:13
You’d run for a while and be above the line [Taylor holds
his hand above an imaginary line indicating the value for
unpolarized electrons], then you’d change polarization
and it dropped below [plunging his hand underneath]. I
remember that in just three days you went from wonder-
ing whether the experiment was going to work to being
pretty sure that you knew that there was parity violation.
That, I mean, that’s why you do this business. That
feeling of knowing something before anybody else. It’s,
ah, it’s why you’re here.
H istorians and philosophers often ignore the passions
clearly evident in such stories in their accounts of
science, discussing various aspects of experiments and
discoveries while failing to address either the desire
that motivates human beings to pursue them, or the
particular kind of deep satisfaction that results. It is
revealing to examine the motivations behind this.
Some scholars ignore such passions to emphasise
the rationality of science, its logic or justiŽ cation.
But the picture of science that tends to emerge
unfortunately can suggest that science is a robotic pro-
cess of hypothesis formation, testing, and hypothesis
reformulation – a vast intellectual game. Other
historians and philosophers explore the social dimen-
sions of science, its social and cultural context as
revealed by its politics, funding, or beneŽ ts. These
are indeed interesting, important, and often ignored
subjects. But if this is done exclusively, it can suggest
that science is merely a vast power struggle conducted
by a special interest group determined to advance its
own cause, and that science is essentially a political or
legal negotiation in which the parties swap interests.14
It is tempting to take such ‘how we work’ scenarios,
as philosopher M axine Sheets-Johnstone sarcastically
dubs them, at face value, and accept them as true
descriptions. But they are only models, formalisations,
abstractions, and like any demonstration of a complex
process they have been put together with a pur-
pose and ideology.15 The unspoken agenda of each
approach is to eliminate the body from science. The
logic oriented scholars want to eliminate the body,
and to reconstruct science without its aVective dimen-
sion because it appears to introduce an element of
personality, arbitrariness, and irrationality into what
they see as an impersonal and objective process. And
those scholars who focus exclusively on the social
dimensions of science want to eliminate the body
for the opposite reason – because admitting the
foundational role of the animate human body in
knowledge threatens to deŽ ne generative and originary
structures of human experience that would not only
resist being reduced to social dimensions but would
indeed to some extent drive them. Every human act,
Sheets-Johnstone points out, is generated not in some
mental space but by ‘a spontaneous bodily happening
that is felt’. Moreover, such a felt bodily meaning never
evaporates but persists – ‘it fuels the explorations it
initiates’ – thus keeping our bodies relevant even in
our seemingly abstract inquiries, and making philo-
sophical and scientiŽ c inquiry possible as communally
practised, timeless, and inŽ nite tasks.16 Acknowledging
the role of the body, and allowing it to enter into our
descriptions, in no way diminishes the achievements
of the inquiries, but rather makes our descriptions of
them truer. For what performance aims at involves
an intrinsic good, while the idiom of power struggle
reduces all goods to instrumental goods. The social
constructivist approach to science therefore is just
as dehumanising as the logic oriented approach
which depicts science in overly rational terms. Both
approaches, therefore, tend to produce images of
science that are oversimpliŽ ed and distorted. Scientists
work with their entire bodies – not with their intellects
alone, but with their  esh and blood – meaning that
their work has an irreducibly aVective dimension, a
compelling attraction.17
The aVective dimension of theatre and art is, of
course, a much discussed topic,18 and one could hardly
take seriously a theory of aesthetics that omitted an
account of it. But philosophies of science often bypass
the aVective dimension, thereby failing to understand
much of what science is and how it works. If we strip
science of its elements of aVect and beauty we badly
misrepresent it, and the result is a picture of science
that is an academic Ž gment, an artefact. To treat
science as all about logic is like treating the human
reproductive process as all about species procreation.
Some individuals or social groups can indeed decide
to treat it that way – to adopt it as one’s own view,
try to live accordingly, and proselytise that view to
others – but those who do so are in the grip, con-
sciously or unconsciously, of a fundamentalist logic
that elevates one particular value over the myriad of
others that appear in human experience. U ltimately,
this simpliŽ ed approach is not a human way of look-
ing at science – as it is not a human way of looking
at human reproduction – for it does not encompass
all sides of the phenomenon we are examining. On
the other hand, individuals or groups can treat science
as a power grab, a quest for domination and control
– but that would be like treating human reproduction
as all about the satisfaction of carnal lust. This can
be adopted as a way of life as well – but it, too, is
an ideology making its own power grab, rather than
a human way of looking at the phenomenon. A
human response attempts to look at, and understand
the place of, all of a phenomenon’s myriad proŽ les.
If we know either science or art only by its logic or
justiŽ cations on the one hand, or by its politics,
interests, funding, or material achievements on the
other, then we fail to understand it.
F inally, understanding science as performance
allows us to bypass the ultimately fruitless debate of
the science wars as to whether science is principally
interest driven, that is developed in response to
changing human wants, needs, and utilities, or event
driven, that is developed in response to real physical
events.19 A performance, whether in the arts or
sciences, is driven simultaneously by what happens
in the workshop or laboratory, and by historically
and culturally driven interests.
Conclusion
Both the dramatic arts and sciences involve forms
of inquiry which proceed by staging performances,
material events in the world which are capable of bring-
ing phenomena into being which have not appeared
before. Both involve a primacy of performance over
the texts and theories, practices and instruments used
to stage them; that is, phenomena that appear in
performance can be reached (i.e. performed ) in other
ways, and can be used to guide changes in the texts,
theories, practices, and instruments used to stage
them. The concept of performance shows how inquiry
in both the arts and the sciences is of necessity open
ended. Performances arise out of, and are addressed
to, local, historically and culturally bounded com-
munities, evolving out of an existing involvement
with, and understanding of, a concrete situation
that is constantly related both to past and future.
But performances never attain a perspective ‘from
nowhere’.
The concept of performance can allow us to under-
stand better the nature and role of such things as
artistry, technique, the aVective dimension of the arts
and sciences, and other dimensions not discussed
here. Articulating further the role of performance in
the arts and sciences provides a suitable framework
for articulating the deep aYnities between them.
Notes and literature cited
1. h. l. dreyfus: ‘Intelligence without representation’,
1998, www.hfac.uh.edu/cogsci/dreyfus.html.
2. m. heidegger: Being and Time, (trans. Joan Stambaugh),
32; 1996, Albany, N Y, SU N Y Press (Ž rst published
1927); r. p. crease: The Play of Nature: Ex perimentation
as Performance, 64–65; 1993, Bloomington, IN , Indiana
U niversity Press.
3. m. merleau-ponty: ‘Cezanne’s doubt’, in Essential
W ritings of M erleau-Ponty, 244; 1969, N ew York, N Y,
H arcourt Brace.
4. b. states: ‘Performance as metaphor’, T heatre Journal,
1996, 48, 1–26.
5. r. p. crease: T he Play of N ature (see N ote 2);
‘R esponsive order: the phenomenology of dramatic and
scientiŽ c performance’, in Creativity in Performance,
(ed. R . K eith Sawyer); 1997, Greenwich, CT, Ablex;
INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, 2003, VOL. 28, NO. 4 271
 ‘Introduction’, in Hermeneutics and the N atural Sciences,
(ed. R . P. Crease); 1997, Dordrecht, K luwer; ‘The hard
case: science and hermeneutics’, in T he Very Idea of
R adical Hermeneutics, (ed. R oy M artinez), 96–105;
Atlantic H ighlands, N J, Humanities Press.
6. p. heelan: ‘After experiment: realism and research’,
A merican Philosophical Quarterly, 1989, 26, 297–308;
r. p. crease: T he Play of N ature, pp. 88–89 (see N ote 2).
7. m. merleau-ponty: Phenomenology of Perception, (trans.
Colin Smith); 1962, N ew York, N Y, R outledge &
K egan Paul.
8. r. p. crease: ‘What is an artifact?’, Philosophy Today,
1998, 42, (SPEP Suppl.), 160–168.
9. r. p. crease: ‘H ow technique is changing science’,
S cience, 1992, 257, 344–353.
10. r. p. crease and j. lutterbie: ‘Technique’, in Theater and
Philosophy, (ed. D. Saltz and D. Krasner); U niversity
of M ichigan Press, forthcoming.
11. committee on science, engineering, and public policy:
On Being a S cientist: R esponsible Conduct in R esearch,
2nd edn, 1; 1995, Washington, DC, National Academy
Press.
12. Passell was speaking on a historical video, Brookhaven
Graphite R esearch Reactor, produced by Brookhaven
N ational Laboratory in 2001.
13. r. p. crease and c. mann: The Second Creation: M akers
of the R evolution in 20th Century Physics, 388–389;
1996, New Brunswick, N J, Rutgers University Press.
14. m. eger: ‘Achievements of the hermeneutic-
phenomenological approach to natural science: a com-
parison with constructivist sociology’, in H ermeneutics
and the Natural Sciences, (ed. R obert P. Crease),
85–109; 1997, D ordrecht, Kluwer.
272 INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, 2003, VOL. 28, NO. 4
15. r. p. crease: T he Prism and the Pendulum: T he Ten
M ost Beautiful Ex periments in S cience; 2003, N ew
York, N Y, Random H ouse.
16. m. sheets-johnstone: T he Primacy of M ovement, 337,
333; 1999, Philadelphia, PA, John Benjamins.
17. r. p. crease: T he Prism and the Pendulum (see N ote 15).
18. See for example e. konijn: A cting Emotions: S haping
Emotions on Stage; 2000, Amsterdam, Amsterdam
U niversity Press.
19. r. p. crease: ‘Productive objectivity: the hermeneutics
of performance in experimental inquiry’, in Hermeneutics
and S cience, (ed. M . Fehér, O. K iss, and L. Ropoli),
25–34; 1999, Dordrecht, Kluwer.
Robert P. Crease
D epartment of Philosophy
Stony Brook University
Stony Brook
N Y 11794
U SA
rcrease@notes.cc.sunysb.edu
R obert P. Crease is a professor in the D epartment of
Philosophy at Stony Brook University, a historian at
Brookhaven N ational Laboratory, and writes a column,
‘Critical point’, for Physics W orld magazine. He is the
author, most recently, of T he Prism and the Pendulum: T he
Ten M ost Beautiful Ex periments in Science (2003, Random
H ouse).
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