ABSTRACT Beginning with the meaning and use of the word “performance,” this essay analyzes some of the ambiguities and tensions performance has historically engendered. These tensions were both social and epistemic and can be sketched out with relation to either the corrupting influences of performance as dissimulation and masquerade or its didactic possibilities as exemplary of morality, virtue, and truth. Following these tensions across the history of antitheatrical literature into early modern natural philosophy, the essay attempts to show some of (...) the ways that natural philosophy was used to perform—regulate, discipline, and direct—its audience(s), while simultaneously being itself performed—through interlocking practices enacted by sites, objects, and humans—as demonstrative of the legitimacy of its social and epistemic authority. (shrink)

Whilst the ‘local culture’ of experimental natural philosophy in seventeenth-century England drew on ‘resources’ supplied by the gentlemanly identity of men like Robert Boyle, this culture found much of its distinctiveness in a series of exclusions having to do with faith, gender and class. My concern in this essay is less with these exclusions, and the distinctions they enabled, than with their surreptitious returns. Following from this, as a heuristic strategy, I will try to understand how Boyle and Co. used (...) and reacted to, repressed and cathected, that which they sought to exclude. By charting the movements of exile and return across the contested frontiers of class, gender and faith, truth and lies, authenticity and performance, we can, I believe, fruitfully complicate our understandings of both the social history of truth, and the social history of our ‘post-truth’ predicament. (shrink)