Although concentrated on formidable readings of Nietzsche and Husserl, and inclusive of rich commentaries on conceptual genealogies that stretch from the staged scientific work of Robert Boyle to zen koans to love and friendship, Avital Ronell’s The Test Drive is a surpassing book that is dense with themes directly related to theatre, performance theory and theatre/performance studies. The Test Drive, which follows Ronell’s cleverly suggestive exegises, Stupidity (2002), addresses the “paraconcept” of tests and testing as it has evolved historically and plays into daily life, ethical practices, social policy, and, fundamental western conceptions of the arts and science. Whether the matter at hand is the pursuit of legal, scientific, or artistic “truth” - or, accepting certain test conditions and shaking hands with the Devil - some test or a testing paradigm are invoked or patently defined. In the modern era, testing is implemented as an integral component of nearly all forms experimentation and underlies what Ronell, following Nietzsche, identifies as our “experimental disposition.” As for the arts and performance, The Test Drive, with a built-in Freudian pun in its title, has the unexpected effect of reframing approaches to aesthetic responses to actor training, audiences' reception and other matters relating to theatre and performance. Ronell’s study also throws a timely light on performance and epistemology, ethics and what I call aesthetic research, or the systematic pursuit and engagement of research by artists in all domains, genres and media. At this moment, where “testing” in the sciences and technology are valorized and the value of the arts and performance are incessantly questioned, Ronell’s analyses raises probing questions about whether our drive to test is a realm of performance to which we should pay more attention.   

            Theatre and performance are mentioned incidentally by Ronell, but readers with backgrounds in these areas will not be able to avoid reconstructing the threads of her argument, every example she uses as well as her high wire prose style and the structure of the book itself, into performance categories. One chapter is in the form of a monologue by Edmund Husserl, where he diffidently ruminates on his relative neglect and the fate of philosophy in the late 20^th century. Each of the book’s six parts are comprised of closely reasoned sections and subsections, narrative asides and personal remarks, along with jolting analyses. It also contains a clever shuffle of graphics and several sets of black and white photographs by Suzanne Doppelt. The enigmatic images appear to be laboratory documentations that imply a coded universe. Throughout, Ronell explores the complexities of such inherently theatrical situations as the relationship between master and slave and its connection to torture and truth telling. Plato and Aristotle assessed torture and questions about its ethics and efficacy remain pertinent today. She also delves into the “exquisite discipline and daring askesis” of the Zen teacher and his students. The pair exhaustively replay “the scene of the proto-pedagogy” called forth by the test posed in the “the restricted theater of the koan.” Responding to the unanswerable koan posed by a Master takes years, during which the adept plunges into periods of extreme doubt and endures demanding exercises before reaching enlightenment. Other “test sites” and scenarios Ronell references include scientific laboratories, the legal system, the university classroom, the man verses machine and Artificial Intelligence debates incited by the Turing Test (is it real or a machine?), and, via Nietzsche, tests of love and friendship. Nietzsche leads her to examine what was for him, the ultimate test site of freedom and self-making, America itself. Up to date, she asks what did President Bush mean when, a few hours after the 9/11 attacks, he stated that “This was a test”?

            As for more literary contexts, Ronell appraises Biblical figures including god, Job and Abraham. A German studies scholar, and student and friend of Derrida (to whom she dedicates the book), Ronell explores several of Kafka texts as well as Hamlet, Julius Caesar and King Lear. Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle clearly about tests as are many of his stories, such as “The Test,” a narration by an unemployed servant. It does not take much reflection to recast Shakespeare in terms of testing. Consider the tests of abstinence and the writing contest in Love Labor’s Lost; Falstaff and Othello testing their loyalty and friendship; and the entire test sites of illusion and reality in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and on Prospero’s island. While reading The Test Drive, I thought of the tests of the hero and in myth (from Odysseus proving his identity to Penelope to the challenge of Orpheus). Greek tragedy turn on decisive tests ranging from the riddle put to Oedipus and the and Creon’s law and Antigone’s response; and, is not the resolve of the women in Lysistrata a test of ethics and testosterone? Marlow and Goethe’s Fausts, and plays by Ibsen, Pirandello and Pinter would be intriguing to assess via Ronell’s test paraconcept. Other modern dramatists - Wilde, Shaw, Artaud, Brecht, Beckett - construct dramas around tests of identity, social action, and the limitations of representation, language and ideology. The body, of course, is a site of relentless testing in both training and performance. The work of Grotowski, Marina Abromovic, Stelarc and Orlan, among others, are entangled with tests and interrogations. Place, environment, landscapes, which have become vital to performances are, in effect, “test sites” where, in Ronell’s terms, “the real awaits confirmation” (171). In addition, numerous postmodern theatre and performance pieces center on testing the basic practices of theatre, acting, language, the voice, the possibilities of the body, not to mention, after Beckett, the entire enterprise of theatre.

            Were I to teach a course, I would add The Test Drive to studies such as Joseph Roach’s The Player's Passion, Jon Mckenzie's Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance, Robert Crease's The Play of Nature: Experimentation as Performance and writings of Herbert Blau, Donna Haraway, and Daniel Dennett. Recurring questions in the course would focus on theatre, performance, and acting as tests and testing situations. What tests are created, why, how, by whom and for what under different cultural and historical conditions are other matters of inquiry? How are actors and audiences tested? What drives testing in theatre/performance? If experimentation and tests, in the modern scientific sense, lead to knowledge, what do the performance and dramatization of tests and testing yield? Underlying these questions, which each of the books above considers, are the following: when considered from the perspective of performance, how are the arts and science related and what, when thoroughly examined, are the differences between the arts and sciences? What does science have to learn from the performance and the arts and the arts from science? As a tentative response, Ronell’s study, with its philosophical thrust, drives home several critical arguments. First, if one of the fundamental aspects of the scientific quest for knowledge is determined by the test, which is a “drive” within us, then there are abundant examples of tests and testing, and the resulting knowledge, in the worlds of theatre and performance, which are epistemologically driven. Second, invoked through a Nietzschean ideal, art, which admits its subjectivism, affirmation of play and is fearlessly open to ceaseless revision, could be seen as a model for the sciences. In Ronnel’ words, “Art at no point derives its authority from institutional divisions or scientific hegemonies. Art introduces a vitality capable of hosing down the strictures of morality. The necessarily subversive force for of art and play challenges the stability of morality as we know it, and, when in concert with science, repels those recodifications slavishly beholden to moralistic descriptions.” (211) A final key issue is representation. Insofar as testing always involves performance, what are the relationships between the “results” of test and their staging and performative structures and conditions.      

           Throughout The Test Drive, Ronell constructs the problematic of the present, where our moral and institutional authorities tend to privilege the test over knowledge, either as results or in larger schemes of cultural realities. For her, the test drive is increasingly significant because of the inescapable, overwhelming forces of science and scientific thinking and its institutions and versions of practice in modern life. The stakes are high, very. Nuclear missile testing and testing for HIV are complex subjects. Think of your own experiences: whether under the rubric of check-ups, evaluation or assessment, it is unlikely that your health, finances, professional status, or political views have not been recently tested or measured in some way. Daily, we hear of test results on foodstuffs and environmental conditions. If you watch television, Criminal Minds and the CSI programs (Crime Scene Investigation) and other police and hospital programs (House, ER) are predicated on the hypothesis-evidence-proof-test cycle, which structures the narrative, drama and morality of every episode. The task and performance saturated “reality shows” like Survivor, American Idol and their spin-offs determine success after the completion of physical and psychological tests. (I suspect that those who concoct the stunts for these programs may have studied the history of the edgier streams of performance art). If you are in a university, are a teacher or have children, well, tests are us. Ronell probes our practices and desire to test and our complicity in the acceptance of the authority of testing. For her, it comes down to several crucial questions: “Why has the test – throughout history, and perhaps most pervasively today – come to define our relation to questions of truth, knowledge and even reality?” (her italics,18). Moreover, since test and testing rely on audiences and their responses, that is, a “colloquy of witnesses, evidence, repeatability, and an entire network of apparatuses meant to enforce the test and its findings” (19), are we not in a predicament where tests and testing “has restructured the field of everyday and psychic life” leading to “often irreversible discursive tendencies and mandating critical decisions.”? (19).

            In short, "passing the test" all to often establishes credibility and implies "truth." But, drawing on various sources, Ronell demonstrates that test and testing, in the scientific sense, is a well-conceived fabrication, derived from hypothesis and bound to the project of experimentation which is, nevertheless, inextricably interwoven with philosophical “protocols.” Whatever is being tested – a chemical reaction, bumpers, intelligence – is a link in a chain of infinite possibilities and performance events entailing other tests and multiplicitous relationships to be tested. If something becomes known and provable, as a result of testing, it is only so until other tests or experimental situations appear. Tests and experiments, in other words, test what they are designed to test, delimiting what is it possible to test under any given condition, and, simultaneously, can be invalidated by repetition or by novel circumstances that are, possibly, inclusive of what has been overlooked in the first place. Of course, new information can revise the findings of a previous test. Consider the drugs that work for one group of patients, but not another; consider side effects.

            Philosophically, Ronell’s inquiry rumbles with teleological undercurrents: “Essentially relational and not static, testing admits of no divine principle of intelligibility, no first word of grace or truth, no final meaning, no privileged signified.” (9) More poetically, she phrases it this way: “think of the test as that which advances the technological gaze as if nothing were.” (14) She neither fears nor attacks science, per se. It is our current cultural epistemé and the chasm that has opened between science, philosophy and epistemology that exasperates her. She approaches the separation from different perspectives, including a resonant 1919 book by Max Weber, On Universities: The Power of the State and the Dignity of the Academic Calling in Imperial Germany. Weber’s study aims to both question and promote modern science in university education. Reflecting on the arts and sciences historically, Weber states that, “To the artistic experimenters of the type of Leonardo and the musical innovators, science meant the path to true art, and that meant for them the path to true nature…with reference to the meaning of life”(198). Ronell does not wholly agree with Weber, but his central query is worth asking today: what is the path of contemporary art and science? Nature, surely, is a highly problematic concept as is "the meaning of life.” Yet, perhaps it is possible to reconstitute overarching questions about the aims of the arts and sciences, as Ronell's study does, by underscoring their affinities and reconsidering the test paraconcept. 

            Acknowledging, but rejecting pessimistic interpretations, Ronell’s intent is to recognize, and avow the practices of testing and aims of science, while calling upon science to answer to philosophical concerns and admit its more disconcerting self-characterizations. Using Nietzsche’s phrase, and enthusiasm, she points out that, after all, science “amazes us” as it inexorably revises and tests itself and, occasionally, arrives at unequivocal certitudes about the natural world. Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, which is more accurately translated as the “joyous” science, is at the center of The Test Drive. A wildly personal, dense fusion of poems and aphorisms, Nietzsche’s book is a complex performance itself. It profoundly and mockingly plays with polemics on the significance of modern science, the arts, knowledge, health, freedom, friendship, culture and the persistent schemes for testing oneself. For Nietzsche, who prefigures Weber, the goal of science should be to affirm life, with positive affect. That is, imagine this: science should be joyous and conduct itself with a fearlessness in confronting reality and experience. (Of course, some scientists do admit to the sheer fun of what they do). One trajectory of Ronell’s argument traces how, in this respect, Nietzsche regarded art as a prelude to science. Adopting Nietzsche gustatory troping, she writes, “Art trains us for science making its scandalously uninhibited observations palatable. Art has given us a taste for science. These developing taste buds are important since without them science’s collaboration would provoke severe nausea” (211). The crux of the proposition is that, like the arts, science, for purists, is an unbounded, fantastical, risk-taking. In performance, art entices the unknown. Similarly, Ronell points out, a “research experiment is a device…that brings forth something unknown.” Clearly, Ronell, like Nietzsche, is thinking about ordinary scientific practice from an idealized perspective. In fact, she repeatedly decries the narrowness of a type of science that does not recognize its own essentiality. “Every scientific statement must relinquish its hope for permanence or its craving to be right,” she asserts, which is difficult for the workaday scientist and frustrates the prevailing, modernist mythos and politics of science.

            The more the discussion advances in The Test Drive, the more Ronell/Nietzsche’s ontological conception of science and scientific practices resemble fundamental, but for the most part unacknowledged, unrecognized processes and practices in the arts and performance. She states that “Science and art continue to share a knowledge of the unreliability of the referent, and “the terror, the same feeling of unpredictability”; both speak beyond the limits of their possibility; both understand experiment as a freedom from the constraints of referential truth” (228). Writing on the experiment, “as the master story of the history of science,” Ronell remarks, as if defining performance via Herbert Blau, that her intent is to place an “emphasis on instabilities and indeterminabilities of permanence and substance, essence and existence, as well as the turn around of truth with which the scientist contends” (51). Substitute director, actor, dancer, painter, composer for scientist and a performance centered aesthetic emerges.

 

            What is to be gained by thinking of tests, experiments, and the philosophical disposition of The Test Drive in terms of the arts and performance? One idea cogently suggested is that the arts and sciences are far more closely related than is usually argued. Ronell's book realigns the limp “two cultures” debate by underscoring how the essential procedures and mechanisms of Science and experimentation can be seen as synonymous with aesthetic practices. Her account of Robert Boyle’s experiments and progress reminded me of projects by performance and conceptual artists (Linda Montano, Vito Acconci) and current Internet and digital interactive performers. Of Boyle, she wrote that his “lab became a space open for inspection: the installation of a public access code was dues to the fact that Boyle needed his work to be countersigned, witnessed. Not only were many of his experimental narrative shapes by epistolary conventions, but they became chain letters, petitioning for signatures…” (94). Ronell does not develop a theatrical analogy, per se, for science as, for example, Robert Crease does in his finely tuned, philosophically grounded 1993 study, The Play of Nature: Experimentation as Performance. For Crease, every aspect of scientific activity can be processed in a theatre/performance construct. Although Crease’s model of theatre is Aristolean and conventional, one of his most insightful discussions focuses on how it is important to recognize that, while the common perception of contemporary science operates as a massive institutional force, as “Big” science, there is also an enduring system of “Little” science that, as in small theatre and localized performance spaces, develops its own productions under controlled conditions for initiated audiences and specialized discourses. Another superb study, Jon Mckenzie's Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance, keys in on performance theory and its discourses in its conceptual grounding in academia, the sciences, technological experimentation, the workplace and business.In the context of 20^th century and, especially, current art and performance, whether the examples are music and sonic art forms or the interdisciplinarization of performance, technology and theory, the projects of science, technology and the arts are decidedly closing. Jon Stephen Wilson’s recent anthology, Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology (2002) highlights computer based art, bio-art and other aesthetic research projects, demonstrating how the gap is, for some projects, indistinguishable.

            On numerous pages of The Test Drive, acts of discovery during performance and the workshop/rehearsal process, which Crease also considers, come to mind. Performers from musicians and conductors, as well as directors, and choreographers do exercises, play and revise themselves, send up trial balloons, test ideas and transform missteps into useful material. Theory and practice interweave in the work of individual artists and groups. In the sciences, Ronell indicares, the process can be, unfortunately, different: “failure cannot be pegged or evaluated as such; it get absorbed into the heat of testing, becoming its supreme articulation in a movement that provokes ruptures without interruption – or ruptures that do not interrupt.” (10) It is here, where the open-ended activity and models of inquiry in the arts becomes instructive. The testing of the actor or dancer’s body and the development of techniques and training, especially those that revolve around play and games, provides a pertinent example. In The Player’s Passion, Joseph Roach describes how an actor initially falters in a role. “As he repeats himself in rehearsal and exercises, however, testing his imagination, probing his physical and mental limits, these hesitancies tend to fall away…” (16). What Roach says of acting could applies to the tasks of the poet, sculptor or digital artist.

            In her discussion of The Gay Science, Ronell considers how, for Nietzsche, the very notion of experimentum or experience is equally interconnected to the yoke of authority (experiments prove the theory) and the potentiality of experience as being disruptive and destructive/creative (experience as teacher). This dual aspect of Experimentum/ experience is exactly what characterizes performance in certain formulations. That is, the active position of simultaneously knowing and desiring to know more in the moment, as well as being creative in a dialogic relationship with art’s inherent play of meaning, tension and irresolution. Of course, not all experience teaches. Nietzsche mocks the religious notion of experience which leads to rebirths and transcendental understandings. Better, as Ronell quotes him, to “scrutinize our experiences as severely as a scientific experiment – hour after hour, day after day. We ourselves wish to be our experiments and guinea pigs.” (209)

            Overall, while some of Nietzsche’s rhetorical flare-ups border on the hysterical, I find these propositions to be integral to issues in performance and aesthetic theory in general. Performance theory reminds us that the work (of art, of the audience, of scholarship) is not finished just because the performance has concluded. Meanings shift, traditions are not stable, scholarship and new interpretative communities revise works, and the experience of a work of art across cultures is constantly a test of it. Often, “minor” or incidental art contributes to more realized work. Above all, that which is “classical” was once likely an “experiment” testing the aesthetic values of its time. It could be argued that every performance of Beethoven or Chekhov today is as socially and cognitively experimental, in relation to knowing human psychology, as tests of anxiety reducing drugs. Unfortunately, we regard the former as diversion rather than remedy.

            In other commentaries on The Gay Science, Ronell intriguingly verges into analysis of Karl Popper’s philosophy of science, Dionysian excesses and Christian logic, the force of personality, evil, chance, irony and desire. Drawing on the work of Paul de Man, she invokes his conceit that art and science are not unlike the Hellenic figures of the alazon and the eiron. These comic types represent modes of certainty and uncertainty and assume the type-casting as the pseudo-smart guy and the knowing dumb guy, respectively. Unaware of their own shortcomings, they antagonize yet deeply need each other. Socrates is, of course, a pivotal figure in this role of a knowing/unknowing performer. Brecht’s Galileo and Adzak, are modern combinations of the two. John Cage’s embrace of Zen and indeterminacy and the irony in the best interdisciplinary, technological performance works keep us tuned to how our knowledges and expressivity, forms of representation, and tools are all too provisional in the scheme of things. Ronell's critique that “the very structure of testing tends to overtake the certainty that it establishes when obeying the call of open finitude” (5) is applicable to tests in performance and the arts, where a sense of infinity is, or should be, a characteristic of every event. 

            Ultimately, it is important to note, Nietzsche warned against totally becoming actors, perpetual changlings in the California sunshine. “Clearly,” Ronell, writes, as if advising Orlan or Stelarc, “there is a price to be paid by the experimental player. One cannot remain detached from the activity of intense experimentation but finds oneself subject to morphing” (192). This is particularly the case, prophet Nietzsche warned, when it comes to the “theater of politics and value-positing stunts” (193). Nietzsche’s self-correction is not intended to abate performance and stop the surgery, but to continuously and rigorously innovate, to live with “brief habits“ that can be useful for interrogating the self’s progress. With this argument, however, as Ronell shows, he becomes contradictory, and, teeters there, unable to convincingly shed the too many masks he puts on all too briefly. Regardless, another value of Ronell's book is to remind readers of how much performance theory is to be found in Nietzsche's writings.    

            There are, of course, no common methodologies, techniques or “tests” for evaluating, retesting, let alone predicting the qualities of a work of art. And, while there are practices and theories, there is no universal criteria for making or responding to art. A precise result sought by a work of art work that can be repeated by others is rarely desired, although Hollywood or Broadway formulae for creating blockbusters is an attempt. There has also been art produced after survey and data collection (cynically by the Russian duo, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid), which proved little since it was aiming for “average” audience valuation of the best American painting. Yet, yet, if we were to systematically review institutional procedures, from the criteria for museum exhibitions to the authority of scholarly research, there are clearly standards for evaluation for the arts, which are constantly being put to the “test” by artists and philosophically explored. The fact that the arts have not set universal standards promotes art’s self-correcting testing of its own boundaries and essential correlation with the human imagination.

            The point to be made here is that merely because, for the sciences, standardization of a methodology or institutional validation exists, that is not sufficient to guarantee rigor in its execution, or review. Moreover, the very conceptualizations and intellectual processes revolving around scientific work need not be regarded as any less rigorous than artistic or aesthetic practices and scholarship in the arts. In short, the prevailing conviction that the work of science and scientists are valorized -- and better funded -- because of the checks and balances of the scientific method, should be challenged, as critics such as Bruno Latour often do. Perhaps, the phrase it’s not rocket science, should be replaced by it’s not acting or virtuoso piano playing. Or, to adapt Ronell’s typology, ‘truth, knowledge and reality’ are no less, and arguably more accessible through the arts than through science. In part, if truths and knowledge could be identified, it is because the differences between them are less significant than it may seem when assessed in rigorous critical contexts. It may be, Ronell’s work implies, that the orientation toward truth and reality that separate the arts and sciences are more the result of the politics and genealogies of historical and institutional behavior rather than consistent thinking. For example, she discusses theorist Hans Rheinberger, who describes how Science is an open system, gradually finding pieces of a great puzzle that is, after all, a representation of the natural world, which includes humans. When all of the data does not cohere, which it rarely does, when surprises occur, science needs to recognize, if not affirm, its own project of illusion making. In a sense, following Nietzsche, “Art gives science permission, a license that has since been revoked. Invoking a kind of willed blindness, the work of the experimenter resembles the trial of the artist” (47). In this context, I also think of the verbal and visual metaphoricalizations of reality Science adopts: neuronal maps, string theory, the Ice Age. Science may yet discover what killed off the dinosaurs, but the physical appearance of dinosaurs and the mise en scené of their landscapes will be, in the end, aesthetic productions.

            The writings of Lyotard, Latour, Harraway and others have long punctured the myth of a monolithic reign of modern science. As for the view that science addresses the “real world” and “life threatening problems,” is it not time to re-evaluate that belief system and its consequences? Will our society be improved, enlightened - more sane - by investigating, say, love and social relationships by scientific projects involving pherome measurements, or social scientific “experiments” in the form of interactive questionnaires and quantitative analysis? Would not thoughtfully reading literature and philosophy, attending theatre and concerts, engaging in serious study of love in art and myth potentially be at least effective? Or, it is possible to find ways of knowing that combine understandings, whatever their source, in coherent or complementary versions? After more than twenty years of teaching and being in universities, I have no doubt that the education in creativity, critical thinking about performance, narrative, art forms, and signs and symbols provided in theatre, arts and literature departments has produced citizens who can respond to contemporary media and politics with more awareness, ethics and insight than students from schools of communication and sociology. It is also well known that the more successful mathematicians, engineers and scientists, which Americans routinely hear that we desperately need, have solid art education in their early years. Train more musicians in public elementary schools and we will have more scientists.

            When talking about Ronell’s book, I encountered objections, by artists and colleagues, to approaching the arts in relation to discourses of the sciences. Artists want to protect their provinces of knowing and uniqueness; there is a resistance to any loss of subjectivity or perceived objectification of artistic work or processes. The very mention of tests and testing, though not experimentation, appears to be an anathema. Yet, art and performance exist in relation to audiences with standards, which may change, yet function ostensibly to “test” works by an artist or group against itself and other texts. We ask, in effect, was this performance as full, effective, transforming as the previous one by the same playwright? How does this work stand in relation to others? The critical and scholarly project itself is a version of testing, and it tests itself, in turn creating “discursive” tendencies that fluctuate, but nevertheless continually examine its subjects. This is accomplished with great seriousness and care. Which is to say, the critical, theoretical and philosophical investigation of the arts –particularly after theory - needs to be asserted for the intellectual depth that those who practice it know, yet which is overlooked or minimized by other academics and the public, who hold superficial or restricted views of the arts and their intellectual authority. Perhaps, this is the result of a type of nostalgia– an old humanism that is defensive or holds to the secondariness of the arts to science, even the social sciences, or, simply, ignorance of the depth and range of arts and its histories.

            One way I dispel the residual sense of the arts in traditional discourses is to elaborate upon the history and characteristics of how artists engage in research. In courses, which I have titled, The Critical Artist and Aesthetic Research, I address the systematic research, investigatory processes, collaborations and teaching of individual artists and groups. This includes the Bauhaus artists, Surrealists, and current technology and documentary oriented artists. This follows from the core axiom of my writing and teaching that art is form of epistemology; and that a major trajectory of 20th century and contemporary art encompasses and is oriented toward research and the production of knowledge. As practiced by artists, aesthetic research (also called artistic research) has affinities to – and often directly involves – humanistic, social scientific, scientific and technological research practices. For the past decade, a range of artistic/aesthetic research activities, practices, discourses, methodologies, and systems of evaluation, codification and critique have been emerging in scholarly studies and in various institutions and universities, as elaborated by Graeme Sullivan in Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts (2005). Scholars and academic entities are formulating rigorous criteria and standards for assessing aesthetic research per se and some European institutions, with considerable support, are addressing the rationales and procedures for establishing university-based programs that incorporate aesthetic research in the arts, education, media, social sciences, communications and digital technology. It is not, of course, that scholarly validation is necessary to consider the arts in terms of truth and reality, nor to prove any of their epistemological depth, but these “testing sites” further collapse the notion of the divisions between the arts, sciences, and other current intellectual endeavors. 

            I am not suggesting that we overtly “test” the arts and establish science-like standards. However, Ronell’s book leads me to consider is that there are ways to add to discussions of the arts and performance, which presents an affirmation and representation of their epistemological dimensions. This may seem absurd to those of us who live with art, but most of my students and too many of my colleagues have never entertain the thought that theater, film -- all art -- is a form of knowledge. To speak, both historically, and with contemporary examples, about art and epistemology is not to devalue art’s other multiplicitous significations, cultural value, and its ontologically fictive dimensionality. It is, however, to clarify the types of knowledge art produces, philosophically and practically, along with its own versions of mystery and joyousness. And, if an offshoot of this project leads to increases of funding and social and institutional visibility, that is a strategy the arts could certainly also learn to live with, I am sure.