Matrix 4-film Déjà Vu Collection
Ling Baus
Wagner and Ernst's answer takes many forms in this collection, both in their own introduction and in the individual essays edited from the International Postgraduate Programme, "Performance and Media Studies," at the University of Mainz in 2005. Like many such collections, the range of material is diverse, with some essays inevitably digressing from the book's central themes and others retaining too much of their original form as conference papers. Nevertheless, there is much to recommend this book, both for the diversity of subjects and for perspectives on individual artists, writers, and performances not often noted in North American theatre studies.
The collection is introduced by Wagner and Ernst's conception of the matrix, which they define as a complex and contradictory structure inherently related to performance. This structure is expressed as "queer performativity," a concept adapted from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and encompasses multidisciplinary instances of the matrix such as "the social matrix" (Gregory Bateson), a "heterosexual matrix" (Judith Butler), and a "disciplinary matrix" (Thomas S. Kuhn). Wagner and Ernst connect these varied matrix metaphors to illustrate the indeterminacies of contemporary cultural performances and to suggest a critical model to analyze the paradoxes, dilemmas, and "messy embodiment" (18) of performance in digital culture. It's an intriguing idea, one that could have been further explored (and perhaps will be) in a longer essay. Here, it functions mainly as an attempt to frame the very different essays engaging cultural performances through the key aspects of the matrix that constitute the four sections of the book: "The Power of the Matrix" (identity and social theory), "Looking through the Matrix" (visualizations and perceptual modes), "Writing the Matrix" (text as perfor media in graphics and performance), and "Subverting the Matrix" (political performances). [End Page 335]
What follows in these sections is a range of essays considering the intersection of culture and performance, broadly defined. Most of the essays are quite good individually, although some strain the overall conceptual themes. Section 2, "Looking through the Matrix," adheres relatively closely to the introduction's aims and has much else to recommend it. Series editor Christopher Balme's essay on visuality in contemporary opera, "Seeing Sound: Visuality in Contemporary Music Theatre," engages image and sound theory to articulate new dynamics of these components in performance. Ernst's...
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