The Life of Training

John Matthews

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350046412
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

In The Life of Training, John Matthews offers an accessible and original contribution to the philosophy of training for performance, building on his previous works Training for Performance (2011) and Anatomy of Performance Training (2014). With chapters on the seven characteristics of biological life - reproduction, stimulation, heritability, adaptation, growth, organisation and homeostasis - Matthews combines his unique approach with elements of Hannah Arendt's mature philosophy to reach surprising and essential conclusions about the role time plays in training practices, and about the function of training practices in producing time and its tenses. Ideal for readers seeking to understand the relationship between training practices and human experience, on and off stage, or for teachers looking for a new, innovative approach to performance.

1

HOMEOSTASIS

Training and thinking are opposites. This received wisdom is a ubiquitous and implicit social message that manifests in the various oppositional activities and attitudes relating to ‘doing’ and ‘understanding doing’. ‘That’s fine in theory but it doesn’t work in practice’ is a statement that is heard in theatre rehearsal rooms, blue-chip boardrooms, science labs, building sites and each and every context in which human endeavour requires individuals to act. Training has historically been associated with technical acts of doing-of-things and has therefore been perceived in opposition to acts of cognitive perception and understanding of things-done and things-to-do. In the specific case of acting, which is the primary interest of this book, this differentiation is borne out in the oft-cited criticism by tutors that trainees are too much ‘in their head’ and not sufficiently ‘embodied’, ‘present’ or ‘in-the-moment’. Examples of this attitude in practice and writing are manifold, and one recent example taken from the British actor-trainer John Gillett may serve as archetypal here. Gillett differentiates between feeling and intellect; willing and deducing; voice-and-body and ‘cerebral’ activity when he writes, ‘if I do it all [playing an objective] cerebrally’ and ‘“my objective” just sticks in my head like a piece of calculus’, and ‘if I try to implement … [my objective] in a self-conscious and over-controlled manner, thinking the words I have used to define it all the time I am trying to play it’, ‘it will of course be as useless as a disconnected plug’.¹ Taking some neurological licence, he even places a division between ‘left brain logical analysis’ and ‘right brain-controlled imagination and intuition’² in his distinction between analysing and playing an action.

The problem of thinking is well played out throughout the canonical Stanislavskian writings, and indeed the differentiation between thinking and doing is frequently depicted as a central part of the actor’s dilemma. In An Actor Prepares, Stanislavski writes that it seems ‘not only difficult but impossible to be thinking at one and the same time about your role, technical methods, the audience, the words of your part, your cues and several points of attention as well’³ while also acting, and yet ‘any simple juggler in a circus would have no hesitation in handling far more complicated things, risking his life as he does it’.⁴ Indeed, the stultifying effect in action of the overburdening of the naïf Kostya’s head with thoughts about units and objectives is a recurrent discursive strategy throughout this work. The more he thinks the less he acts, and the book expounds both explicitly and implicitly that thought and deed are related but differentiated things. The whole project of training, not only in acting but in each and every context of human action, has often been seen as centrally concerned with overcoming, bypassing or submerging conscious thought beneath an embedded, ritualized, instinctive and yet acquired unconscious ‘doing’ and crucially side-stepping the self-awareness of thinking.⁵

The commonly accepted differentiation between training as a process of acquiring the skills to do and learning as the acquisition of the skill of thinking about doing maps onto a socially and culturally much broader and older distinction. There are several genealogies of this broad sociocultural tendency in Western philosophy⁶ but most relate back to Aristotle’s differentiation between five virtues or attributes by which the soul arrives at the truth: technê, epistêmê, phronêsis, sophia and nous.⁷ While technê, understood as ‘practice’, and epistêmê, conceived of as ‘knowledge’, have been both contrasted and conflated in subsequent theorizations,⁸ it is Aristotle’s primary distinction between the human capacity for a form of pragmatic reasoning about ‘real-world’ existence (logistikon) and for a species of knowing of transcendent facts about existence (epistêmonikon) that gave rise to this division in the history of Western thought.⁹

The opposition between training as a vocational preparation for technical tasks and education as an intellectual development of the capacity to establish a priori conditions by which the prima facie of technical operation come into being goes back at least to Aristotle.¹⁰ His claim that ‘men of experience know that a thing is, but they do not know why it is, whereas men of learning know the reason and the cause’¹¹ has since been used by both camps in this equation to signal the limitation of the other. In the realm of philosophy, theory, in its association with an objective view (from theōros, ‘to spectate’), has asserted ascendency over practice (from praktos, meaning ‘done, to be done’; verbal adjective of prassein, prattein: ‘to do, act, effect, accomplish’) since Aristotle’s time, and this hierarchy has been renewed in the age of science just as the folk authority of practical expertise has been called upon to rectify those discrepancies uncovered in human endeavour between ideas that are fine in theory but unworkable in practice.¹²

Immanuel Kant drew this division into sharper focus as thinking was further refined and distilled into the process of judgement. With remorseless pessimism, Kant claimed that while the spectacle of humankind’s actions ‘may be moving for a while’,

the curtain must eventually descend. For in the long run it becomes a farce. And even if the actors do not tire of it – for they are fools – the spectator does because any single act will be enough for him if he can reasonably conclude from it that the never-ending play will be of eternal sameness.¹³

Kant appears to elevate the theatre critic’s complaint that ‘I’ve seen it all before’ to new and more desperate heights. His rather uncharitable metaphor cleaves the wisdom of spectators (thinking) from the ignorance of actors (doing) with reference to an ancient parable ascribed to Pythagoras: ‘Life … is like a festival. Just as some come to the festival to compete, some to ply their trade’, but ‘the best people come as spectators [theatai] so in life the slavish men go hunting for fame [doxa] or gain, the philosophers for truth’.¹⁴ Although Pythagoras’s substantive point would seem to be that only the spectator may see the ‘whole’ while the actor by virtue of enacting his ‘part’ may only understand partially, he also makes a very recognizable and seemingly contemporary complaint about actors hungry for, or psychologically dependent upon, the affirmation of an audience: doxa means both ‘fame’ and ‘opinion’ and in this parable the actor relies upon the spectator’s ‘it-seems-to-me’ for her own sense of ‘me’ – the spectator’s dokei moi for her doxa. Thus, the actor is not her own master; she is dependent upon the opinion of others and although Pythagoras is only using theatre as a metaphor we can see in the eternal wisdom that ‘the audience is always right’ about the quality of any given performance, a deeper reaffirmation of the superiority of thinking over doing here.

The division between thinking and doing, and the project of its dissolution, was a primary preoccupation of Performance Studies in the 1970s and 1980s. Here, body–mind dualism discourse stood as a proxy for a theatrical mise en scène at large where the apartheid of actors and audience – seers and doers, those with minds and those with bodies – which, seemingly was emblematic of division tout court, had become as distasteful in practice as it was in theory.¹⁵ With seemingly scant regard for Pythagoras, Kant, Aristotle or even Stanislavski, Performance Studies adopted its own esoteric project of self-denial as if with great optimism it could be believed that wishes would become facts merely by stating them out loud.

Either in the form of Schechner’s 1970s optimism and its much-desired ‘end to dichotomies’¹⁶ or Immanuel Kant’s pessimistic eighteenth-century reassertion of Pythagoras’s parable of dichotomous stage-relations, we may see, historically, thinking in association with reasoned inaction and training in association with thoughtless (or even foolish) action. Yet despite the seemingly eternal antagonism between the categories of thinking and training they have one thing in common. They both take time.

Thinking as a process related to but different from judgement (the forming of a thought) requires prior knowledge and an apprehension of future possibilities as well as a relationship to the reality of the present. Thinking as a practice is also refined over time as thinkers get more reliable, more accurate, more economical and less often wrong by the practising of thinking. Training as a process related to but different from acting (the manifesting of capacity) requires prior experience and cognizance of future outcomes as well as a relationship to the urgency of the present. Training as a practice is also refined over time as trainees get more adept, more effective, less wasteful and less often unsuccessful in the practising of doing. This would be a rather facile insight if all it is stating is that thinking and training, like all aspects of human experience, occur in a temporal context. The point is not that thinking and training happen in time but that the practising of thinking and training each give rise to the human experience of time, thereby placing our present endeavours in a relationship with our past and future thoughts and deeds.

In the history of philosophy, the differentiation between thought and action has been recapitulated by Hannah Arendt’s use of the categories of the vita contemplativa – the contemplative life – and the vita activa – active life. While the differences between the two are stark, both lives are however just that: lives. They are vital and in the same way therefore inherent to human life itself. In Hannah Arendt’s final work, the posthumously published The Life of the Mind (1978), she puts forth a compelling case that thinking is a process whereby we project ourselves, as humans, into existence. We establish continuity and contingency in our actions and relate ourselves to existential facts and phenomenological experiences. For Arendt, the life-giving essence of thought comes from the ubiquitous human capacity to conceive of actions in sequence and thereby to be purposeful, consistent, contiguous and thus ‘whole’. In this book, my concern is with the purposeful, consistent, contiguous actions produced in relation to thought, or thoughtfulness, the means by which they come into existence and the consequences of them so doing.

The ‘continuity of our business’¹⁷ is evidently a matter not only of conceiving action but also of performing it. Acting, both in the limited sense of performing onstage and in the broader sense of human agency, is a matter of preparation in the present in relation to the past and for the future. The shaping of the ‘everlasting stream’,¹⁸ as Arendt called it, into a more or less coherent experience of time is an activity well rehearsed throughout human history and performed everywhere in which humans undertake to act. The rigour of thought in its subjection to reason or, more accurately, to the ‘imperative’ – the law which commands that there should be reason – is manifest practically in the technical rigour of actions undertaken to achieve ends.

The imperative is usually described as the ontological force that commands human minds to thought and to action. In other words, it is the answer to the questions, ‘How do we, as humans, know a fact?’ and ‘How do we know the right thing to do?’ Levinas’s translator, Alphonso Lingis, explains that the imperative ‘is not a concept … is not a principle, or a law or an order’ but rather it is a ‘given, a fact’ it is ‘the first fact’.¹⁹ The imperative ‘is a command that there be principles and that our thought represent order – or that we represent the unprincipled and the chaotic correctly’²⁰ and it is met with at once in our encounter with the world and its things.

We may choose to see the imperative as a fact derived from itself or, put more simply, as the only explanation for the coherence and integrity of some thoughts and actions and for the efficacy of these thoughts and actions. However, positing the imperative does not mean accepting that human thoughts and deeds are transcendentally perfect only that they can be seen to conform and contraire with an ideal set of thoughts and actions which can be derived from whatever logical, moral, ethical or instrumental ends one may choose to posit. It has been my assertion hitherto that the refining of the capacity to act-to-achieve-ends, the remediation of deficient-acts-to-achieve-ends and the social reproduction of knowledge about acts-in-relation-to-ends are the concerns of training.²¹ The political philosophy of Hannah Arendt has asserted something very similar about thinking and by aligning my assertions with hers I should like to contend for training, as she does for thinking, that training is a means by which humans generate and experience time.

In the post–Second World War context in which Arendt derived her theories, thinking was averred as a means for human civilization to be better or at least to avoid being worse. In the pre-apocalyptic context of twenty-first-century theorization, which Alan Read (inspired by the drive to extinction implied in Arendt’s concept of the ‘banality of evil’) has called ‘the last human venue’,²² training has arisen globally as a means for humankind to both postpone and prepare for its annihilation. In the lives of individuals and communities, training can provide an albeit transient sense of agency in the face of the indifferent and irresistible drift of time. The systematic and more or less sustainable increase in the human capacity to act in any given context and the transfer of that capacity down through the generations provide a pull against the increasingly new challenges of action in changing contexts, and thereby a means for human beings to insert themselves into the flow of sheer change, as Arendt calls it, and experience an albeit partial impermanent and perhaps illusory sense of mastery over it. Training, much like thinking, couples a preparedness for the future with an acceptance of the future’s uncertainty and provides both a rehearsal and a requiem for tomorrow.

In the seemingly increasingly totalitarian global environment in which this book is being written, where political attitudes and their affiliates are seemingly hardening against each other, Hannah Arendt’s philosophical predictions about the dangers of thoughtless action are beginning to seem all the more prescient. The new online spaces for thinking collectively derived in the late twentieth century are now showing a troubling tendency towards thoughtlessness. Arendt would, I think, have been positive about the emergence of social media and its potential for political (of the polis) action but I feel sure that she would have been concerned by its lack of rigour and its apparent openness to banality and to exploitation for personal gain.

Indeed, Arendt was highly critical of individualistic or unworldly modes of thought both in the form of ‘pure thought’ practised by philosophers and as the ‘thoughtlessness’ of totalitarians. For Arendt, thinking is a social or rather po...