An Actor Manages: Actor Training and Managerial Ideology
Dr Broderick D.V. Chow
Lecturer in Theatre
Brunel University London
Kingston Lane, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH
Introduction
What is an actor’s work? Is it the process of creating and presenting a character? Or is it the business of managing a career? While the former attracts people to the business, the latter is essential.AsMichael Simkins (2013) in the Guardian estimates, 92% of actors in Britain are out of work at any one time. The precarious nature of the business therefore means that actors must combine the unremunerated labour of auditions, promotional material and managing finances with one or more non-acting based jobs– oftencasual or part-time and flexible enough to allow time off for auditions– aswell as creating showcase pieces and their own work during those fallow times when an actor is euphemistically said to be ‘resting.’Thebusiness of acting is often set in opposition to the actor’s ‘craft’, a term thatresonates with philosopher Richard Sennett’s conceptualization of craftsmanship as undivided skill and attention for its own sake. ‘Working on my craft’ was how I justified handing over 300 Canadian dollars for eight weeks of scene-study classes while a working (and resting) actor in Vancouver. Though nearly all of us in the classhad already completed training at a university or drama school, it was understood that working on one’s craft was a lifelong process. Eventually, the glorious moments in scene studies of the American greats became the thing itself, far superior to any job. In an industry nicknamed ‘Hollywood North’,dominated by commercials and two lines as a cop on Smallville, it could sometimes seem like the acting in class, not the stuff out in the industry, was real acting.
In this article I will argue that the business of acting and its creative craft are two sides of the same coin.Psychologically-based actor training stems froman ideology of individual self-management – mental, physical, and emotional – that accompanies the emergent practice of management in thetwentieth century. By reading the theories and techniques of Stanislavskian and post-Stanislavskian actor training against changes in the organization of work in North America and Europe in the 20th century, I outline a citational network between discourses of acting and business management. I analyze three stages in the development of organizational management –Taylorism, Management by Objectives, and Human Resources Management – leading to the current moment of the ‘new economy’ where a rhetoric of the ‘creative industries’ dominates, which I suggest is a culmination of nascent ideological tendencies. The three earlier stages of organizational management are an instrumentalisation of tacit knowledge that resembles the development of Stanislavsky-based actor training. Acting and organizational managementbrought an increased focus to emotion, empathy, and social relations and how these could be produced, maintained, and instrumentalizedby waged labour.[1] Systematic actor training(Jonathan Chambers’ term for derivations of Stanislavsky’s ‘System’) reaches its apotheosis of usefulness in our current historical situation of ‘precarity’ in which the worker no longer has recourse to forms of structure and security enjoyed under Fordism and must self-manage – a role that the actor has long prefigured.
My method follows Jon McKenzie’s study of ‘performance’ in Perform or Else. Drawing together three discursive fields–cultural performance, organizational performance, and high-performance technology – McKenzieidentifies three interlinked principles: efficacy, efficiency, and effectiveness. In this citational network, performance is concerned withwhether or not something ‘works.’ Performance is a generalized principle applied to both the functioning of a copper wire and a human being in everyday life, and is therefore a normative and even terrorizing ‘mode of power and knowledge’ (McKenzie 2001: 164). Here, I developupon McKenzie’s reading together of cultural performance and organizational managementto argue that the discursive resemblance between actor training and management theory represents an ideological imperative to ‘act the part.’ This imperative demands that one identifieswith one’s job on a personal, emotional, and even spiritual level. By thinking critically across fields I hope to raise difficult questions regarding creative labour in today’s precarious labour economy.
Bits and Objectives: Scientific Management and the Detailed Division of Labour
Since the 1990s many governments have turned to the ‘creative industries’ as a key player in the ‘new economy.’ The UK Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) was influential, bundling together a number of industries including advertising, publishing, and (together with music and visual arts) the performing arts, as the ‘creative industries’ (DCMS 2001). The creative industries, Kate Oakley (2004) points out, bear a heavy burden, charged with the revival of entire cities and communities without sufficientevidence that they are up to the task. Justin O’Connor (2012), in an extended critical review of Terry Flew’sThe Creative Industries (2011), points out that what began as a policy to secure more funding for culture was uncritically expanded as a way of redefining other forms of work.Within this ‘creative industries’ ideology, ‘creativity’ takes on a dual meaning. On the one hand, it is mainly associated with what we tend to think of as ‘artistic’labour.On the other hand, today, creativity is also thought of as a general feature of work, artistic or not. In this vein is Chris Bilton’s work on ‘creative management’ (2006, 2010), which aims tomanage and nurture innovation, while negotiating uncertainty. But adopting the rhetoric of creativity also risks adopting creative labour’s precarious conditions and a high-level of personal and emotional investment in one’s labour (see Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2009, 2011; McRobbie 2002).
While theatre is only one of a series of creative industries today, the ‘actor’ is the figure that haunts the history of management. Management increasingly resemblesthe acting labour of the Western modern theatre, in which actors create characters with believable psychological interiority. My argument focuses on Stanislavsky’s system and subsequent adaptations, which remain a backbone of most training regimes in the English-speaking theatre, thoughthey are by no means the only forms practiced today in conservatoires or universities.
Alison Hodge notes that actor training is a phenomenon of the modern, director-led theatre, which resulted in ‘a more objective examination of the nature of the actor’s work’ (2000: 2). As well as being motivated by these shifts in the European theatre, Konstantin Stanislavsky’s experiments also determinedthe shape of the theatre industry to come by systematizing and professionalizing the actor’s work. His experiments at the Moscow Art Theatre (MXT) in the early 1900s correspond with practices at the beginnings of modern organizational management, which were taking place in America a decade or so earlier, specifically Frederick Winslow Taylor’s development of the paradigm of Scientific Management, commonly known asTaylorism. Taylor argued that managers must gather knowledge of the entire production process in order to divide the process into tasks for the worker (hence, as the political economist Harry Braverman points out, the huge expansion from 1890s to 1950s of degrees in engineering). Scientific management separates ‘conception’ from ‘execution’, as managers assume a ‘monopoly over knowledge’ (Braverman 1974: 113). A ‘task-based’ management theory, Scientific Management parallels otherperformance practices. As a number of scholars have argued, VsevolodMeyerhold’s system of biomechanics was directly inspired by Taylorism’s Soviet adaptationwhile also ‘humanising’ it (Pitches 2003; Evans 2009). What has not been acknowledged, however, are theparallels between Taylor’s work and Stanislavsky’s.These are not similarities in terms of specific practices so much as ideological similarities; a drive to systematize and rationalize embodied knowledge.
A ‘craft’ is a skill or process that an individual performs, whether the portrayal of a character or repair of an engine. Craft is what Scientific Management seeks to break down. Dividing a process among several workers (what Braverman calls a ‘detailed division of labour’) directly benefits the capitalist in terms of economy and control. As labour is the source of surplus value, and the accumulation of value the driver of capitalism, the capitalist is driven to economize on the overall wage bill by dividing a process into tasks. The capitalist can then pay lesser-skilled workers less money to perform the easier tasks, whereas the minimum pay of the worker who performed all operations of the process would be by default the highest pay for the most difficult task (Braverman 1974: 77-80). This economizing creates greater output for less input, andimproves the efficiency of production processes (as in Henry Ford’s assembly line).At the same time, separating planning from doing further alienates the worker from the products of his/herlabour. The designation ‘Scientific’, therefore, is not neutral, but ideological – it naturalizesthe imperative of maximizing surplus value, regardless of the human cost.
The destruction of traditional craftsmanship entrenchedclass divisions (Braverman 1974). By concentrating ‘knowledge’ in the minds of managers, a workforce of laborers with specialist knowledge became unnecessary; a process Braverman calls ‘deskilling.’ By ‘destroying the craft as a process under the control of the worker’,Braverman writes, ‘[the capitalist] reconstitutes it as a process under his own control. He can now count his gains in a double sense, not only in productivity but in management control, since that which mortally injures the worker is in this case advantageous to him.’ (1974: 78).Therefore, Scientific Management represents the destruction of embodied knowledge and a division of knowledge between the head and the hand. Management (despite the etymological link to the Latin manus, or hand) is demarcated as an intellectual exercise – the head can understand what was previously known by hand.
The detailed division of labourdoes not seem immediatelyapplicable to the creation of individual, singular characters – whilea director could economize by dividing up Keira Knightley’s performance to forty-four child laborers– she is probably not going to. But both Taylor’s practicesat the Midvale Steel Works in the 1880-90s and Stanislavsky’s practicesat the Moscow Art Theatre a decade laterattempted to capture knowledge that was at first glance tacit, embodied, natural, and mercurial, in the form of method – understandable, transmissible. When embodied or intuitive practices are broken down, whether they are the mechanic’s craft or the actor’s work, they can be understood and perfected.Both Taylor and Stanislavsky were outsiders to closed, guild-like practices. Taylor’s apprenticeship in the factory was, as Braverman points out, an act of youthful rebellion against his wealthy father; Stanislavsky was an amateur actor, who, as his biographer Jean Benedetti notes, was pretty bad at acting.In Stanislavsky’s case, having viewed foreign actors such as Eleonora Duse and TommassoSalvini in Moscow, he sought to capture what his biographer Jean Benedetti describes as the ‘ease, naturalness and flow of the actor of genius’ (2000: 3) by means of a method.
Unlike the factory worker,the actor does not simply carry out the tasks set by a director but engages herself in a complex process of planning. The emphasis on planning is at the heart of Stanislavsky’s system and was, in some ways, a theatrical revolution. Compare the 1896 staging of Chekhov’s The Seagull with the MXT’s fabled production two years later. In the first, Sharon Carnicke argues, actors would learn their parts on their own, and meet for ‘a few’ rehearsals; in the latter, Stanislavsky’s actors ‘put eighty hours of work into thirty-three rehearsals’ (Carnicke 2000: 12). The labour of the actor shifts behind the closed doors of the rehearsal room, with the actor analyzing the playand dividing it into a ‘score’ ofactions. ‘If our preparatory work is right’, Stanislavsky wrote, ‘the results will take care of themselves’ (Stanislavsky qtd. in Carnicke 2000: 25). Reading Stanislavsky throughTaylorism, the actor isboth a manager who plans a series of actions, and a worker who executes them.
The Stanislavsky ‘event’ transformed the modern theatre, most would say, for the better. Bysystematizing the ‘nature’ of the actor’s creativity, Stanislavsky inspired a century of Western actor training and democratized the profession. The MXT and its ensemble mode of working replaced the Russian theatre’s star system, meaninganyone, in theory, could learn to be an actor. But it is tempting to see this moment of the actor’s autonomy as the beginning of the profession’s precaritization.
In the next phase of management the skills of the actor enter into the remit of the manager. What Taylor overlookedwas the role emotionplayed in organizations and workplaces. Taylorism’s monopoly on planning degraded the worker’s psychological and emotional wellbeing – to maintain productivity managementwould also need to mediate antagonisms brought on by the degradation of skilled labour. Management theorists from the 1930s onwardswould address this oversight, including the focus of the next section, Peter F. Drucker.
Performing (Self) Control: Managerial Ideology and Labour as Dressage
Managers hold control and power, but they are not the same as owners. In the early phases of industrial capitalism, this lack of (literal) ownership was viewed as a problem. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, worriedthat because directors of ‘joint-stock companies’ were managers of other people’s capital, they wouldnot employ the same vigilance as if it were their own (1776, in Fournier and Grey 2000: 8). The manager is therefore a median figure that requires its own role and corresponding ideology to justify its existence. Willard Entemancalls this ideology managerialism: an ideology in which ‘the fundamental social unit is neither individuals nor the state, but organizations’ (1993: 154).Managerialism views the individual as a rational actor, who can nevertheless sacrifice his/her own self-interest for the team.Following an Althusserian reading of ideology, however, we know that ideology is not merelya matter of personal worldview.In his most famous essay, Louis Althusser writes that when an individual is ‘hailed’ on the street by a police officer, and turns around, the ‘mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion’ interpellates him as a subject: ‘Because he has recognized that the hail was “really” addressed to him, and that “it was really him who was hailed”’ (Althusser 1971: 48). Paraphrasing religious philosopher Blaise Pascal – ‘Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe’ (1971: 42) – Althusser notes the way ideology is not embedded in a subject’s beliefs, but his/her practices, or, perhaps, performances. Managerialism therefore is both an ideology of organizations, and the practice by which the individual affirms or performshis/her commitment to an organization.Therefore, the practice of management lies at the intersection of organization, performance, and emotional investment.
The manager’s labour is not directly productive, in that it does not directly create use values. Instead, the manager indirectly improves productivity and organizational performance (i.e. efficiency), extracting as much surplus value from the worker as possible. One of the earliest management theorists, Henri Fayol, noted that ‘Whilst the other functions [of the organization] bring into play material and machines, the managerial function operates only on the personnel’ (1916[1971]: 181). Fayol’sprinciples branch out from the division of labourtomore intersubjective principles (known as ‘soft skills’ in today’s MBA programmes) such as ‘Initiative’, ‘Esprit de corps’, and ‘Discipline.’
The substance of a manager’s labour is already ‘performance’, therefore, in two senses (which, according to McKenzie, are intertwined). A manager is responsible for the quality performance of an organization, and to ensure this is required to perform a certain way. Contra McKenzie, performance has not replaced discipline, rather, the manager performs discipline. Jackson and Carter, drawing on Foucault, call this ‘labour as dressage’: ‘non-productive, non-utilitarian and unnatural behaviour for the satisfaction of the controller and as a public display of compliance, obedience to discipline’ (1998: 54). Dressage means both ‘discipline’ and ‘taming’, but it alsorefers tothe show ofperformance of a disciplined and tamed horse. Theonly function of labour as dressage is to demonstrate or show compliance[2].
Here we can return to Adam Smith’squandary: why would a middle-ranked employee agree to this performance of compliance (without a stake in ownership)? Precisely because managerialism provides a roleto inhabit. This isa mechanism of ideological interpellation akin to Stanislavsky’s holistic approach to character. The manager’s role is best explored through the work of Peter F. Drucker, the Austrian-born theorist of management, and one of the first to try to define the ‘function’ of the manager. Despite at times being incorrect in his predictions, Drucker remains a benchmark for organizational theory, bringing together Scientific Management with an interest in human behaviour.[3]
Drucker recognized that Scientific Management’s exclusive concern with productivity meant it was poorly placed to address the problem of worker motivation. A purely Taylorist organization diminished worker flexibility and adaptability, and increased resistance to change: ‘[Scientific Management] knows how to organize the present job for maximum output but only by seriously impairing output in the worker’s next job’ (1977: 232). Denying the human dimension of management hindered economic performance.In this way, his theories broughtTaylorismtogether with Elton Mayo’s human relations movement, which ‘recognized that the social-psychological climate of an enterprise is as much a factor in productivity as technical capability’ (Locke 1996: 24).Drucker’s innovationis known as ‘management by objectives’ or MBO. MBO sets goals for an organization and distributes these goals in objectives to be accomplished by individual workers or teams. What is distinctive about MBO, however, is that objectives cannot stand on their own as singular tasks, but must be integrated into a ‘job.’ ‘The human being does individual motions poorly’, Drucker writes, but a job, allows the worker to invest in his/her work personally or emotionally (Drucker 1977: 230). A human is not a tool, Drucker argued. Therefore, management must make useof a worker’s ‘will, personality, emotions, appetites and soul.’ (1977: 230).
Drucker gave little advice on ‘soft-skills’, leaving this task to be taught in business schools. His concern was more structural than psychological. However, his management theory points to an important featureof the ideology of managerialism: the instrumentalisation of emotion. In hisseminal text The Practice of Management, Drucker gives a surprising insight: rather than instructing readers on how to manage others through manipulation or guile, Drucker suggests that the manager’s first object should be his or her self. He writes: ‘The greatest advantage of management by objectives is perhaps that it makes it possible for a manager to control his own performance. Self-control means stronger motivation’ (1955: 112). The desires of the managermust become consonant with the goals of the organization – they must take on the objectives for themselves. A manager who is managed by self-control and objectives ‘acts not because somebody wants him to but because he himself decides that he has to – he acts, in other words, as a free man’ (1955: 117) – in other words, he has to want it.