An Actor Manages: Actor Training and Managerial Ideology

Dr Broderick D.V. ChowLecturer in Theatre Brunel University LondonKingston Lane, Uxbridge, UB8 3PHbroderick.chow@brunel.ac.uk

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. As

Michael 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 – often

casual or part-time and flexible enough to allow time off for

auditions – as well as creating showcase pieces and their own work

during those fallow times when an actor is euphemistically said to

be ‘resting.’ The business of acting is often set in opposition to the

actor’s ‘craft’, a term that resonates 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 class had already completed training at a

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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 from an ideology of individual self-management –

mental, physical, and emotional – that accompanies the emergent

practice of management in the twentieth 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

2

organizational management brought an increased focus to emotion,

empathy, and social relations and how these could be produced,

maintained, and instrumentalized by 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 – McKenzie identifies three interlinked principles:

efficacy, efficiency, and effectiveness. In this citational network,

performance is concerned with whether 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 develop upon

McKenzie’s reading together of cultural performance and

organizational management to argue that the discursive

resemblance between actor training and management theory

1 Empathy, within the theatre, can refer to both the actor and the spectator’s identification with the character. Within the literature of management, however, we see that this human process can be mobilized to industrial ends.

3

represents an ideological imperative to ‘act the part.’ This

imperative demands that one identifies with 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

sufficient evidence that they are up to the task. Justin O’Connor

(2012), in an extended critical review of Terry Flew’s The 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

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feature of work, artistic or not. In this vein is Chris Bilton’s work on

‘creative management’ (2006, 2010), which aims to manage 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 resembles the 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,

though they 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 determined the shape of the

theatre industry to come by systematizing and professionalizing the

actor’s work. His experiments at the Moscow Art Theatre (MXT) in

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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 as Taylorism. 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 other

performance practices. As a number of scholars have argued,

Vsevolod Meyerhold’s system of biomechanics was directly inspired

by Taylorism’s Soviet adaptation while also ‘humanising’ it (Pitches

2003; Evans 2009). What has not been acknowledged, however, are

the parallels 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

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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, and

improves 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/her labour. The

designation ‘Scientific’, therefore, is not neutral, but ideological – it

naturalizes the imperative of maximizing surplus value, regardless

of the human cost.

The destruction of traditional craftsmanship entrenched class

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

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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 labour does not seem immediately

applicable to the creation of individual, singular characters – while a

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 practices at the Midvale Steel Works in the

1880-90s and Stanislavsky’s practices at the Moscow Art Theatre a

decade later attempted 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 Tommasso Salvini in Moscow, he sought to capture what

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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 play and dividing it into a ‘score’ of actions.

‘If our preparatory work is right’, Stanislavsky wrote, ‘the results will

take care of themselves’ (Stanislavsky qtd. in Carnicke 2000: 25).

Reading Stanislavsky through Taylorism, the actor is both 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. By systematizing 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,

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meaning anyone, 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 overlooked was the role

emotion played in organizations and workplaces. Taylorism’s

monopoly on planning degraded the worker’s psychological and

emotional wellbeing – to maintain productivity management would

also need to mediate antagonisms brought on by the degradation of

skilled labour. Management theorists from the 1930s onwards

would 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, worried that because directors of ‘joint-stock

companies’ were managers of other people’s capital, they would not

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

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existence. Willard Enteman calls 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 merely a

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 performs his/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),

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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’s principles branch out from the division of

labour to more 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 also refers to the show of

performance of a disciplined and tamed horse. The only function of

labour as dressage is to demonstrate or show compliance2.

2 The question of course becomes: ‘who is the audience for this show’ of compliance? Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s body of work from 1989 onwards would answer: The Big Other – the network of socio-symbolic rules that guarantees our intersubjectivity, but crucially, doesn’t really exist.

12

Here we can return to Adam Smith’s quandary: why would a middle-

ranked employee agree to this performance of compliance (without

a stake in ownership)? Precisely because managerialism provides a

role to inhabit. This is a 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 brought Taylorism together with Elton Mayo’s

human relations movement, which ‘recognized that the social-

psychological climate of an enterprise is as much a factor in

3 In the 1970s, Drucker argued that the United States was seeing the retrenchment of corporate power. Naïvely, he suggested that top CEOs would no longer be household names, an idea that Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Rupert Murdoch, and many others have since belied.

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productivity as technical capability’ (Locke 1996: 24). Drucker’s

innovation is 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 use of 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 feature of the ideology of managerialism: the

instrumentalisation of emotion. In his seminal 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 manager must become

consonant with the goals of the organization – they must take on

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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.

It is easy to see the parallels between MBO and Stanislavsky’s

System of bits and objectives. Both actors and managers begin their

planning by identifying a ‘super-objective’ of sorts, and devising

smaller objectives that lead to this overall goal. Here, the new

paradigm of actor training seems to influence management: while

Taylor prefigured Stanislavsky’s analysis of the text into action, MBO

draws on Stanislavsky’s mobilization of human desire through the

analysis of the text in terms of character objectives. While desire is

utilized in Stanislavsky’s system to creative and artistic ends, and in

Drucker’s system to improve the firm’s efficiency, ultimately, the

result is the same: desire becomes part of a new form of labour that

is utilized in production, whether this production is theatrical,

physical, or cognitive/immaterial. In other words, since Drucker

demands not only the manager’s intellect but also her desire, by

performing her compliance with the norms and desires of the

corporation this new manager is doing the labour of the actor. In a

way, Drucker addressed the alienation of the work in the Fordist

factory. But his work led to a different kind of alienation – the

alienation of the emotions, and of the self. Today, this alienation is

so characteristic of modern work it often goes unnoticed. Jackson

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and Carter write that today it is: ‘[…] considered inadequate simply

to work but required that when one worked one should self-actualize

[…] we are required to be empowered’ (1998: 59). Tony J. Watson’s

ethnographic research with managers notes that managers use

‘self-concepts’ and discursive formations such as ‘the sort of person

I am’ (1997: 150) in order to identify with the organization. In social

psychology this is called ‘identity work’, a performative and

discursive construction of the self. The job of the manager is not

only to make the employee or colleague believe in the organization

but to make oneself believe. Only in this way can the manager

‘make clear to the world that there is no division between the

manager as a human being and the manager as a functionary’

(Watson 1997: 150).

Emotion as Material: Strasberg and Carnegie

The increasing emphasis in management theory on the

management of one’s self in order to create favourable interactions

with others accompanied the shift in the economies of the West

from the manufacture of goods to the renting of intellectual

property and accumulation of surplus value through brands and

symbolic capital. Drucker predicted this shift by conceiving of the

‘knowledge worker’ and the Italian autonomist philosopher Maurizio

Lazzarato (1996) uses the term ‘immaterial labour’ to describe

these new forms of work. But while immaterial labour does not

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produce material commodities of the sort analysed in chapter one of

Das Kapital, such as coats or chairs, its practice certainly involves a

familiar material: the body and its affective and emotional

capacities.

Lee Strasberg, Stanislavsky’s disciple and the originator of what is

today known as American Method Acting, understood that ‘emotion’,

or ‘feeling’ was a material that could be worked on and disciplined.

Strasberg studied at the American Laboratory Theatre under the

tutelage of Maria Ouspenskaya and Richard Boleslavsky, both

students of Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre. As artistic

director of the Actor’s Studio, which trained numerous American

actors including Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft and

Sally Field, Strasberg has had enormous influence on American

acting. The radical departure in Strasberg’s training was ‘the

Method actor’s uncompromising search for “truth” and

“authenticity”’ (Counsell 1996: 53). Strasberg stressed the use of

‘affective memory’ (sometimes incorrectly known as ‘emotional

memory’), that is, evoking a specific emotion within the given

circumstances of the dramatic text by remembering a

corresponding feeling from the actor’s own past. All artists, he

argues, use their sensual memories of previous experiences, but

only actors must do so ‘in the presence of the audience at a

particular time and place’ (1988: 116). This is a fundamental

transformation to our approach to truth and sincerity. The System

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and the Method are means of disciplining and manufacturing

spontaneous emotion, but this is not the same as pretending. No, in

fact, both the System and the Method emphasise the ‘truth’ of the

moment, and this discourse is not limited to theatre professionals;

‘emotional truth’ and ‘believability’ are frequent (empty) clichés in

the evaluation of actors’ performances by the general public.

The idea that genuine emotion can be instrumentally manufactured

radically elides false and true, and parallels other ideological

changes. While Strasberg was formulating his Method with the

Group Theatre, Dale Carnegie, a former actor turned self-help

lecturer and entrepreneur, published How to Win Friends and

Influence People. He provides advice on interpersonal

communication and leadership, illustrated with anecdotes in an

upbeat, folksy narrative voice. Chapters titles are Machiavellian:

‘How to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing

Resentment’, however, Carnegie does not advise using guile or

manipulation. Rather, his advice oscillates between self-interest and

sincerity. One must ‘arouse in the other person an eager want’

(1936: 69) and ‘talk in terms of the other person’s interests’ [in

order to get them to like you] (1936: 110). But at the same time,

you must actually mean it. Honesty and sincerity run through his

principles, for example: ‘Make the other person feel important

— and do it sincerely’ (1936: 121). Carnegie doesn’t resolve the

contradiction between authenticity and manipulation – he simply

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pretends it doesn’t exist. Both Carnegie and Strasberg effectively

give the same advice: don’t deceive, but engage in a careful

process of feeling management.

William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1957)[2002], an

ethnographic study based on interviews with top American CEOs,

shows feeling management in action: ‘the calm eye that never

strays from the other’s gaze, the easy, controlled laughter, the

whole demeanour that tells onlookers that here is certainly a man

without neurosis and inner rumblings’ (Whyte 1957[2002]: 155-6).

Organization Man ‘must not only accept control, he must accept it

as if he liked it’ (Whyte 1957[2002]: 151, my emphasis). This is not

the same as deceit. It is wilful self-deception. Whyte’s ‘as if’ reminds

us of Stanislavsky’s ‘magic If.’ Stanislavsky’s fictional surrogate, the

acting teacher Tortsov, tells his students: “‘In this process the magic

“if” and Given Circumstances, when they are properly understood,

help you to feel and to create theatrical truth and belief onstage. So

in life there is truth, what is, what exists, what people really know.

Onstage we call truth that which does not exist in reality but which

could happen’” (Stanislavsky 2008: 153). Grisha, a student,

challenges Tortsov by pointing out the contradiction between ‘truth’

and theatre’s fictional nature. In reply, Tortsov tells Grisha: ‘“Decide

what is more interesting, more important to you, what it is you want

to believe, that the material world of facts and events exists in the

theatre and in the play, or that it is the feeling which is born in the

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actor’s heart, stirred by a fiction, that is genuine and true?”’ (2008:

154). Feelings, in other words, are ‘true’, because they arise from

the actor’s self. But this truth can be manipulated through a process

of ‘justification’ in reference to the Given Circumstances; this

creative work ‘“satisf[ies] your sense of truth and your belief in the

genuineness of your experiencing”’ (2008: 154). Transposed to the

corporate world, this passage takes on a different cast. As in the

world of a play, the Given Circumstances of the corporation are

largely out of the actor’s control. Unlike a play, the actor’s work of

generating true feeling becomes a means for the manager to submit

freely to control.4

Acting styles are never neutral, but reflect and refract ideologies

and larger social and historical changes. The discursive coincidence

between actor training and organizational management is not

metaphorical but quite actual. The two practices share techniques

and processes, which is demonstrated through the increasing

importance of ‘transferrable skills’ in the prospectus pages of

university drama courses. ‘Acting’ is not simply a useful metaphor

for understanding new forms of emotional and affective labour (cf.

Hochschild 1983). In fact, ‘the actor’ is a metonym for the alienation

of the self within work in the 20th century, and prefigures the ideal,

self-managed subject: the freelancer.4 Arlie Russell Hochschild notes this similarity in The Managed Heart, her study of ‘emotional labour’ in the service industries (specifically among flight attendants and debt collectors), making use of Stanislavsky’s theories to conceptualize her distinction between ‘surface’ (feigned) acting and ‘deep’ acting (1983[2003]: 37-38).

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Self-Management for Precarious Labour

Taylorism sought to separate planning from execution, while the

school of MBO supported by Drucker attempted to reintegrate

individual tasks into a ‘job’, which supported personal investment

and self-actualization. In the contemporary firm we see, in the words

of Alan McKinlay and Phil Taylor, an ‘emergence of a new language

of work [which] has been paralleled by the rise of teamworking, a

form of work organization in which groups of employees assume

responsibility for complete production processes, including

administrative and organizational functions’ (1998: 173, my

emphasis). This is a larger shift from a hierarchical, Fordist model, to

a more lateral model of (self) control. The single manager is no

longer solely responsible for ensuring performance. Rather, each

employee assumes a management function; they must all perform.

As suggested earlier, the creative industries drive this shift. Not only

are the creative industries seen as an ideal area of expansion within

the post-Fordist economy, they also provide a model for

organizational management. Thus, Robert Hewison, John Holden and

Samuel Jones engage with theatre practices in their study of the

RSC (2010), and their use of the ‘ensemble’ as both a rehearsal

practice and an organizational tool. More generally, Bilton (2006)

argues that management in itself is a creative act, facilitating the

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conditions for creativity and moving the concept away from the

Romantic idea of the individual artist to creativity within systems

and organizations. In one sense, collective creativity is a positive

thing, as are the increasing autonomy and possibilities for self-

actualization to be found within the collective. But within the new

economy, collectives are often arranged around specific projects,

constantly being restructured and rearranged. The value of the

creative collective should be questioned if it is not supported by

institutional structures that give it security and stability.

Hesmondhalgh and Baker argue that creative industries policy does

not take into account the specifics of artistic labour: ‘policies that

argue for a radical expansion of [the cultural industries] under

present conditions, without attention to the conditions of creative

labour, risks fuelling labour markets marked by irregular, insecure

and unprotected work’ (2009: 5). While the ‘individualization of

work’ (McRobbie 2002: 518) may be perceived as flexible and

exciting, it comes with the removal of forms of labour security

enjoyed under Fordism. Scholars in diverse disciplines have called

this precarity, a pervasive adoption of short- or fixed-term contracts,

zero-hour contracts, and billable freelancing. In an individualized

labour economy, success requires constant self-management: ‘what

individualization means sociologically is that people increasingly

have to become their own micro-structures, they have to do the

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work of the structures by themselves, which in turn requires

intensive practices of self-monitoring’ (McRobbie 2002: 518).

Without conflating ‘acting’ with all artistic labour, nor suggesting

that actor training is responsible for today’s freelance economy, it is

striking that it prefigures one key area of this shift: self-exploitation.

McRobbie notes the very high level of self-exploitation in the

creative industries, due to a combination of passion and pleasure.

The rewards for creative labour are presented as ‘inherent’; one’s

work becomes reconceptualised as one’s craft. The ideologies

become intertwined: ‘self-exploitation’ also doubles as a description

of the actor’s work in Stanislavsky-derived actor training, which asks

the actor to work on her emotions, body, and spirit. In other words,

the positive, ‘actorly’ sense of self-exploitation as artistic mining of

the self becomes ambiguously folded in with McRobbie’s usage of

the term ‘self-exploitation’ as long hours, exhaustion, and low

remuneration. The training of the actor is also useful for what we

might call acting’s ‘externalities’, that is, the business of it all, in

which the self is packaged and sold in order to find (temporary)

employment. Aside from the minimal amount of time spent actually

‘on-the-job’, acting involves enormous periods of unremunerated

labour, or rather, labour that is paid for by the promise of eventual

remuneration. This includes those performances that never come to

be – auditions and castings, which involve reading from the sides,

but also, networking with casting directors, agents and producers.

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Actors also self-manage their life-narratives and personal portfolios,

mining aspects of their personal history and image in order to

present a flexible but unique and hire-able self. In a typical audition,

an actor must ‘slate’ (USA/Canada) or do an ‘Ident’ (UK), stating

their name and agent, give ‘profiles’ (the casting equivalent of a

mug shot), and usually summarize themselves in a few pithy

sentences. At the same time as an actor is meant to mine their

inner self for emotional truth, they must also create an attractive

packaged self that can be sold. This, we should make no mistake, is

another form of labour, but it is not remunerated as such. Rather,

actors are happy to take it on. These externalities increasingly

resemble the work freelancers must do. But the insecurity and self-

exploitation of the job have long been accepted as part of the

actor’s lot. The actor is at the vanguard of the new economy.

Conclusion: Reviving the Naturalist Project

Our citational network between Stanislavsky-derived actor training

and organizational management is now complete. By comparing

similarities between features of practices I have looked for shared

ideologies. This process of ‘reading together’ draws attention to the

way in which positive aspects of one field (the liberation of the

actor’s creative potential, for example) may at the same time

support exploitative or damaging aspects in another. While my aim

has been primarily critical, having drawn attention to the ideological

24

overlaps between actor training and organizational management, a

number of possibilities for action emerge that could have positive

benefits both for actors as well as creative industries workers.

Firstly, by pointing to actor training’s overlap with the world of

business management, the citational network I have drawn

demystifies the craft and demands we consider acting labour as

labour. Without denying the ‘art’ of acting, a critique of actor’s

working conditions is essential at a time when the profession is

more precarious than ever. We might draw attention to the

discursive way in which unpaid labour is accepted and naturalized in

the profession (when Sanford Meisner calls line-learning and

substitution exercises ‘homework’ (1990), he blurs labour and

leisure). An investigation into unpaid or poorly paid working

conditions might have implications for arts funding policy as well as

Actor’s Equity guidelines.

Furthermore, Hesmondhalgh’s suggestion (2010) that creative

industries policy requires detailed empirical analysis of individual

creative industries should apply to the special case of acting. Actors

do not work in one creative industry, they work across many

(theatre, film, television, music, publishing, advertising), their

underemployment marking them out as what Marx calls an

‘industrial reserve army’ (Marx 1867[1976]: 784). Why actors would

accept these precarious conditions would best be ascertained

25

through empirical research, which might demonstrate the way

desire and passion are increasingly mobilized in the creative

industries as a means of control.

Finally, I agree with Jonathan Chambers’ call for more ‘historical

thinking’ in acting (Chambers 2010). Academic theatre

departments, by integrating practice and theory, are best placed to

lead here. Naturalism was intended to depict the human within the

larger social and historical forces that determine his being: this was

the aim of Zola, Ibsen, and Chekhov in the late 19th and early 20th

century, which was carried into Strasberg and Meisner’s work with

the Group Theatre in the 1930s, which staged Clifford Odets’

seminal piece of trade union theatre, Waiting for Lefty, in 1935. But

as Colin Counsell (1996) suggests, the process of creating realism

on the stage, as interpreted by Stanislavsky and his inheritors is

bound up in an ideology of bourgeois individualism. The notion of

‘realist drama’ is a historically and culturally constructed synthesis.

The root of drama is ‘action’, and ‘realism’ is meant to reflect life.

But life is not constant action in pursuit of objectives. Realist drama

therefore reflects life as defined by productivity, managerial

ideology at its purest. Perhaps by re-evaluating the ideology of

naturalism we might inject some ‘idleness’ into the theatre. Instead

of succumbing to the relentless drive of productivity, perhaps the

stage is the place where the actor might down tools, and go on

strike.

26

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