Performing for affect? Immaterial labour and performer training

Abstract

Despite its well-documented precarious nature, graduates regard the social factory of the cultural and creative industries as a desirable career destination. University-based performer training has found itself at the forefront of this, championing the critical role of self-awareness, social reflexivity and cultural knowledge in the formation of the new working subjectivities on which such industries are based. That such valued educational and training objectives should have become vindicated by the demands of contemporary networked and affective working ought to be a cause for celebration. However, as a number of writers have argued, such developments present students and academics with a series of tensions and contradictions that are intrinsic to the new social and economic forms of ‘cognitive’ or ‘informational’ capitalism. One particularly influential group derives its inspiration (and some of its membership) from the Autonomy movement of 1970s Italy, which now counts academic and political activists as members across the world. This paper examines this body of theory, first summarising its key arguments before assessing its potential to contribute to a critical interrogation of the objectives and methods of contemporary performer training regimes with specific reference to the long tradition of psychophysical and post-psychophysical performer training.

Keywords::

• performer training
• psychophysical
• immaterial labour
• social factory
• creative work

Notes

^1. See Taylor (2013) for an explanation of the term ‘imaginaries’ in this context.

^2. Zarrilli (2009, p. 45) cites variously the philosophers Alva Noe, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson with the anthropologist Tim Ingold and the psychologist James J. Gibson, ideas which are now emerging at the heart of contemporary post-aesthetic cultural politics (Roberts 2007, e-flux journal 2011, Sommer 2014).

^3. With the art collective PAD/D – Political Art Documentation/Distribution.

^4. See the Special Issue of Performance Research entitled On Value edited by McKinney and Wallis (2013).