Performing Richard Armitage, performing Dr. Servetus — parts I and II

[Three things. ONE: I’m still waffling about the second half of this post, but have decided to publish the first half as is. Hopefully I’ll get over my inhibitions about the rest of it soon. TWO: I realize this argument will anger some people. Additional points, grounded argument about the views expressed here, disagreement and suggestions of other data and perspectives to consider are welcome. If you’re inclined to attack me, though, please just stop reading; I’m done writing apologias for my interpretive strategies. As a consequence of heavy exposure to debates in philosophy of language as they apply to the reliability of historical evidence, my position on the nature of what we can know reliably may have developed differently than yours. I, too, an only a human. By stating my perspective, I am not saying you shouldn’t think what you want to think about Mr. Armitage based on your notion of reality. THREE, I want to defang immediately the inevitable objection that I am saying everything about Mr. Armitage is “only a performance.” My argument is twofold. First, as I discussed extensively two days ago, even if there is a distinction between “reality” and “performance,” conventional evidential techniques fail us in locating it. Thus, I don’t see how we as audience members can reliably separate “performance” from “reality.” Secondly, though, and more importantly, what I will say below should make clear my conviction that performance is one of the most important things a self-aware person can do. Performance turns the often narcissistic process of self-exploration into an action that benefits others. As I conclude: much more than the cultivation of “being real,” performance changes the world. The world could stand to see a few more performances of self like the ones Richard Armitage is giving.]

A recent candid shot of Richard Armitage taken during the publicity storm for Strike Back. I don’t remember where I downloaded it from, but markings on the file date it to May 4, 2010, and credit it to Oliver at Goff Photos. Doesn’t he have an impressive thumb? Den Mann hab’ ich zum Fressen gern.

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If you are not subscribed to that discussion you might want to look at some recent comments on “The dorktastic past” by RAFrenzy and grerp that get to the question raised by RAFrenzy on the extent of the realness of Mr. Armitage which I didn’t respond to at the time because of final exams, but thought a lot about. (The “dorktastic past” post has had a curiously long life; it is one of the most viewed on this blog.)

I. The Problem & the Assertion

My instinctive response to the problem at the basis of RAFrenzy’s only superficially rhetorical question was to develop an Armitage epistemology in order to determine what it is possible to know about him. There, I suggested our fascination with him strands us at the mid-point between (B) and (C), or between the optimistic and skeptical common senses stances about what we can know based on information he offers in interviews. I referred to the possibility of (D) — that we can know nothing about him based on his statements about himself — but suggested that most fans wouldn’t go there. (And the discussion of the post has sustained that hypothesis so far; look at jane’s very incisive posts in particular, in addition to grerp‘s.) Quoting myself:

(D) could encompass a spectrum of possibilities: first, that the conditions affecting the possibility of knowledge created under (C) are so severely limiting that our knowledge of Mr. Armitage is inevitably indeterminate — we know what Armitage has said, but not whether it is credible information about him; second, that everything Mr. Armitage says about himself in interviews is a lie and that he seeks to mislead us for reasons that we could guess or that are entirely unknown to us; or the possibility that Mr. Armitage is doing something other than speaking about himself when he makes statements about himself in an interview.

This post is a sustained argument for (D). I want to begin by connecting it to grerp’s comment that “if I were him and able to control my reactions and didn’t enjoy a spotlight on my personal life, I would make up an alternate RA and be him in all interviews and appearances. He would certainly be capable of it, and I doubt anyone would be the wiser.” (grerp writes a lot more there that is thought-provoking and worthy of discussion, too, but we’ll stick with that for now.) I also want to make clear that that may not be her whole position, as she writes on the epistemology post, “I think even an accomplished liar will leave the occasional fingerprint. It’s hard to rubber glove your entire persona. … The consistency of his interview personality across time and regardless of interviewer does also offer data.” As grerp notes, the jury is out on whether Mr. Armitage is performing “an alternate RA” in order to protect himself from media scrutiny, but that it is only one of the options under (D). I am arguing for (D) here via the final hypothesis — that Mr. Armitage is doing something other than speaking about himself in interviews.

What is he doing, then? I will argue below that in his interviews he is performing the role of Richard Armitage. I want to distinguish this position both from implying that what he performs bears a 1:1 relationship to his “real” self (A), or even a selective version of that self, as if it were possible for humans to communicate without self-interpretation, and from claiming that he is lying to or misleading us in order to hide or protect something (the most troubling version of [D] and the one no one, including me, wants to believe). Though I can’t exclude those possibilities, I want to suggest instead that the line between “real” and “public” Armitage that is alluring to us and draws us in as viewers –between the things that we can and cannot see– may be equally unclear to him at times, and that playing with that line via performance is a means of self-exploration carried on for mutual benefit.

Indeed, as various statements Armitage himself has made affirm, the roles humans set out to perform sometimes take them to unexpected places. As his audience, we’re drawn in by the pudens discourse — expecting to see, but ultimately not being able to see the thing we want to see most. He is trying to draw that line every time he gets asked a personal question. But the act of performing his many different roles, including the role of Richard Armitage, is almost certainly also changing him and affecting his own perception of himself. It strikes me, too, that changes in his messages to fans also reflect his conception of the line between public and private and his capacity to perform himself in a particular setting. His initial performance of self in this space was more intimate and bore the signals of genuinity; he realized he could not sustain this kind of performance, perhaps due to the demands it generated precisely because of the pudens dynamic; and yet he occasionally wished to continue to do so in the form of the “spokesperson.” He is still figuring out what to do and say, how to be Richard Armitage to his fans in response to the various pressures he places upon himself and those brought to bear on him. (So no, I don’t think we’ve seen the last turn in Mr. Armitage’s relationship to his fandom.)

Richard Armitage being interviewed on GMTV by Lorraine Kelly, May 4, 2010, and a really successful performance of Richard Armitage, I think, as I felt more comfortable watching him being interviewed here than I often have in the past. What I especially love about this screencap is how it shows the way in which his cheek musculature moves the bottom of his nose when he’s smiling. Source: Richard Armitage Net

II. Theoretical Underpinnings

Identity has been highly contested in the West at least since the Greeks. We can’t prove anything about our own identities, much less those of others. As we can never really know what is true about others, only what we observe, anything we think about them is projection, without which we would have no knowledge of them at all. For skeptics of philosophy of language debates, however, I offer the following disclaimer: I don’t know anything about Mr. Armitage’s experiences beyond what I have read in the press or observed in video or his performances — a chain of evidence at the level of (B). Some of what I will say is based on my own experiences of performance, which is also a level (B) interpretive strategy, though I will try to point out the holes in my argumentation as/if I notice them. I am also using interpretive strategies drawn from the critiques of knowledge provided by questions posed at levels (C) and (D). Any interpretive act is dangerous; anything I say about him is only guessing. That doesn’t separate me from any other observer of him, incidentally, and on the most skeptical view, it may also be true of anything I say about myself.

As a professor, probably my most important role is that of Dr. Servetus, a role I play, after a decade, ever more successfully in its own performative space, but one that has made me ever more reserved outside of it when I have to encounter people who know me as that role. Performing the self is unavoidable as soon as we come in contact with others, and I don’t think that my struggle with this issue distinguishes me much from other humans. Friends who are mothers, for instance, often tell me about the fragmentation of self they experience in interactions with their children — some feel as if they are losing pieces of themselves. Conversely, I was substantially jarred this week when I left key pieces of Dr. Servetus behind for the summer and experienced an unmediated re-entry into the role of Daughter Servetus. Of course, if you endorse the notion of the decentered self, you think identity is not unitary; on this view, it is constructed primarily through language anyway, so that it in the attempt to find ourselves we only end up exchanging one signifier for another. Since I’ve been aware of it I’ve found this a grand description for the sort of problems people find in explaining who they are. 

Still, I feel the dilemma between the unitary, essential, and the constructed, fragmented self acutely, perhaps because of my position as a person with a heavy, indeed, neo-pietist religious socialization who lives her intellectual life on the cusp of poststructuralism. The notion that the self should not be identifiable was crushing for me, even as I acknowledge its validity in my own experience and in my observations of others. I was taught as a child to seek G-d out through the cultivation and practice of self-searching honesty that was then extended out into the world as a strategy of being, but my life experiences and education have tended to suggest that honesty itself is a stance among others that we embrace for one reason or another. In particular, in order to be successful at honesty, we must choose not only to be honest, but also to appear honest. (I notice this issue every semester in encounters with students who turn in late papers.) What I have concluded from this contradiction in my life is that the fact of performance interferes unavoidably with sincerity even as it draws upon it.

(Pedantic detour: If it interests you, this problem was set up in the Enlightenment debates about sincerity and rationality and played out in discussions of acting conducted by Diderot and others. In the wake of the Enlightenment, the focus in acting on an actor/audience interface where the actors were assumed to be like the audience changed to a separation between actors and audience. A “fourth wall” appeared in theatres that emphasized the role of actors as only seeming to be what they were; in short, a shift in performance from being to seeming occurred. Let me know if you need bibliography.)

I define sincerity here as “being real” or “being oneself,” in contrast to something else: acting / pretending/ performing — professing? What I mean by performance is different from “pretending,” in the sense that we might pretend to feel a certain way in order to please other people but do not let the act of pretending change who we are or what we feel, as when we tell a white lie or attend a social event that we’d rather not. Mr. Armitage makes this distinction himself when asked about his acting style: “In a way it’s slightly lazy because it means you don’t have to pretend – you just have to believe. As much as it’s possible to be like that I suppose I kind of do step in and out, I’m not one of these people that can’t talk to other people because I’m in my character, but I kind of do stay with the character, yeah. He’s always there. It’s like marinating something – you’re sitting in a marinade the whole time.” Given his professional training, Mr. Armitage no doubt finds it easier to “believe” he is these characters than I would. He performs many roles for a living; while I have multiple selves, in essence I mainly see myself performing one role that takes most of my energy and which I try hard not to see as fictional even as I acknowledge that it must be. While it is my means of earning a living, as well, it was not initially constructed as an act of believing. Until just a year or two ago, indeed, I did not think that I had to believe that I am Dr. Servetus. Now I find myself struggling to do so.

Still, I disagree with Armitage here insofar as I don’t think the problem with pretending is that it’s harder than performing, although it may be; rather, it’s less convincing because it is “only acting” and noticeable as such. Pretending –according to Webster, “fr. Latin, to tender as an excuse, literally, to stretch in front as a curtain”– changes nothing; it only hides something. Performing (fr. old French: per — thoroughly; fournir — to complete) changes something, it brings something to a close; you stop being the thing you were before and start becoming something else. In contrast to pretending, as with any kind of effective performance, performing the self involves a relationship between conviction and action that seeks a particular goal. This end may or may not correspond to the conviction with which one has started, but it in turn pushes you into certain kinds of convictions or actions. Thus, performing is more like developing an ethic of affability that you perform and the performance changes you, permanently or temporarily, for worse or for better. What comes out in turn comes back to challenge who you thought you were. Some people might call this “fake it till you make it,” although that phrase tends to suggest both a more ambivalent relationship on the part of the performer to the desired outcome than I mean, and also a much more definite outcome defined in advance. I am usually performing myself as something I already feel, and in turn I am often surprised by the outcome. Anyway, I find that performance changes me. I am never quite the same after a semester of performances. I wonder if there is something here akin to what Armitage has noted he experiences while acting. He’s quoted in a 2006 interview as having said: “You can spend a bit of yourself when you give yourself to a character. At the end of a job, you have to remind yourself who and what you are.“

~ by Servetus on June 3, 2010.