Performing Dr. Servetus, performing Richard Armitage — part III

[Trying to figure out if there was any need to respond to the contradictory errors with which I have been charged, along with my concerns that this material is way too personal to publish on the Internet, and also way too “replete with very thou,” have delayed publication of this part of the discussion for several days. But I don’t have time to futz with passwords for trusted readers, so be responsible. In the words of Mrs. Hale, “I thank you for your promise to be kind …”. I guess I can always poof this or compress it. If you are more interested in the Armitage narrative than the Servetus narrative, skip the long middle section from the picture of me to the picture of Clio. Strictures TWO and THREE from the previous post should be taken as read here. Remember that as a description of me, this text too is, alas, nothing more than another performance of self. So I’ll say with Puck, “If we shadows have offended …]

 

Andrew Lincoln and Richard Armitage attend the premiere of Chris Ryan’s Strike Back at the Vue West End cinema in London. The darling nose shows up delightfully in relief against Collinson’s hair. Makes you wanna play “I got your nose!” And it’s another abbreviated upper lip sighting. Yum. Also love how those curls at the nape of the neck and the slight disarray in the strands of hair, along with the lines around the eye, humanize the figure — underlining a successful performance of the Richard Armitage role here. Source: Richard Armitage Net

Previously on “me and richard armitage”: In an initial post, I argued for the impossibility of meaningful “real” knowledge about Mr. Armitage based on what he says about himself in interviews. In that same post, I noted the attraction of the hide/reveal technique of giving out pieces of information about himself that strands us between optimistic and skeptical stances toward what we read about him. Finally, I mentioned that any possibility of us obtaining such knowledge from interviews would have to be rooted in Armitage’s connection to and mediation of (his) stable, knowable self. In a second post, I argued that believing that it was impossible to know anything about Armitage based on what he said in his interviews did not imply that he was lying, and argued that in his interviews he is performing the role of Richard Armitage. I also rehearsed the reasons for us to be skeptical about the possibility that anyone has a knowable, stable self, concluding that the act of performing any role changes the self, and that this is also true when perform our own selves. This circumstance, it goes without saying, also applies to Mr. Armitage.

In the penultimate installment of this particular project, today, I want to give some examples of how performance of the self destabilizes and restabilizes some identity elements, focusing in particular on the question of performance in relationship to truth / ethics / genuineness. In doing so, I start with a (B) strategy, assuming –problematically– that I can describe myself accurately and arguing on the basis of my own experiences of performing the self. I point out the ways in which those assumptions have historically forced me to question the stability of myself in terms of (C), conditioned in my case particularly by the form of the expectations of others, an experience that draws into question if I can really describe what it is I am performing or experiencing or successfully perform or experience a coherent self. The shattering of this project, I conclude, leaves us as humans unable to know or describe, but left at (D) in the form of an inability to center the self that keeps us performing. Throughout, but especially at the beginning and the end, I relate my experiences to statements made by Mr. Armitage that index his own steps in delineating the role of Richard Armitage. The end of this segment concludes that these inevitable performances can be, and in the case of Richard Armitage’s performances of himself, plausibly are, deeply ethical. How Armitage accomplishes that will be the subject of the last segment.

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III. Reasoning through Narratives

Mr. Armitage has been engaged in professional performances of various kinds since he was a teenager, so he’s been involved in working out questions of self from the moment of his earliest adult socialization, perhaps before he was even entirely aware of them. His statement about what he learned in those venues: “It… instilled me with a discipline that has stood me in good stead – never to be late, to know your lines and to be professional” points to an important aspect of performance — putting one’s own needs and desires into the context of the goals of the ensemble. He has noted that he finds exploring the relationship of person to environment a key tool for developing a character. In the Vulpes Libris interview, in response to a question about his practice of writing character biographies, he’s quoted as saying, “the moment when it comes alive is when that research turns into the character, and that character goes out into the big wide world and collides with other characters (often the facets created in the biography are designed to cause chaos when this happens, like planting a few explosions inside the character). …  I like the interaction of a scene with another character. That’s why you will never see me in a one-man show.” This statement tends to suggest that he sets up his characters to experience the problems consequent upon the collisions between aspects of the self that occur when it is confronted with the other. Because of this statement, I tend to read his performances as attempts to explore such issues; he made similar remarks about John Porter ( I can’t find the quotation now) and I think that this theme goes even deeper in the script than his awareness of the inability to resolve the individual soldier vs. military organization theme at the basis of Porter’s moral conflicts.

The future Dr. Servetus at age 12, just as epistemological heck was breaking loose, which is fortunately not visible in this beginning of the school year photo. Breasts and orthodontia, which would be, appeared in the picture the subsequent year. I can faintly see the musculature of the avid clarinetist around the mouth. I was at my adult height (5’8″), and in contrast to Richard Armitage, I feel like this conferred all kinds of advantages. Then again, I wasn’t male, or 6’2″, and it didn’t all happen in one summer. Source: Mom’s (dusty!) closet.

The problem of the self-contradictory aspects of the self brought into sharp relief as a consequence of contact with others has been a defining one in my life. So if he’s setting up his roles to explore self vs. other issues, part of their attraction to me stems from my experience performing the self in various ways since I was a girl. Given the circumstances of my childhood, I have been troubled by the paradox that a lot of it has occurred in religious spaces. The devotional practices of the church in which I was baptized were designed to create a coherent self, to iron out potential contradictions by forcing the person to confront his irremediable tendency to sin through rigorous self-examination. I did those things. At the same time, though, as a precocious musician I was expected to provide musical accompaniments of various sorts to religious services. And as a child / teen heavily involved in church and thus perceived to be particularly pious, I also provided readings, etc. It was relatively clear from the beginning that these endeavors were not about my religious feelings; they were about creating or inspiring religious feeling in others, and in order to be successful, certain elements were required, in particular a level of concentration on sequence and execution that interfered with the development of that religious feeling in myself. In instrumental music I still found a shield between myself and the audience, something to hide behind, something else that it could all be about, some physical space where I could bivouac and find myself during the performance, but when it was singing or reading a text, I experienced no buffer. The immediacy was practically unbearable, so that the self as I performed it became the shield. The performance comes from the self but it must simultaneously bare and extinguish it while creating something new.

I couldn’t have put that process in words as a teenager, but as one of the most stunning but frightening texts I read in college taught me, the performance of faith extinguishes it, even as it creates something entirely different in one, a conviction that one must go on performing for the benefit of others. My unconscious but growing awareness of this problem was really jarring. By the time I was 14 I was suffering emotionally from the extreme struggles necessary to maintain the self I was performing in church and in musical venues. In the atmosphere of other family problems, no one noticed mine, thus perhaps guaranteeing that they would persist for years, but this experience makes me sympathetic in general to Mr. Armitage’s statements about having attained his adult height suddenly at age 14 and feeling something other than what people around him perceived him to be. (This has to be an experience that, mutatis mutandis, many of us share with him. The moments of early adolescence when the body begins to change in unfamiliar, indeed unrecognizable ways, and when one begins to differentiate from one’s parents, offer myriad opportunities for highly similar experiences to his, and mine.)

Leaving home at 18 thus came as a huge relief, since it meant that I could stop doing what I had increasingly regarded as playing games with things that really mattered but not being able to discuss the problem with anyone; I still participated in numerous music ensembles, but only in large groups where I was well-hidden, my self subsumed in a larger sea. Eventually, by grad school, I stopped playing music for others altogether; my doctoral adviser told me it would take necessary time away from work, and indeed, it seemed too much of a cheat. I couldn’t give up G-d and religion –that was too much to ask– but, looking back now, I see that in college I quickly exchanged the religion of my childhood for one that insisted less on access to a real, coherent self for one in which intent is still important but performance is thought to have value in its own right. Again, I wouldn’t have realized that at the time.

I came head-on with this problem again when I moved to Germany. Due to a surprising political situation that had suddenly influenced immigration patterns, several provincial towns were flooded with people of my new faith for the first time since the war, and qualified people to lead religious services were lacking. Despite my gender, as a competent lay person, I was quickly coopted into leading weekly services. Even though we pray all facing in the same direction, so that the congregation saw only my back, what I discovered after about three weeks was that the very reason I’d been pushed in that direction — that I appeared to my fellow congregants to be spiritual, pious, connected to the divine while in prayer — meant that I would never experience closeness to the divine again in that setting. Leading services was all about creating a feeling for others that I was excluded from because I was concentrating on creating it (which involved timing, singing, pausing, and giving stage directions to the congregation in the three languages of its members): and the most important component of creating it was the exercise of “being real,” which really meant “appearing to be real to the congregation.” 

I was pretty good at appearing real to other people, and for a while I kept myself afloat financially by leading services for liberal congregations in provincial towns, but when I’d complete a service and then be expected to socialize with people afterwards while still in the role of the prayer leader, I’d be flummoxed. That role was not something I could perform at a dinner table, but what people seemed to expect was a version of that intensity and what they thought of as that “realness” sized down for interpersonal encounters. Even more disturbingly, as I grew more fearful that I was not genuine, I found myself speculating about ways to make myself more so. In my case, this activity frequently focused on debates about humility; isn’t the mere attempt to be more humble, or appear more humble, a rather arrogant exercise?

The problems in this setting were mitigated to some extent by the fact that I was always speaking a foreign language, while praying or interacting, and if my prayers were potentially contaminated, I could still fantasize that in some sense my emotions at least were only real in English. But as my German got better, that rationalization worked less well. By year three of living in that language I had to concede that I was perfectly well able to express my emotions in German, as indexed not least by an increasing number of arguments with my (native German) person, who was a bit taken aback as the woman he had thought of as irenic and smiling suddenly became able to express fairly forceful opinions in ever more exact terms.

And even then I didn’t know if I was expressing my emotions in German, or if German was somehow speaking me. Richard Armitage reports that he was affected by dreaming John Porter’s dreams; I began to feel as if I were drowning when I began to dream in German, when indeed my parents and others I knew only as English-speakers appeared to me in dreams speaking German. I totally understand how being away from home in a completely different atmosphere and essentially living as a different person could make it difficult to stay in touch. It’s not just that one is busy, and working hard, and physically tired; it’s that the act of bridging to the self that one’s family and friends at home know is sometimes too arduous to contemplate. My mother reports that toward the beginning of my third year there they began to pick up a strange vibe from me, and thought they were losing their daughter.

John Porter (Richard Armitage), at the end of the dream sequence in Strike Back 1.3. Source: Richard Armitage Central Gallery

(Detour raised by the issue of Porter’s dreams: From the sacred to the profane: Watching Porter’s highly scripted sexual fantasies about Danni in Strike Back has roused certain sympathies in me for the actors. Their job is to arouse arousal in their audiences, and for that, I assume, they have to both suppress any serious lack of sexual interest in each other in order to perform, but at the same time exclude the possibility of arousal for themselves in order to be able to perform. That’s a killer project for an afternoon; it must be exhausting to find a place to stand in that morass of contradictions while you’re getting naked with someone. It’s fun to fantasize about being Shelley Conn, but it’s exactly not the situation in which one would wish to find oneself kissing Richard Armitage.)

(Now back to the sacred). Appearing to be sincere: a contradiction in terms, one that I’ve started calling “the sincerity trap.” At the time, the elder sister of my person was teaching homiletics (the art of preaching) in the theology department of a German university. One of my research areas is the early modern history of homiletics, when very little instruction on the rhetoric of preaching was available to prospective pastors, and when I asked her what she thought the hardest thing was to teach the students, she said essentially that the hardest problem was the dilemma of being sincere while performing sincerity; that is, that the students didn’t understand that their actual sincerity wasn’t always perceived that way by the congregation, which expected sincerity from the pulpit. Most candidates for the ministry are sincere or feel themselves to be; but they needed to be helped to see how to bring that across to their listeners.

You can see through reading all of this why poststructuralism would have been a reluctant but consoling refuge for me, I think. Even as we grasp for the self, it flees our control. We think we have one self, but we have many; the people who surround us perceive another and in treating us as if that self is real, they either make it solidify or change us somehow. It would be one thing if we could plausibly decide who to be, but even as we find and perform one self, the performance changes the text we are performing. (Poststructuralisms would tend to suggest that all of these problems may be effects of the aporias at the center of language; I won’t explore that here, but my severe awareness of this problem after years of Bible study is the source of my obsessive speculations about whether people exist, which are fairly acute in the case of Mr. Armitage. A matter for another day, since I know most readers consider that possibility absurd.)

My searches for a self all ended in fragmentations. I didn’t become a musician; I didn’t join the clergy of any faith; I decided to take refuge in critical analysis of the human past and got a Ph.D. If I couldn’t be whole myself I would at least be able to understand and explain why I couldn’t. To some extent this choice was also a taking refuge in a facet of my personality that had been relatively consistent through all of the years and both religions and thus a desperate attempt to cling to trait that was relatively stable, if unattractive: a defensive stance that one elementary teacher termed a morbid capacity for and preoccupation with detailed observation–a tendency that may have created my problems in the first place. But the field of study I chose was the past of my childhood faith, which in turn –almost unavoidably– put me in the classroom. Here I was confronted with all of the problems I had before, though at first they seemed less threatening than in religious venues.

Clio, muse of history, as painted by Vermeer; perceived by me as a less threatening arbiter of my sincerity than G-d. Source: Wikipedia

It seemed to me at first that history lectures, being about subject matter, did not have to be about the communication of either sentiment, virtue, or truth. But negotiating those issues after they reappeared –exciting the students, encouraging them to define virtue and follow it, trying to convey an ethic of curiosity about the world that would spur them to seek out the truth– turned out to be much less problematic than the essential nature of performing Dr. Servetus before them three times a week. I was back in the exact same situation I’d been in front of my congregations; the only difference was that G-d was not involved. I thought maybe that would be the decisive thing to make the sincere performance of self that stands at the core of enthralling university lecturing possible. If I slid into “mere” acting, into what I’ve previously called pretending,  at least it would not involve moral error. Even so, performing –in the sense of changing something, of achieving a completion– did not lose its fundamental nature.

After a decade of performing Dr. Servetus, I now have more available toolkit to deal with the challenges of performance, insofar as the techniques of performing and teaching are similar, and sometimes they are. For instance, even if I don’t learn lines, I plan what to say and how to say it, and I do need both to rehearse and to memorize; these days I have to have a carefully planned audiovisual element. Like Mr. Armitage, I warm up (though not with the Alexander technique; I do things I learned in singing lessons) before speaking to keep from overtaxing my voice and to fine-tune breathing and breath support to make sure I can reach the back of the hall for the whole 75 minutes. I think about my own stage directions, pacing, timing, etc.; and, as in the case of live acting, I respond to the dynamic of the lecture hall. When it’s all working –all the technologies of media and self are cooperating– it feels like I am not pretending; indeed it can feel as if my lectures are a performance in the way that the religious services I offered never were; it is in the lecture hall that I become able to believe in the self I am performing, as opposed to pretending for the benefit of others. Pretending is hard, even exhausting; performing (when it works) is easy. And the actions I take there are for the benefit of others, to try to help them understand how knowledge can change them. But it is also in the lecture hall that I am changed by my performances, that what I learn there changes me. In the lecture hall, I re-enter that yearning for the coherent, unitary self that I have in principle rejected the possibility of, but need to try to re-constitute for the students, and maybe for myself as well.

The historic figure Servetus, in an image from approximately a century after his death, someone with whom Dr. Servetus, as a Trinitarian heretic, identifies intensely. His thumbs and fingers are nowhere near as cool as Mr. Armitage’s, unfortunately. Source: Wikipedia

This process of change starts with creating the character of Dr. Servetus. Lecturing is another attempt at reaching the self and presenting it on an ethical–because hopefully honest or at least non-deceptive–level to an audience. Because it is deeply personal, rejection of the performance in whatever form that occurs is painful, even if it’s clearly a minority position. Cf. Armitage’s comments on reading about himself on the Internet: “The problem with me is I read everything, but it’s only the bad stuff that stays with me. It’s weird, you only need to be told something once and it stays with you.” Same for me: if I put myself out there, the rejection stings. As much as I need to read them in order to improve my work, the one angry course evaluation in a stack of a hundred ruins my mood for days. I could also apply this insight to the performance of self that is blogging.

More importantly, though, lecturing as an attempt to perform the self for the students points out the many flaws in what I think of illusorily as my core self, the self I am when I think no one else is watching. Some of those traits are good, admittedly, and easy to put out there: My intellect spurs students to question their assumptions; I can be generous with praise; I am actually funny in the classroom if nowhere else; I appear transparent and I tell them what I think if I am asked directly, at least within certain limits; I teach as if I am relatively uninvested in my own opinions; I appear irreverent; if I feel a side in a student discussion is losing unfairly, I argue present the most convincing arguments I can as advocatus diaboli. 

As many of the necessary traits of a professor as I possess, however, I am lacking in important qualities of the good professor — patience, discipline, consistency. I’ve whined in the past about some of my failings, revealing others in the process. All of these positive traits have to be trained and added to Dr. Servetus’s panoply of tricks for dealing with students, and the negative ones suppressed. Cf. what Mr. Armitage says of creating John Porter: “It was a ‘challenge’ … to live up to Ryan’s character. ‘I wanted him to be the kind of bloke I’d like to be even without the flaws’.” In the interview in the DVD extras for Spooks 7, Armitage speaks similarly of Lucas as a super-hero and how he’d want him to be — better than himself. Similarly, I want Dr. Servetus to be a superhero professor. What I note about performance –how could it be different?– is that performing a better self can make me better. Attempts to be patient by performing patience in turn make me patient. Attempts to take students more seriously by performing taking them seriously in fact make me take them more seriously and improve their work because they think what they think matters to me. And sometimes, this whole process means that it does. The performance thus serves an ethical end: it serves not only me by making me a better professor, it serves the students as well. What’s become puzzlingly clear to me in all of this is how damaging “being real” or authentic could be in this atmosphere. What reasons would I have to become better, if I were only seeking to establish my identity? Dr. Servetus’s identity has to be the one that best serves the audiences of Dr. Servetus.

My concession that my “real” self, or at least the one that precedes attempts to perform the Dr. Servetus role, could be damaging to the students notwithstanding, I’m still bedeviled by the sincerity problem, by the dilemma of appearing to be sincere that challenges young pastors in new pulpits. My willingness to weigh every side of a questions sometimes appears to students as an unwillingness to take a stand, as wishy-washiness. Students want professors who are passionate, interesting; once one has appeared that way in a few lectures, one’s no longer allowed a bad day. Some days I have to try to perform sincerity, and on some of those days, it doesn’t work and remains a pretense. On a day when I can feel the different gears of the performed self straining against each other rather than clicking smoothly together, I can also see the students nodding off or reaching for their laptops. But on a day when it’s good, it’s a bit like what Mr. Armitage describes in his discussion of attaining confidence when he says, “I lost control and became the character,” or in 2006, when he was quoted as saying “Live acting is a kind of adventure sport[.] … “I don’t go abseiling or snowboarding, but I sometimes think that stepping out on stage can have the same kind of adrenaline rush.” And on a day when I succeed in performing sincere Dr. Servetus even when I don’t feel that way, I feel rewarded by the sense that such action has an ethical value.

I, like Armitage, confess to a certain amount of doubt about my performances, not least in the price I pay for them. It isn’t always equally easy for me to believe in Dr. Servetus. It was particularly hard this year. In the same 2006 article, we read, “Armitage admits to doubts about becoming an actor. ‘I regret it a lot,’ he says, furrowing his brow. ‘And I don’t know why, because when it’s good, it’s great. But it can take its toll on your emotions’.” As he notes, John Porter didn’t just go away after he was done playing the role; that can be a positive and negative effect of performance, I find. In a similar vein, I found interesting his comment: “I am searching for a place where I can just be, not necessarily a physical place, to settle down, a state of mind. I like to get home to Leicestershire but I rarely have much chance. Time seems so short.” I could parse this comment for days, but I’ll limit myself to noting that the unsettling effects of performance, as rewarding as it is, eat up hours of recovery. It’s not just the time it takes to get somewhere, it’s the time one needs to get in the frame of mind to go, to readjust the self one is performing for the new environment. If Mr. Armitage finds that issue both fatiguing and unsettling, well, I can only agree with him. It’s just that which may make the performance of the role of Richard Armitage both necessary and life-altering for him and us. Whatever it is, it’s not pretense. When he’s performing Richard Armitage, he is emphatically not pretending.

I hope it is clear now why I think there are certain kinds of performances of the self that can change the world, in that they change their audiences along with the actor, and I think part of what attracts me to Mr. Armitage is my belief not only that his performances are among these, but also that he may be embracing such performances as an ethical solution to the problems raised by the sincerity trap. I’ll pick up there soon.

~ by Servetus on June 5, 2010.