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eight  Technique Robert P. Crease and John Lutterbie When techniques are broadly de‹ned—as process-oriented and involving any systematic and goal-directed human action—one ‹nds them in every creative human activity: in sports, painting, dancing, playing musical instruments, and acting; in physics, chemistry, medicine, and astronomy ; in education, administration, and sex. Joseph Agassi argues that magic consists of techniques, though unscienti‹c ones.1 The swing-era ballad “Oh, Look At Me Now” mentions “technique of kisses.” But techniques can also be much more narrowly de‹ned to include only fully articulated and independently recognized practices that are speci‹cally identi‹ed and studied as techniques (the “Alexander technique”). Whether broadly or narrowly conceived, techniques tend to inspire an ambivalent reaction especially among practitioners of artistic ‹elds and especially in theater. Champions deny the existence of a sharp distinction between technique and artistry, seeing the former as enabling, liberating, and essential to the latter. Skeptics draw a sharp division between technique as involving the (teachable) mechanics of acts, and artistry as involving the (unteachable) aesthetics of acts, and then point out how frequently the former comes to dominate, smother, and disrupt the latter. Musician Charles Ives, a critic of technique, is famous for remarking, “My God! What has sound got to do with music!” Indeed, it is virtually a cultural cliché that technique is at least disconnected from true artistry. A cartoon in the New Yorker magazine once depicted a robber explaining to several other robbers how to use a new gun; “Sure, technique counts,” ran the caption, “but at some point you’ve got to trust your criminal instincts.” Between the two poles—of technique as enabling or disabling artistry— lies a spectrum of attitudes, in which technique is regarded as contributing to artistry in a variety of ways and with different degrees of importance.2 160 Perspectives on Technique In theater, a long-standing difference of opinion about the relationship of technique and the artistry or emotional intensity of performance has played out among philosophers and theater scholars ever since Plato’s re›ections on the technē of acting, in which he found no “knowledge” but only seductive passions arising from blind inspiration—the inexplicable presence of the Divine. Shakespeare, marveling at the ability of passion and form to work together, has Hamlet chastise himself for failing to do in life what the player can do “in a ‹ction, in a dream of passion . . . his whole function suiting / With forms to his conceit.” Diderot felt that the passions were preeminent in acting until he realized that David Garrick’s technique allowed him to play consistently well night after night, while those who depended on inspiration could not sustain the depth of passion in subsequent performances. Stanislavsky found that the actors of his time were depending on technique at the cost of emotional verity, was impressed by Chaliapin’s apparently spontaneously and self-taught “natural genius,” and worked at devising a system for training actors that could be relied upon to bring emotional honesty to the stage, “to create on stage a live life of the human spirit.”3 Technique, in short, generally is seen as a set of skills (i.e., tools that can be acquired) that allow the performer to access the emotional contents demanded by a role, but needs to be supplemented—even as it sometimes interferes—with a charismatic intensity that demands attention, understood as an intangible derived from inspiration (in-spiriting ), pure talent, or “presence,” like Stanislavsky’s “human spirit.” This long-standing ambivalence about the value of technique—as well as the broad spectrum of activities in vastly different ‹elds said to fall into that category—suggests an essential conceptual unclarity of the sort that philosophers might be expected to address. One would expect a philosophical account of technique to do much to exhibit the domain and limits of technique, to indicate what is the same and what different in each of its diverse forms, to clarify how the often polarized spectrum of attitudes about it came about, and to reveal those conditions under which it is liberating and those under which it is sti›ing. But among philosophers, alas, we ‹nd a repetition of the same spectrum of attitudes. Philosophers, too, seem to be scattered between two poles in their attitudes toward technique . At the one pole are those who regard technique negatively as the de‹ning manifestation of the crisis of modernity, while those at the other pole...

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