Training : repetition, movement and immunity

At first sight, it looks like a paradox. On the one hand, managers are travelling all round the world, companies are networking, speed is all the more praised, financial transactions are rushing at a light-speed, nomadic subjectivities are multiplying, etc. On the other hand, capitalism runs towards ever more standardization, diffusing its non-places and its managerial logic, with a growing immunity against challenge and criticism, and intolerance towards otherness. But what if this paradox was in the core of capitalism, that displacement, travel and movement were associated with immobility, immunity and constancy rather than with transience, transitions and transformations? We started an ethnographic study of Odin Teatret, a famous Danish, avant-garde theatre group. The study started with looking for the participants' culture, inquiring on the other, that is in a way from a safe, decontaminated distance. We were struck by the level of trust, of involvement and the quality of achievements but also by the fact that people there were joyfully accepting intensive participation (many hours, training beyond exhaustion, demands for permanent initiatives). What is more, a good deal of the time was employed at physical and mental training, with no link with the expected rehearsals. It is only in a second period, when we accepted that the research should be carried on through first person direct experience of these trainings, accepting to be affected (see Stewart, 1996) and transformed by what was happening that we eventually understood that, in spite of their seemingly repetitive and constant nature, trainings were about movement and transformation. A closer participation to such trainings made us understand that they are not intended to move us towards a preset destination, but are meant to prevent us to remain stuck, trapped in clichés and unfertile imitations. They are meant to keep us moving - to put us in this transfomative state enabling a reactivation, awakening and stimulation of processes of individual, collective and technical individuation (Simondon, 1989; Stiegler, 2005). For B. Stiegler (2009), the capitalism crisis is bound to the destruction of such individuation processes, of our ability to project ourselves in the future, of desiring. Capitalism standardizes subjectivities, it tends to erase differences and singularities, to repress movement. Trainings in Odin would be a fight against such standardisation processes. They force every participant to move and quit his resting state, forcing him or her to open up to what is unknown yet. Individuation, in our capitalist milieu, requires forces against its standardization trend, and trainings (as well as theatre plays) act towards the possibility of individuation, of movement, where all the moving forces (exercises, practices, methods, organizations) are themselves constantly in the move. Often, when life in Odin Teatret is described, people react by naming it a sect. Maybe running against capitalist standardization of subjectivities, desires, ways of life, requires intensive exercises beyond exhaustion and normal activities that could look like endoctrinement. P. Sloterdijk (2009) sees in the training, in the constant repetition of exercises, both spiritual and physical, the most salient trait of our times in Europe. For him, speaking of exercises would propose an alternative language and viewpoint to speak of what used to be referred to as spirituality, morale, ethics or asceticism. These exercises are meant to grow an immune system that would protect us from and help master the dangers and vulnerability of our fate: building a "co-immunity". They both embark us in an auto-formation and auto-elevation, and protect us from all that would threaten our belief systems. We will discuss of training qua vehicule to movement and transformation both as a new form of (post-)modern spirituality and practice of self, and as resistance to capitalism's standardization of subjectivities. Movements will thus be discussed in terms of immobility and immunity as well as transformation and transition. Odin Teatret offers the research a theatre where trainings have both a technical and existential reach, and has been developed as distinctive expertise - while theatre in itself may well be the relevant field for Deleuze (1968) adds: "Theatre is the real movement". Deleuze G. 1968. Différence et répétition. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France Simondon G. 1989. L'individuation psychique et collective. Paris: Aubier. Sloterdijk P. 2009. Du musst dein Leben ändern. Frankfurt am Main: Suchkamp Stiegler B. 2005, De la misère symbolique : la catastrophè du sensible. Paris: Galilée. Stiegler B. 2009, Pour une nouvelle critique de l'économie politique. Paris: Galilée.