Technique

TechniqueRW

#essay, #waywardness, #unteachable, #embodiment

Technique: ‘A particular way and order of performing actions.’ Most techniques come from extensive trial and error. ‘The master’ who has spent hours thinking or physically practising certain actions, designs a particular way and order of performing actions. Many masters have come up with many techniques. All techniques have a goal, like being able to do a perfect pirouette, or playing a difficult musical piece, or meditating for days in a row, but the result of executing each technique may be different.

Let’s take killing an animal as an example. You could kill an animal with a gun, strangle them, drown them, cut their throat, and several other ways. These ways all have a particular way and order of performing actions, so they have a technique. Besides the goal of killing the animal you could have another goal; doing it efficiently, painlessly, according to religious beliefs, collecting all the blood, keeping the fur intact, slowly, dramatically, or to achieve a comedic effect. Whichever technique you choose depends on which goals you want to achieve. To know many techniques is to be able to choose the right actions for the right moment.

I wonder if I can make up a technique that I’m not able to perform myself. Something like: writing readable texts in straight lines behind my back with my left hand. I could practise this and maybe at some point I’ll be able to do it, but until then I cannot tell you exactly in which particular way, and in which order you should perform which actions. So I haven’t yet designed a technique. I only have a goal I would like to achieve.

Now that I have a goal without a technique, I wonder if there is such a thing as a

technique without a goal. You may try and execute this technique: Sit on a bench that is too low. Hold your knees together. Arch your back. Arms are hanging down. Look straight ahead. Then start moving your eyes from left to right and back. Repeat this movement. Slowly speed up. When you move your eyes as fast as you can, start wiggling your fingers.

If you have executed the technique like me you will probably have come to the conclusion that if you keep repeating; at some point you will either want to stop, or you will pass out. It really makes you nauseous! This effect seems to be the only result of this technique (although you could perhaps use it in a performative piece).

I tried to create a technique without a goal, so I said some random stuff but actually not having a goal is a goal as well. If you poorly execute a technique, like shooting an animal but missing, you do not achieve your goal and you end up with an unexpected result. Now I wonder: If waywardness is to always do the unexpected, can I design a technique whose goal is to always have an unexpected result? Like: First identify the structures around you. Reflect on what is constraining you. Note what is expected of you. Choose to do the opposite.

If you execute the technique, and a wayward result comes out, is it still wayward since someone else designed the technique, pushed you in that direction? Is a wayward technique only wayward the first time it is performed? From then on it is repetition, which is not wayward in itself. Can you even design a technique or give a class on being wayward? Or is the technique to train waywardness; designing the surroundings, creating a breeding ground for whimsy, and self-willing students?

How to teach is also a question of how to learn.

In Greek times you could learn by absorption (empiera), or example (techne). Subjects which could be taught were the ones which had a theory, or a body of information; a set of methods or something that could be written down and handed on to students. Elkins tells us techne was transformed into technique from the renaissance onwards. From then on a technique was something you could teach people, while the arts, being not only a body of information, became ‘unteachable’. Following this definition, technique is narrowed down to the component of language. Whatever cannot be put into words is not part of technique and becomes unteachable.

There is not a single technique which is explainable only in words. Every technique is designed and executed by a body, and a body has so much nuance. Learning a technique with your body needs just as much observing and trying as it needs explanatory words. Teaching techniques should always be a combination of techne and empiera.

So how to teach and how to learn waywardness? Are there any techniques out there to use for this goal? Can we create one or is that not the point? I would say it is actually much more wayward to create your own techniques; by practicing, altering, and challenging your teacher’s, parent’s, societies’, partner’s, and neighbour’s ways of doing, their bodies of information, set of rules and methods. Waywardness is to change those to your liking, to your conditions, to your goals, to your body, to create your own particular ways and orders of performing actions.