Virtuosity
Remember a time you were amazed and dazzled by someone. Not by them in general, but by their specific actions in a moment. It may have been a musician on stage or someone telling a vivid story at a party. You were entranced, entertained, and afterwards wouldn’t be able to quite say what about it was so wonderful. In these moments, you witnessed virtuosity.
Virtuosity lies entirely in the performance of an act. This requires that no tangible end result is left behind, or at least that the end result is not the goal of the performance, even if someone is trying to record it. It also means that virtuosity requires an audience – the virtuoso speaker might be practising her work at home and preparing her appearance, but the virtuosity of the act will only emerge in the moment she stands up before her listeners and takes them with her. Similarly, a display of virtuosity may often follow a score, but it goes beyond the mere enactment of that score. A virtuoso violin performance is more than the score of the composition, and a rousing speech goes beyond its manuscript.
We have been accustomed to think of virtuosity as a thing of the past. We might still earnestly call Paganini a virtuoso in a retrospective, but today a declaration of virtuosity outside of classical music advertising seems as out of place as shouting “Bravo!” at a techno club. A performance is more likely to be talked about in the qualities of the performers and how great they did a particular thing rather than as a dazzling, unrepeatable moment. This is a shame! When looking for it, we can all find virtuosity in our own lives and those of the people around us.
The everyday instance of virtuosity closest to home is everyday language. If we speak a language, we have learnt to effortlessly riff and improvise in our conversations, telling stories and making jokes and performing with no way of recreating the feeling of a particular conversation or moment even minutes after it happened. In good company where conversation flows freely, we are all virtuosos.
In the workplace, virtuosity has changed from being firmly outside it into being a requirement of most work. When an act of work, as used to be more common, is closely tied to a widget that is being produced, following prescribed steps, there is little room to dazzle and be dazzled. Ingenuity is expressed in finding labor-saving tricks to increase the leisure time of oneself and one’s coworkers. A virtuoso may have been someone who performed in a way that was particularly entertaining to watch or particularly absorbing in the rhythm they followed, but these skills were adjacent to the work. Today, most work takes place in an environment of coordination with the widgets being produced not always being immediately apparent. Identifying ways of reducing the workload is not a trick, but an expectation for most roles. Being a virtuoso may mean taking the score of business practices around meetings, spreadsheets, clear communication and delivering a performance over time that leaves everyone being happier with their work. It could also be expressed in running the kind of meeting where attendees leave feeling better than when they came in.
The first step is teaching oneself to recognize this virtuosity through the fog that makes us want to see outcomes and techniques and repeatable practices. Think of moments where you find yourself performing, or see others perform. This may be the party host whose small talk, welcome chats and introductions make everyone feel at home and connected to the other guests or the manager whose projects you always enjoy being part of. Try identifying the kind of virtuosity – what is the heart of the performance? What is the score and how can it be interpreted? What’s dazzling? When approached this way, you may see a new joy in some practices you already participate in, and uncover spaces in which virtuosity is possible but wasn’t previously pursued.
Going further, one can try to move from what can be called servile virtuosity to a escape virtuosity. In this distinction, servile virtuosity is virtuosity that is engaged in as a means to an end – most commonly by receiving money for it. It is also generally limited to a specific context. An actor can be a virtuoso but she also needs to pay rent. A host might be a virtuoso but if she’s organising a fundraiser dinner party, she’s also deploying her virtuosity for a greater good. Escape virtuosity on the other hand is virtuosity whose score is missing completely, or, put differently, comprises the common places and general conventions of living in one’s society. We mentioned language as one form of virtuosity that is accessible to most and a constant source of innovation and joy. One can be a virtuoso story teller, a virtuoso relationship advice giver, or a virtuoso small talker. But the relationship performer-performance-audience goes further – since almost all of our actions happen in a social context, there is room to be a virtuoso in how one lives one’s life. To be an escape virtuoso, you must recognize the commonplaces of your world and your own expertise in reinterpreting them.
References
This description of virtuosity is taken almost entirely from the second of three seminars delivered by Paolo Virno. The relevant section can be found here: https://libcom.org/library/4-labor-action-intellect-day-two#_43_On_virtuosity_From_Aristotle_to_Glenn_Gould_
The seminars can be a bit repetitive, but the riffing on the intersection of Labor, General Intellect, and Politics is wonderful.
For works that build on Virno’s, see Isabell Lorey (2015) State of insecurity: government of the precarious and McKenzie Wark (2019) Capital is dead: is this something worse? (possibly https://publicseminar.org/2016/07/virno/)