Actor training as violence: labour, debt, and the differential production of employability

This article examines actor training as a site in which violence is not only encountered through spectacular acts of misconduct, abuse, or poor practice, but organised through the ordinary relations of training itself. Drawing on materialist analysis, assemblage theory, and accounts of structural, symbolic and epistemic violence, it argues that actor training is shaped by the labour conditions to which it is oriented: oversupply, precarity, unpaid work, low pay, debt, and the differential market valuation of bodies, voices, identities and dispositions. Rather than treating training and industry as separate territories, the article considers how institutional training prepares students for precarious cultural labour by normalising self-management, affective discipline, symbolic indebtedness, and the adaptation of the self to employability. It further argues that these processes do not land equally, but are mediated through class, race, gender, disability, nationality, immigration status, and other intersecting conditions of access and recognition. In doing so, the article develops the concept of actor training as an assemblage of violence: structural in its organisation, disciplinary in its everyday procedures, differential in its distribution, and sustained through pedagogical and ideological practices that fold harm into the ordinary terms of professional preparation.