The instrument metaphor secretly requires the actor to construct a stable self

Evidence

What begins as the seemingly simple statement that the actor’s role is to be a mere instrument quickly evolves into a claim that the actor must organize and stabilize for herself a character in relation to which her performance can be crafted. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 370

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the reader’s silence-writing tension: the claim of emptying oneself turns out to require a strengthened, organized self — the same paradox as ‘losing oneself in silence (still a self doing the losing).’ — connects to: One’s own possibilities become instruments for the Other’s aims; Habit is spirit’s mechanism for converting resistance into supple instruments.