Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu
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Posts posted by Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu
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An early note in my reading was on McLean's speculative translation of melos and "machine". Not sure of its bearing here in the trace of thought, but post it because it was an off-shoot of my reading, and might as well preserve the footnote.
At the start of reading a book it is a beautiful virtual space; much is possible. Here @BHMcLean108's new book Deleuze, Guattari & the Machine in Early Christianity starts by retranslating "μέλος" as machine, instead of merely parts. But moves away from them being "organs"
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In tracing this mental landscape I made these notes, with these caps of McLean's work:
"This D&G Disjunctive Synthesis summation by McLean (in analogy for early Xp church) provides a powerful template for explaining the affective powers of ring Muay Thai, esp in the festival setting (and helps explain the surplus value of the deities of the ring & Muay Thai itself)."
"These Deleuze & Guattari dynamics help flesh out a Girardian reading of the sacrificial rite power of the festival Muay Thai ring, how the production of the (sacred) loser helps propitiate the gods/dieties, thru symbolic expulsion, and generate the surplus value of the community."
"prospectively: The paranoic pole helps us understand how the revulsion against the gamblers (the very organs of the generation of Muay Thai as a sport), produces a low-intensity paranoic body."
"McLean on "milieu" to give context to territorialization..."
and, then noted:
"Getting an enormous amount out of McLean's D&G & Early Xp book, understanding the dynamics of the festival fighting Muay Thai trad, the unwritten development of Muay Thai in the provinces, in the light of the territorializations the early Christian Church. socio-religious flows. I've always had the sense that the traditional, custom-rich festival fight ring was a stage upon which "the god was made to appear", often only in flashes. Girard opened one door to this, but McLean's book opens up the floor plan of the process. The generation of surplus." -
Posting this as a fragment, as a developmental post on the nature of Thailand's native Muay Thai. Usually my posts are more comprehensive, but this time I ran into old Twitter posts were I had done some reasoning work which I believe I didn't continue on with. It's good to move it here in case much more can be made of this. working from McLean's Deleuze, Guattari and the Machine in Early Christianity: Schizoanalysis, Affect and Multiplicity
The thought/analysis ends with this graphic describing the expressive nature of Thailand's Muay Thai:
The above represents the culminative end to which I traced the analysis, but it had begun with the reading of McClean's book studying the Deleuze & Guattari "machine" of the Early Christian Church, really thinking about how the material conditions and the ideas came together expressively. Here were some excerpts that started out my investigation and potential application to Thailand's native Muay Thai:
This is what I wrote following these citations:
Posting as a note to myself for further study. A project of outlining the rural muaywat fesitival fight (form, event) along D&G lines of nondiscursive content & discursive expression. This McLean summation (in the service of the Early Christian Church, using the same as helpful). Ess. the nondiscursive form of the content (the ring, the wat, the festival) & its substance (the bodies, physical money-flows); AND its discursive expression, its form (genre styles of fighting, modes of masculinity) and content (fighting as writing) produces power/knowledge. This will allow us to trace the expressive characteristics of Thailand's native Muay Thai, what is unique to it, as in particular how it relates to violence and its expression, a very meaningful content in contrast to Western modes of violence as entertainment. This would also allow us to trace just how radically the West is reformulating and recoding the expression of Thailand's Muay Thai (to forward and feed its own differing values), and to mark where in the discursive/nondiscursive structure this is occurring.
I also posted this Reddit sourced description of a Deleuze & Guattari Abstract Machine:
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Whatever one's position on the future of Thailand's Muay Thai, its hard to deny that many of the arguments for the unstoppable - but sometimes delayed - "evolution" of the sport, it's imagined "potential" being reached through globalization and hoped-for mass popularity, it's provincial/parochial (or corrupt) nature being technologically "modernized" and rationalized, mirror the justification reasonings behind colonialism, which held a concept of beneficent, educating husbandry and willful, well-rewarded participants in the culture. This is not to say that they are the same, we are in a different time in history, but only that the ethical questions about colonialism likely need to also be answered in this case, where "development" by powerful outside forces and interests is assumed as an unproblematic Good.
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42 minutes ago, Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu said:
Reflecting on it, I think these are my three main objections - or at least points of constructive criticism - towards some of the globalizing efforts on Thailand's Muay Thai:
1. Changing the rules and very form of the sport so that Westerners (and other non-Thais) will win fights that they otherwise would have lost. (This goes from changing weigh-in rules to down-regulating primary Thai skills - defensive counter fighting, narrative control, clinch, etc - that non-Thais just are not good at.)
2. Decaying the once vast small kaimuay/festival culture of provincial Muay Thai which created such diversity and complexity of skillsets in Thailand historically AND radically altering the developmental training methods of Thais. Both of these lead to Thai fighters just becoming less and less skilled, and more in line with a Western/International baseline.
3. Changing the ethos of Muay Thai fighting. Moving it from a sport that fundamentally expresses control to a sport that expresses violence.
The first of these puts a thumb on the scale that gives the illusion that Western/International fighters are much better than they are. This is great for International marketing. And the second of these reinforces that illusion because it drains the Thai standard of greatness that gives Muay Thai its allure in the first place. If Thais become less skilled, again International fighters will win more fights. The primary motivator and promise of the "Magical" or untouchable fighter of Thailand becomes lost, an image that ironically enough has been essential to Soft Power.
The third of these is maybe the most troubling, or at least harder to see and pernicious. In order to align Thailand's Muay Thai with Global appetites it must move towards expressing similar values that combat fight culture expresses in global capitalism, which is that of transgressive violence. The very foundational value of control-in-the-face-of-possible-violence that generated such high level fighters of Thailand, which gave it its aura in the world, becomes culturally colonized; it is replaced by a lower value of entertainment violence (which over time produces much less complex or fluent skill sets).
I could mention as well, this is really core to the persistent debate about youth fighting in Thailand. From an Internationalist perspective because fighting is fundamentally violence, it is inherently transgressive and "adult". Because fighting in Thailand's history is NOT fundamentally violence, but instead is about mastery and control (quite complexly developed, including the use of aggression, but not fundamentally so), it is not inherently adult. In fact, it is an inculcative practice, a practice of maturation that aligns with the process of becoming adult, possessing control. One reason why Thai fighters have been so sublimely skilled is that they grew up within a process of developmental control over oneself and threatened violence. An art counter to violence as it is commonly conceived in a fundamental way. If we change the spectrum of this valuation, not only are the highest level skill sets threatened to be lost, but also the valuable lesson that Thailand's culture has for the world will fall away.
Ideally, the key to long term Soft Power for Thailand has to be founded on the uniqueness of Thailand's perspective on fighting and fight culture. This is what brings people across 1,000s of miles and causes them to invest their lives in the specialness of the art. And this comes out of the valuation of what fighting itself means and the incredibly high level of skill that was developed in that value, come out of the root-system of provincial fighting.
This is aside from the worrisome corrosive effect of replacing extremely knowledgeable, deeply invested in-stadium fans with phone scrolling tourists who know very little about the sport or what is going on in the ring. A sport (and art) in a certain sense cannot survive at a high level of performance with such a huge in-stadium fan disparity. Audience will over time shape the product...when it becomes a "product". This is one of the quagmires of a consumerist approach.
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Reflecting on it, I think these are my three main objections - or at least points of constructive criticism - towards some of the globalizing efforts on Thailand's Muay Thai:
1. Changing the rules and very form of the sport so that Westerners (and other non-Thais) will win fights that they otherwise would have lost. (This goes from changing weigh-in rules to down-regulating primary Thai skills - defensive counter fighting, narrative control, clinch, etc - that non-Thais just are not good at.)
2. Decaying the once vast small kaimuay/festival culture of provincial Muay Thai which created such diversity and complexity of skillsets in Thailand historically AND radically altering the developmental training methods of Thais. Both of these lead to Thai fighters just becoming less and less skilled, and more in line with a Western/International baseline.
3. Changing the ethos of Muay Thai fighting. Moving it from a sport that fundamentally expresses control to a sport that expresses violence.
The first of these puts a thumb on the scale that gives the illusion that Western/International fighters are much better than they are. This is great for International marketing. And the second of these reinforces that illusion because it drains the Thai standard of greatness that gives Muay Thai its allure in the first place. If Thais become less skilled, again International fighters will win more fights. The primary motivator and promise of the "Magical" or untouchable fighter of Thailand becomes lost, an image that ironically enough has been essential to Soft Power.
The third of these is maybe the most troubling, or at least harder to see and pernicious. In order to align Thailand's Muay Thai with Global appetites it must move towards expressing similar values that combat fight culture expresses in global capitalism, which is that of transgressive violence. The very foundational value of control-in-the-face-of-possible-violence that generated such high level fighters of Thailand, which gave it its aura in the world, becomes culturally colonized; it is replaced by a lower value of entertainment violence (which over time produces much less complex or fluent skill sets).
Prescriptively, one would maybe list:
1. Try to take the thumb off the scale for International fighters. Now that they have been skewed for start sliding the sport back towards complexity and higher level skills.
2. Protect and nurture the kaimuay/festival grassroots of Muay Thai, the small gym networks and fighting circuits that develop rich skillsets. AND, preserve or return to aspects of traditional training practices, because higher level skills were embedded in these practices.
3. Pull back on the valorization of violence or aggression for its own sake, and embrace the uniqueness of control in the face of violence, extol "gep awut" for instance. This unlocks the greater levels of skill which will give Thailand enduring value in the world.
I could mention as well, this is really core to the persistent debate about youth fighting in Thailand. From an Internationalist perspective because fighting is fundamentally violence, it is inherently transgressive and "adult". Because fighting in Thailand's history is NOT fundamentally violence, but instead is about mastery and control (quite complexly developed, including the use of aggression, but not fundamentally so), it is not inherently adult. In fact, it is an inculcative practice, a practice of maturation that aligns with the process of becoming adult, possessing control. One reason why Thai fighters have been so sublimely skilled is that they grew up within a process of developmental control over oneself and threatened violence. An art counter to violence as it is commonly conceived in a fundamental way. If we change the spectrum of this valuation, not only are the highest level skill sets threatened to be lost, but also the valuable lesson that Thailand's culture has for the world will fall away.
Ideally, the key to long term Soft Power for Thailand has to be founded on the uniqueness of Thailand's perspective on fighting and fight culture. This is what brings people across 1,000s of miles and causes them to invest their lives in the specialness of the art. And this comes out of the valuation of what fighting itself means and the incredibly high level of skill that was developed in that value, come out of the root-system of provincial fighting.
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Pretty crazy that all time elite Muay Thai fighters of the Golden Age ended their careers incredibly young. Oley 20 (two fights at 22, but basically done at 20), and Saencherng at 22. Really craziness. Not even (arguably) physical prime, and certainly not mental prime, but some of the best who ever fought.
Sylvie trained with Saencherng today, full of physical wisdom almost 40 years from retirement.
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Today I watched Chatchai imitating Samson Isaan's interfering, smother style when teaching Sylvie how she should fight. It came out of nowhere, but it warmed my heart so much. and his movements were so beautiful. It's not his style, but he was adopting it. He also told a short story of when he used to be a sparring partner of Samson's at Petchyindee when Samson turned to Boxing. He said that Samson didn't really like sparring him as Chatchai would hurt him with select shots (Chatchai more experienced at the time). He knew how to handle that tempo pressure. So something really special today. Chatchai guiding Sylvie into some of Samson's tactics because it would be really good for her style, but also having experienced them directly himself, and knowing the solves. Such a great instructor.
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There is a fundamental dichotomy, a catch, which farang will experience when coming to Thailand to dream of becoming recognized in a traditional way. The more "value" you have...in your attempted authenticity, the more you are pulled into a traditional hierarchy in which the fighter holds an extremely low position, and in which your opportunity to develop as a fighter becomes highly restricted to the meaning-system of those held by those high in that pyramid. In short, the more value you achieve, the less opportunity you have. And, for women - because traditional Muay Thai is quite patriarchal - this can be more intensely so. So, if your aim is to develop as a fighter to the height of your capacities, our experience and guiding rule has been: Be very careful about how much "value" you have, especially within traditional concepts of value. This means that to some degree you have to skate by, across some concepts of "authenticity", certain types of recognition or symbolic value (because they can foreclose growth and opportunity), and instead carve out new, creative forms of value to others. This is Sylvie's secret gift and path, the way she carefully avoids kinds or limits of value, while creating value and meaning, so that her horizon as a fighter is not curbed by tradition itself.
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I feel like even when I find a voice in Muay Thai with whom I may have some sympathy, discourse itself is impossible, because of the highly political nature of social media life-rafting, everyone grabbing onto their own piece to stay afloat, often using the social media form to assail others, but also signaling their potential place within commerce. The very sense of reachable agreements become divorced from the possible. Allies and potential allies because disagreeable promimates and competitors for attention or even a place in the "idea space". I can't even suitably ask: Do you actually agree with the things you are saying? It's a very odd hyper-real collapse of what discussion is supposed to be.
This is why the discussion now can only be had at the level of the muay you build - which is difficult as they fast change the rules to favor foreign schematics and values - the muay becoming the language of a true-ist discourse. The alphabet of limbs and spaces and nothing more...a muay that betters what it disagrees with.
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One thing to appreciate is that ONE Championship is really just "Muay American". Not only is it captured by the image of the UFC, it was dreamed up by an American boarding school kid, his imagination of what "Muay Thai" should be, far away from the country and culture of Thailand itself.
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I confess that in this, the above, there is a sense in these inner beats a secret language. A language which develops intuitionally out of the art of individual fighters and the matrixes of the sport, but also an expressive geometry that - coded and displayed - becomes a communication. An occult communication of human potential, locked in the finitude of its Space...symbolized by the Ring and its ropes. Muay Thai is a dance of freedoms, and in that way at least (ideologically) transcendent.
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I should add that these are two nice summations in comment on the original posting of the micro-gallop video on YouTube, in answer to someone who asked for elaboration:
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Returning to the OP, one of the interesting things about the comparison of Yodkhupon's movement and Chatchai's inner beats movement is that it points out how futile or insufficient visual imitation can be. Just looking at their shapes they look nothing alike. A large part of the Western and International grasping at and training of Muay Thai is based on visual cuing and bio-mechanical imitation, a great deal of it video-based as well. This visual-mechanical lead just keeps us on the surface of "strikings" and tends to cut away all the living material beneath the strikes, the rhythms and stylistics that animate the strikes and make them so effective (and beautiful as well). Only when you get down into the rhythms, leaving the visual map aside, do these two gallops come together, a secret affinity that connects them, and suggests that they could in practice amplify each other.
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For more philosophical thoughts on rhythm (and possibly the failure of rhythm), especially as it relates to "Style", this thread discusses Karuhat, perhaps the most accomplished Muay Thai stylist:
a section from the above:
Thais learn much more foundational techniques - with far greater variance, and much less "correction" - principally organized around being at ease, tamachat, natural. The techne (τέχνη), the mechanics, that ground stylistics, are quite basic, and are only developmentally deployed in the service of style (& signature), as it serves to perform dominance in fights. The advanced, expressive nature of Thai technique is already woven into the time and tempo of stylistics. This is one reason why the Muay Thai Library project involves hour long, unedited training documentation, so that the style itself is made evident - something that can even have roots in a fighter's personality and disposition. These techne are already within a poiesis (ποίησις), a making, a becoming. Key to unlocking these basic forms is the priority of balance and ease (not biomechanical imitations of the delivery of forces), because balance and ease allow their creative use in stylistics.
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This film study also delves into the potentials of Chatcchai's rhythm dynamics, and how they can be experimentally trained with other Muay Bouk styles:
The fuller discussions of the film is found here, public and free on Sylvie's Patreon.
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Above is two minutes of work with Sylvie and Chatchai this week. He's teaching her his tiny inner gallop step which triggers on-beat much of his boxing strikes. He is explaining that this tiny step is the same as in Muay Thai, especially when throwing lead side weapons. Chatchai is a world class Boxing Kru but he was also a Golden Age Muay Thai fighter, and he sees Western boxing and Muay Thai not in conflict, but rather as built out of comparable rhythms. What is interesting about this is how that small gallop is in the same beat as say the gallop step Yodkhupon shows (just below), in his Muay Khao stalking. It's the iambic pentameter, one might say, on a much smaller scale, close space scale.
Once we get below the level of strikes - strikes being a primary preoccupation of Western appropriations and inclusions of Muay Thai "techniques" - we get into a much more important dimension of fighting. Fighting in many ways a battle over space, fighting the fight where you are more comfortable and where your opponent is not (a primary reason why Muay Femeu vs Muay Khao battles are classic), but the battle over space is conducted often through the battle of rhythms. Each fighter is attempting to (somewhat musically) impose their rhythm on the fight, and disrupt the rhythm of the opponent. This is especially important if each fighter has a different rhythm, it becomes a musical duel, but even with similar rhythms you still are trying to get inside the opponent's "beat". This is part of the meaning behind the Muay Thai sway or rock, that has become iconic. It's the beginning of a rhythmic battle, in which a baseline is laid for variance to ensue.
But, what is beautiful about the top video, at least in my mind, is how that it secretly connects up to Yodkhupon's space-eating gallop, which allows you to quickly cross over distance and suddenly and suffocatingly be on your opponent. What Chatchai's inner gallop does is allow the gallop to become at any time a trigger for a strike, out of the same rhythm, once you get into the phone booth of the pocket. You don't change rhythms, you just condense it.
Seven years ago Sylvie put together this video on the Yodkhupon gallop, and how it relates to the Muay Thai sway. You can even see in it her showing Chatchai's weight transfer rhythm (which he had taught her). But, she had not yet learned Chatchai's inner gallop step, nor seen how Chatchai's rhythm could connect up with Yodkhunpon's gallop...and Yodkhunpon's gallop had not yet been connected up with Chatchais's full Boxing vocabulary arsenal.
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Chatchai tells us that he's changed up and started relying less on pad holding in his developing of boxers. Too much padholding been a mistake. The best work is done on the bag. Less mitts, more bag. This while the "combo" has been the primary colonization and extraction of Muay Thai, spreading like wildfire in Thailand, virtualizing the sport away from its embodiment and creativity. (Hell, just ran into this "virtual" padholding.)
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I think one of the most salient points about the widening commodification of Muay Thai is that a thing is how it is made...and "how it is made" will produce wildly inferior fighters. Fighters themselves will be shaped by commodifying forces aimed at very different performances, much of it to churn out dreck content, and build an Image of Fighting that is quite perverse to the fighting that has been. New production lines are being made, organized around tourism labor.
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It's still mind boggling to me that you change all the rules so less skilled Western fighters can win fights...and then everyone says: Why are Thais so unskilled??? lol. Did you not see the move, the magic trick? They took hard to reach, prestigious titles, or invented new ones, and then transformed them into something to include non-Thais, by changing the sport. It is true that Thais are much less skilled than they used to be, but they downregulated all the superior skills that they still had. Let's just remove all the things Westerners (and others) aren't good at to make our sport popular. Painful to watch, and almost humorous. But, this is the commodification of things. Importantly...things.
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The basis of an argument of why Farang one day may be banned from fighting at the National Stadia, the clawing back on the commodification of the National sport, as a National competition treasure.
As the argument goes in the book I've been citing (this is a separate article), the West has come to divide the world into "persons" and "things". Persons are very different than things, things are suitable for commodification. But, this is a Western division. The thesis above is that forces of economy work to commodity everything, which is to say, to make everything exchangable with anything else. This is fundamentally in tension with, or even at war with "culture", which ideally works to cordon off exchange, to limit it, and even at an asymptotic limit make nothing exchangeable with anything else. The fixity of strata and social regimes, local exchanges is what generates cultural meaning. Commodification works to erase cultural meaning.
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Thank you for doing this. It's great to have Sylvie's magazine scans upload and the outline details you found.
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from the same commodity article I've been citing, here a very important transition from exclusivity to authenticity, as the distance between (knowledge) production and (knowledge) consumption shrinks, and duplication or imitation increases. This genuinely is where we are with the invasion of the "combo" from the West, really a technique "duplication" mechanism, attempting to copy and reproduce for export the more nuanced knowledge of traditional Muay Thai production. Notable is that, as rule changes have come to emphasize the de-skilled combo (clash fighting, KO bonuses, aggression and volume valorization, down-regulating defense and control), the counterfeit becomes woven into production itself...and, one suspects that "authenticity" will rise as a value marker, due to this collapse.
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I've been thinking about how to write about this. A few sketched out ideas. Sylvie's chosen path to fight a LOT - and as it turns out more than anyone documented along several criteria, but it wasn't really the ambition - was because when we came to Thailand we were pretty surprised by a few things. The first was that really there wasn't a huge gap between very experienced local circuit Thai female fighters, and nominal "World Champions". It was more a small question of degree, which meant that if you were a high practicing circuit fighter you already were not that far off from "World Champion" level. At the time - and maybe this has changed some, in part due to Sylvie's example, now fighters count and even probably exaggerate their fight totals - the goal was for foreigners to come to Thailand and win belts. As there was no substantive difference between belt and no-belt, and as Sylvie's actually goal was to just get increasingly proficient in Muay Thai, to come closer to it in its cultural form, pursuing belts really wasn't very interesting, especially because being booked for a belt fight at the time was largely in the hands of a few powerful gyms that were promoting their name to Westerners. She didn't really want to fight in the high profile Tourism layer of Muay Thai, the layer that was big gym steered. Instead it seemed that the best way forward was to just fight. And fight a ton. The Thai gambling social form of Muay Thai, and other cultural constraints, made it so that Sylvie would never really be given an easy match, once she became known, and as she increased the size of her opponents - a luxury she had because she was only a 100 lb fighter, and she could practically go up and up and up as long as her skill kept pace - there was a huge talent pool of Thai female fighters in the traditional Muay Thai scenes.
She began detaching herself from gym control (extremely hard to do), in part because gyms have social obligations to specific promoters, and in part because gyms also have incentive to force matchups that (at times) unduly favor their Western fighter, and booking her fights in various regions of Thailand, moving from provincial fighting, to local tourist oriented scenes, to Bangkok big broadcast shows, from the North to the Northeast to the South. It really was profound, and uniquely freed fighting because all that mattered was that the fight was fair and challenging, the exact recipe for unique growth (a sign of this babybear match-making is that she really held a 70% or so win rate as her opponents went up in weight. It really was an ideal Milo's Calf condition), building-in increasing handicaps,
one that I don't believe can ever be duplicated because of how much Thailand's Muay Thai has been infiltrated by the Soft Power economic imperative, digital image-making, and how female fighters themselves have come to be reinscribed in the Thai power dynamics of Entertainment Fighting. Promotions and gyms now value and control Western (and Thai) female fighters in much more restrictive ways that produce a limitation of opportunity and experience. Restrictions indeed existed before, but today female fighters have been woven into other more hierarchical interests that are unlikely to recede.
It really was that she didn't want to be fighting for belts that were politically arranged (even if great opportunities), or to have people controlling her matchups to produce regular advantages so to secure an image of dominance. Images of dominance in Thailand's Muay Thai actually often close down opportunities, and it was our feeling that as traditional Muay Thai itself is undergoing widespread deskilling, the one sure fire way to continue to grow was to fight, climbing an increasingly steep grade. The fight, if the thumb is not unnaturally on the scale in your favor, is the one (fairly) unblemished experience that grew knowledge and capacity in the sport. Thais fought a lot in their development, Sylvie would just take this principle and maximize it as an adult who came to the sport later in life, detouring the various prestige honey-pots and power imbalances that could trap you, cut you off from what was possible in you. Key was working at Thailand's talent-rich margins, and creating a vast network of promoter and gym relationships so that you never became too advantaged in the ring...advantage that came as bias to all Westerners who have been part of Thailand's embrace. Sylvie was setting a path on the edges of the sport, a sport which had a quite vast provincial base, much of which Westerners did not really encounter.
The result of all this, of literally 100s of fights of increasing size difficulty, in the traditional - nuanced - mode of the sport is an extremely grounded - she hasn't been knocked down in over 1,000 rounds - defensively robust (a gep awut 4th round imperative) fighting style, that is very, very attuned to narrative scoring (it has to be, because that's how trad scoring works), all built around Muay Khao and clinch dominance in a very small, 100 lb body, quite in contrast with the more common body types and size around which Muay Khao usually is ascribed. An absolutely unique fighting capacity, that was made out of its fight path...along with the continuous influence of really unparalleled documentary work, which also has been no small part of the story.
But it really came from shunning advantage, and false pictures of mastery. It came from just doing. And it came from a certain kind of invisibleness, the ability to slide across power barriers that can capture many others, at a different time in Thailand's Muay Thai history, a time of a perfect relationship between connectivity and tradition, in a sweet spot that no longer exists, before Muay Thai was given over to the foreigner in more programmatic, economic, sport-changing ways.
Journaling - Readings, Muay Thai, Concepts and Articulations
in Kevin's Corner - Muay Thai, Philosophy & Ethics
Posted
Frequently Sylvie and I have talked about native Muay Thai as if it were a language. There are many ways to imagine this, but in this film montage (sound on), the particular way that a film genre will communicate itself, discursively, through "blocs of sensation", discursively, gives clue to its communication. These tropes and movements (including camera movements) compose a "language" of expression. It is the same with traditional Muay Thai, the refining of these communications.