Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu

I would agree with this, that there is always a chance that Thai culture becomes romanticized, "orientalized" or exoticized for Westerners. But we've been living here for 9 years now I believe, and we've done our best to understand the differences in culture that are expressed in Thailand's Muay Thai. Much of this actually comes from Sylvie learning how to specifically win fights under the Thai aesthetic, which involves learning how fighters and fights are scored. A lot of Westerners over the decades have come to Thailand to fight and felt like there has been unfair judging against them, as foreigners. But what we've come to see is that many who have fought in the country just don't understand Thai scoring. A big chunk of that misunderstanding is how aggression is scored in the ring. In the West aggression is almost a pure good. You show aggression, this is a near automatic plus. In Thailand, all things being equal, you have to be very careful in how you show aggression. Aggression on its own actually could be a scoring negative. As a baseline, for instance, in the West the advancing fighter appears to be in control. In Thailand it's (all things being equal) the retreating fighter. If you don't understand this, you aren't going to understand why a fighter won or loss often. It took Sylvie over 100 fights in the country to even learn how to fight a 5th round. It isn't esoteric philosophy, it's actually solving the problem of how to win a close 5th round in this fight culture. These are really subtle skills. Just from learning how fights are scored, and scored quite differently than in the West, the Buddhistic foundation of the culture seems to be the best root explanation for the difference in view of aggression. She wrote about it here: The Art and Psychology of the 5th Round in Thailand

Rodtang isn't really regarded an elite fighter in the context of Thailand's Muay Thai, certainly not historically, and not even of his generation. [Edit in: He was a MAX Muay Thai champion (an Entertainment Muay Thai promotion), then held the Omnoi belt for a year, never was a Lumpinee or Rajadamnern champion, then started fighting internationally...at least by wikipedia.] He's rightfully made a huge name for himself in an International promotion which favors aggression, is designed to promote aggression, and present Muay Thai as close as possible to International Kickboxing. ONE Championship is pretty much tailor made for a fighter like Rodtang. It is nominally a "Muay Thai" promotion. It calls some of their fights "Muay Thai", but they have been highly modified, including the scoring criteria. In many ways ONE is the opposite of Thailand's Muay Thai. They want the knockout, they want the highlight reel moment of aggression.

Yes. Cus is NOT saying that cowardice drives the KO. He is saying that fear drives both fatigue...and the KO. But, when a fighter is effective, that fear turns into "Tiger" energy. It is me that that is adding the analysis to Cus's words that it is still fear driving the KO, which is the observation of Chrysostom, the Ancient Greek orator. The Cus quotation is setting the framework to understand what Chrysostom is saying. Tyson himself though affirms that in his opinion the reason he was so aggressive was because he feared his opponent even more than they feared him. He attributes his own explosive, hyper-aggressive style to the very high level of his own fear. Paraphrasing the quote of Mike's: "If you're afraid of me, I'm a thousand times more afraid of you. That's why I'm more aggressive." Teddy Atlas seems to be saying a similar thing in his criticism of Tyson. From Chrysostom's perspective, this trying to end it fast is a lack of courage and psychological endurance. Not saying that this is the correct interpretation, only setting the frame to understand how some fight cultures do not admire the knockout the way that we in the West do.

This is Sylvie's 269th fight, a televised fight with her commentary: I was able to have a camera in hand for this one and shoot a photo essay on it. You can find it here: The Magic of The Ropes: Fight 269 You can see this quick video scroll through those photos here:

Yes, very much so. Which brings us to perhaps a coincidence of how both Stoicism and Buddhism treat or have programs of self-control. I suspect that the real reason that Dio Chrysostom can speak to virtues that approximate scoring tendencies in traditional Muay Thai 2000 years later is that Thailand's Muay Thai is Buddhistic. So what we are really seeing is that Stoicism (and other Hellenic aesthetics) and Buddhism share a perspective on human affects, especially those of anger and aggression. Thanks for the links, I'll enjoy looking through them. Attached is the article: Athletic Beauty as Mimēsis of Virtue The Case of the Beautiful Boxer which talks about the prevalent social and philosophical attitudes around boxing in the era of The Terme Boxer. Athletic Beauty as Mimēsis of Virtue The Case of the Beautiful Boxer.pdf

I look at this photo and I cannot help but feel that I'm looking at Sylvie's origin story. This exact moment, this Joker's bathroom scene. In truth there is no origin moment, and in reality this was just a moment in the flow of things, but seeing it frozen here, photographically, it bends back through time and founds itself. It's that she is looking at herself, and taking herself in, as a whole, wearing the Frankenstein scars of her recreation, made by Muay Thai, and she does not shrink back. She is incorporated anew, almost literally. The backstory to this moment is that she was booked on a Yokkao fight. What a huge promotional name at the time for a 100 lb fighter who had been mixing it up in the North, fighting at documented rates no fighter ever had before, just pounding the local, very active Thai circuit for 2 years in the country. You can see her record here. She was making history already then, but she was nobody. She had a few passionate supporters, those that had followed her journey from Master K's New Jersey basement on YouTube, but on the face of Muay Thai itself, she was just another female fighter somewhere in Thailand. We were exploring moving down to Pattaya to get more serious training from Sakmongkol, and maybe better clinch training from a little gym filled with Thai boys, but had not made the move yet. Sylvie was a "clinch fighter" at the time, but honestly didn't really know how to clinch yet, and wasn't getting much clinch training back in the North. She was fighting, she was winning, but it was largely just will-power and determination, not really knowing. Suddenly she got an offer through an Italian connection in Pattaya to fight on Yokkao. Wow, okay. The fight was at 46 kg, but then suddenly it was at 48 kg. We didn't care. Sylvie just fought everyone. Giving up weight to someone we didn't know, not arguing for - or having someone leverage for us - small advantages wasn't and isn't our thing. "They change the name, they change the shorts" in the Wanderlei Silva way, something she really embraces. Turns out, she's fighting one of the best female fighters in Thailand over the past 5 years, Lommanee. We had no idea. Giving a few more pounds, huh. Sylvie was diced by Lommanee's infamous lead elbow, and experienced a transformation. This happened on several levels. One, its very difficult to give up significant weight vs elite fighters. Sylvie just wasn't there yet. There heart was there, but she wasn't formed. Secondly, her bloody face zoomed and bounced off satellites and ran through the Muay Thai world. As the Yokkao commentators made protective sexist comments about this worrisomely happening to "a girl", her asking the doctor to let the fight go on with blood streaming down her face became, right then, a kind of superpower of dignity. Sylvie writes about this experience of suddenly being seen here: Can Bleed Like a Man – Lumpinee, Muay Thai, Culture, Sexism and Meme A fighter has to be seen in order to exist, because fighting is a display, a performance before the public eye. It is an art that involves peak human states taken on so as to pull the public in. A fighter who is not seen is not a fighter, in a certain way. This is the first time that Sylvie was actually seen. To this day people tell her they know her from this fight, sometimes even thinking that it happened recently. But she is being bathed in the blood of public vision. She is being born into existence, as a fighter, in an origin sort of way. With 269 fights, the cusp of 200 fights beyond this her 70th, and 218 stitches taken to the face, this was her origin, when she stepped into blood. It's not the first time she's bled, but it's the first time the blood covered her, and she was seen. It's honestly a horrible moment on the face of it. It's embarrassing to be cut in any fight. It's embarrassing to just be out mastered in the ring. There is a well one can fall in with a loss like this, a dark, colluding well. But Sylvie has just incredible resilience, a kind of Phoenix power. Like complex comic book heroes (or villains) she walks with her extreme discomfort and shame like one walks with a shadow. She was seen. She walked with blood. I've known and loved her for a long time now, and I don't fully understand the powers of her endurance and transformation, I wrote a little about in 2016 here, but somehow this fight and that she was seen, bloodied, constituted her as a fighter, assembled her. The epic journalistic Muay Thai Library documentary project was but a flicker of a thought in the future, her years of struggling in the clinch in the training ring were before her, her friendship with legends of the sport, fights upon fights taking on massive weight disadvantages, beating World Champions out of her weight class, all before here...but here she had kind of Madame Bathory'd herself, and embraced herself as a new, imperfect, constructed, hardened, dreaming new thing. A force of fighting. It did not happen at the exact moment when the photo was taken before the mirror, above. But it was happening then. You can see it in her eyes. She is taking all of herself in. There is no shrinking back, no concerned examination. She sees the whole thing of herself. The Yokkao broadcast and all the subsequent images that flowed from it was when she was seen, but that was not the origin. It was when in the aftermath of that blood, those stitches, she saw herself. The path she walks to this day is extremely dangerous. That moment in the mirror was the consummate, retroactively imbued moment of origin...perhaps, but from that origin, from who she began in her embrace became a very difficult climb. It's a quite vertical climb up a rockface where honestly no one has taken hand holds or foot holds before. It began then, but it was only the first day. Since then being seen, and seeing yourself has become the weaving on a loom, back and forth, getting into the ring and bathing oneself in violence hundreds of times. I recall one of the variations of the origin story of Achilles, the near invulnerable epitome warrior of Homeric Greece. The goddess Thetis is said to have thrown her off-spring into the fire upon birth, each time, until she found one that was impervious from her divinity. In some sense, this is what fighting is. The exposure of the flesh to the fire that burns it until you find some composition of the self which remains unburned, unconsumed. I look at that photo at the top of this article and I see that composition. I see that body of herself that takes all of herself in, the stitches of her transformation. Origin Story.

A little more on the idea of the cowardice of the knockout, take in Teddy Atlas's harsh & controversial statement that Mike Tyson "never won a fight". Teddy Atlas assisted in Mike Tyson's training under Cus D'Amato (and had a bitter break with Tyson). At the very least it weaves into the idea that the purpose of the knockout may actually be trying to find a way out of the pressure of a continued fight and the possibility of failure. The sheer explosive, very quick knockout style of Mike Tyson would lend to this possible interpretation of a use of the knockout : In support of this view, as Mike Tyson said in the recent ABC Sports documentary on him: "If you're afraid of me, I'm a thousand times more afraid of you. That's why I'm more aggressive."

Golden Rule: When in doubt outside of Thailand go for the KO. hahaha.

It depends on if it is just modified Muay Thai (limiting weapons and changing the way aggression is scored) or if it is technically Kickboxing, as in scored as the sport is commonly scored. If the judges are scoring for kickboxing, as a sport, there are some very big differences. The most important one is that in kickboxing you can take kicks on your arms and they don't score, including head kicks. These are some of the most dependable points in Muay Thai and they are more or less null in Kickboxing. This means your upper body guard is important. It also means that attacks to the lower body can score higher in Kickboxing than in Muay Thai (where low kicks only score if they contort the opponent). The graphic below shows some of this. It's not 100% as head shots in Kickboxing score highly when not blocked. Also, broadly, punches score much higher in Kickboxing. At least that's my sense of it. Also, forward pressure is much better regarded in Kickboxing than it is in traditional Muay Thai. Short advice: pressure, throw in combinations, mix in lots of low kicks, maintain a strong upper body guard, punch more than mid-kick.

Also important, the Yodkhunpon shadowboxing session: #104 Yodkhunpon Sittraipum - The Art of Shadowboxing (64 min) watch it here Some have said this is one of the favorite sessions in all the Library. It's very rare to get detailed instruction and advice on How to Shadowboxing, let alone from a great fighter fo the past. This is a FULL hour of how to shadowbox, learn with me as I learn from The Elbow Hunter of 100 Stitches Yodkhunpon, the greatest Elbow Fighter in Thai history.

Here is Sylvie's quick vlog on "how to punch with a loose hand": You can also study Neung's boxing style in the Muay Thai Library: #71 Napapol Giatsakchokchai - Powerful Boxing For Muay Thai (81 min) watch it here Nothing is a better match than world class boxing added to fundamentally sound Muay Thai. Napadol was one of the best western boxers in all of Thailand, a WBC champion, and he teaches a gorgeous, powerful boxer's technique that is easily married to Muay Thai.

To me this is huge. The worrying trend that all of Thailand would start to be pushed toward new "Entertainment Muay Thai" action-first models, reducing clinch and devaluing high-level defensive skills gets exciting news in this. Lumpinee already has remodeled itself on hyper-modern, commercialized Muay Thai meant for an international audiences (not necessarily quality or skill set), becoming distinctly non-Thai in many ways. Regular MMA promotion will have its debut as part of the New New Lumpinee Stadium in January. It had me concerned that everything was just going to slide in one direction, some promotions much more than others, but all of them shifting. Things change fast in Thailand once they get going, and one never knows where it can swerve. But Lumpinee GoSport shows are already mixed shows, with "real" lower level Muay Thai on a card, also with something like "Entertainment Muay Thai" as well (these fights are only 3 rounds, but it's unclear if it's judged in the clash-only, Channel 8 ruleset). This New New Lumpinee approach was probably somewhat mimicking the mixed cards of ONE, where Kickboxing, MMA and modified rules Muay Thai (in the Entertainment, clinchless style) have had success. It's quite startling that Superchamp and Hardcore, which after the demise of MAX Muay Thai, have been the spearhead of Entertainment Muay Thai promotion would open itself up to 5 round, regular rules Muay Thai. It's not completely clear if they will be judging in a traditional clinch and defense can win style, or if the "if you back up you lose" rules will be in effect (a big, important deal). At the very least it shows that a variety of rule set fights on a promotion are being seen as the way forward, and it sets up a direct comparison and competition between Lumpinee GoSport and Superchamp/Hardcore (Channel 8), not to mention the coming Fairtex mixed card promotions that are soon due in Lumpinee as well. The move towards 5 round fights by Superchamp/Hardcore at the very least shows that even in the "Entertainment Muay Thai" model, which Superchamp/Hardcore has a firm lead in, they see incorporating more or less traditional Muay Thai as an advantage. Maybe it's to raise the value of the brand and bring more widespread legitimacy? Saying: we are not just "entertainment" fighting. Maybe they'll bring in bigger Thai names and compete with the transformations that are happening at Lumpinee? At the very least it gives more foothold to the value of traditional kinds of Muay Thai, and a desire to braid things together. These kinds of moves, across promotions, also coincidentally raise the value of foreign fighters in the country. As more and more promotions embrace mid- and low- tier skill set matchups, which are almost always Thai vs non-Thai, and the more these promotions take a bigger slice out of the Muay Thai pie, the more non-Thai fighters are needed.

The famed trainer of Mike Tyson Cus D'Amato had a spectacular theory on what made fighters tired. Fear: “Fear is the greatest obstacle to learning in any area, but particularly in boxing. For example, boxing is something you learn through repetition. You do it over and over and suddenly you’ve got it. …However, in the course of trying to learn, if you get hit and get hurt, this makes you cautious, and when you’re cautious you can’t repeat it, and when you can’t repeat it, it’s going to delay the learning process…When they…come up to the gym and say I want to be a fighter, the first thing I’d do was talk to them about fear…” “The next thing I do, I get them in excellent condition….Knowing how the mind is and the tricks it plays on a person and how an individual will always look to avoid a confrontation with something that is intimidating, I remove all possible excuses they’re going to have before they get in there. By getting them in excellent condition, they can’t say when they get tired that they’re not in shape. When they’re in excellent shape I put them into the ring to box for the first time, usually with an experience fighter who won’t take advantage of them. When the novice throws punches and nothing happens, and his opponent keeps coming at him…the new fighter becomes panicky. When he gets panicky he wants to quit, but he can’t quit because his whole psychology from the time he’s first been in the streets is to condemn a person who’s yellow. So what does he do? He gets tired. This is what happens to fighters in the ring. They get tired. This is what happens to fighters in the ring. They get tired, because they’re getting afraid….Now that he gets tired, people can’t call him yellow. He’s just too “tired” to go on. But let that same fighter strike back wildly with a visible effect on the opponent and suddenly that tired, exhausted guy becomes a tiger….It’s a psychological fatigue, that’s all it is. But people in boxing don’t understand that.” …[Heller, 61] Trainer of one of the most vicious and entertaining knockout artists in modern boxing reveals how it is fear that can drive the knockout. One of the more inscrutable aspects of Thailand's traditional Muay Thai is that classically the knockout is seldom chased. There have been a handful of knockout artists, but the most esteemed fighters, legends of the sport were not knockout fighters. You'd see an elite fighter with 120 fights against top tier competition and maybe 10 or 12 KOs. In the West we thirst for the knockout. It's practically the entire entertainment goal of watching fighting. Highlight cut-ups are filled with starchings. It's the porn of fighting. Why do Thais - who by many measures make up some of the most skilled fighters in combat sports - not esteem the knockout? A large measure of this is that aggression is not viewed in the same way in Buddhistic Thailand as it is viewed in other cultures. It lacks self-control, a big aesthetic dimension of traditional Muay Thai is the exercise of control over oneself. But I turn to Cus D'amato's quote because I ran into a very interesting passage on the boxing of antiquity. The Greek orator Dio Chrysostom (c. 40 – c. 115 AD) is describing the virtues of the undefeated boxer Melancolmas. And one of the things that really struct me was that he claimed that knocking out an opponent was an act of cowardice. A fear of endurance: source notes linked Nearly 2,000 years ago in Hellenic Greece the same equation of fear, fatigue and aggression that Cus D'amato harnessed to produce the great Mike Tyson, was already understood, but fell in another light. The rule set of Greek boxing appears to have favored defensive fighting, and depending on your source, either consisted of a boxer fighting multiple opponents in succession, or fighting one opponent until collapse or relent. The fear and fatigue, the prospect of endurance was real and heightened. The praise for Melancomas was that he never took the easy way out and sought to end the fight, the test of himself, to end the fear by knocking his opponent out. It was rather through mastery of his opponent - and himself - that he would win. In the mouth of Chysostom we also find the aesthetic of Thailand's femeu fighter. He is the fighter who masters both himself and the space, and produces a victory out of the crumbling of his opponent's character. He chooses defeat, or collapses under the weight of its inescapability. When I read this I was quite struck, even feeling that I had never quite thought about this before, but somewhere in my mind it must have been registering that I had all the related thoughts that make this up, because I also stumbled on an old essay I wrote about how knockouts can feel like they have taken the "cheap" way out: you can read that essay here "Shame and Why Fighting Signals the Glue of What Holds Us Together" What's telling is that both Cus D'Amato and Chrysostom believe the same thing. Fear rises and the fighter is looking for a way out. Cus directs that fear into an instinct to end it all with a KO, Hellenistic Greece 2,000 years ago - and in many quarters of Thailand's traditional Muay Femeu greatness - counted the endurance of that fear, and its resolve through self control, and the control of the opponent as the greater art of fighting. This coincidence of fight philosophy came out of my research into the Terme Boxer, or The Boxer at Rest. A bronze sculpture of a boxer who has been bloodied and scarred by the endurance of his match. Contrary to the Greek classic ideal of the Apollonian athlete, depicted as standing, flawless and physically beautiful, this statue embraces the realism of the boxer 2,000 years ago. Scholars are not entirely sure why he is so realistically shown, but some feel that it was in answer to an over indulgence, an eros, in the image of the untouched boxer. Some feel that the sculpture depicts in inner beauty of a man facing that fear and enduring it, overcoming himself: What is interesting is that if the fighting arts / sports are to have culture value beyond the sheer visceral release of watching people get starched, some semblance of the idea that the knockout is an act of cowardice needs to take hold. Some sense in which "just wanting to end this thing" might be looking for a way out. We are conditioned to feel that the retreating fighter is the cowardly one, and we can certainly understand how that might be so. But perhaps best is to understand that there are two exits from the fear, one in disengagement, and the other in trying to cut it short through sudden violence. If a fighter is being forged like a blade, it's the lasting presence in the heat which creates the transformation and the perfection of the steel.

Just Adding a Few Related Notes Ran into my older essay on Shame and Fight Culture and this passage where I note that the knockout can be a kind of cheapened victory. You can read this essay here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/26074631 And also ran into this reference to how the artful boxer was regarded in Hellenic Greece, and the knockout as a form of cowardliness (opting out of the endurance of the test of skills), at least expressed by Dio Chrysostom.

This article by Sylvie might really help: Muay Thai Vocabulary | Understanding Your Thai Trainer

This Cartesian instrumentalism I think has vast overlay on our experiences, not only conditioning how the art and skill is learned/practiced, but also how it is experienced, what it means to us, and how we relate to ourselves through it. If our bodies are only instruments that obey or fail us this is a very different world to live in, and likely holds a very different set of capacities or ceiling. But the concept of instrumentation also runs out into the very way that Muay Thai is disseminated (or even appropriated) outside of Thailand. It involves our mechanization of its parts (moves, strikes, techniques) the broken way one might Frankenstein parts together (for instance in MMA), and also the way it goes out across the Internet in "breakdowns", which literally "break" "down" the living experiences, often rationalizing it into constituent components and "reasons". The instrumentation of our own bodies, experiencing our bodies as tools or mechanized actions holds its parallel in the commercialization of the art, and a pedagogy of mechanization as well. It all seems to flow from a Cartesian World, one ultimately balanced on the knife-edge of a mythologization of "freedom of choice".

The easiest way into the bridge between the two is the work of Gilles Deleuze who was deeply influenced by both of them. His Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza is a good overview of his take. His Spinoza: Practical Philosophy is much shorter, concise approach.

I don't really want to spin into a Nietzsche on Spinoza thread, he had a love-hate thing, but this by Nietzsche is notorious: “I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now, was inspired by “instinct.” Not only is his overtendency like mine—namely to make all knowledge the most powerful affect—but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world-order, the unegoistic, and evil. Even though the divergencies are admittedly tremendous, they are due more to the difference in time, culture, and science. In summa: my lonesomeness, which, as on very high mountains, often made it hard for me to breathe and make my blood rush out, is now at least a twosomeness. Strange! Incidentally, I am not at all as well as I had hoped. Exceptional weather here too! Eternal change of atmospheric conditions!—that will yet drive me out of Europe! I must have clear skies for months, else I get nowhere. Already six severe attacks of two or three days each!! — With affectionate love, Your friend” Friedrich Nietzsche, postcard to Franz Overbeck in Sils-Maria dated July 30, 1881. Thanks for the very kind words, and reading my thoughts closely.

If you want to get a broader sense of what a constructed, relative freedom of a Westerner through the cultivated training in the fighting art of Thailand's traditional Muay Thai might look like, consider Bourdieu's concepts of Habitus, Doxa and Hexis:

The 17th century philosopher famously denied the freedom of the will. There was no separate, wholly independent power of choice or decision which cut us off from our histories or the world at large as we have lived in it, floating above it in a divinity of autonomy. We feel free when we make choices, but we are not free. This fundamental feeling of freedom that all of us experience is one of the most intractable obstacles for such a claim. It turns perhaps our most salient feature as thinking beings into an illusion. Can it really be that every single choice I've made has been done under a powerful illusion? Can the words I'm typing right now be caused by a myriad of things, almost all of which I'm blind to, and not by my fundamental choice, or series of choices, to type them? This tension between our daily experiences of our selves makes of Spinoza's claim one of two things: It is either a powerful unveiling of the nature of our world, and of ourselves giving radical insight into the truths and powers behind our otherwise blind experience; or it is a kind of Science Fiction of theory, something Philosophy can be good at - an interesting and provoking model of the world which isn't really true at all, but is enjoyable or entertaining to try on and think about. When asked: Did you freely choose to say the words you just said? Spinoza's view tends to fall into Science Fiction for us. Of course I did. In this article I hope to appeal to the experiences of training in and fighting in Thailand's Muay Thai to illuminate just what Spinoza means by the denial of the freedom of the will, and why it is important for our lives. I'm going to be page quoting at length from the book: Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization by Hasana Sharp in part because it is the book I'm reading now, and these thoughts flow from her discussion of Spinoza's position on Free Will. And also because she does a very nice job of presenting his claims and some of their consequences. I've been studying Spinoza and secondary works on him for 15 years and this is a really good one. If anyone has a hard time finding a copy of this book I can maybe help you, DM me. The Determination of Speech and the Language of Muay Thai One of the most dramatic targets of Spinoza's argument against the freedom of the will is the speech of human beings. The reason for this is that there seems nothing more quintessentially human than the act of speaking. It's supposedly what separates us out from the animal kingdom, and what people say helps us to determine, gauge or weigh who they are. What people say is important to us, and we also put a great deal of attention - at times - into deciding what to say. For many speech epitomizes the freedom of who we are. And Spinoza goes right at it. For him when we speak or write we are no more like madmen, drunks or gossips, people who feel that they are in control of what they are saying, but are not at all. Sober speech is just a difference of degree, not in kind, from drunk speech. "Sane" speech a difference in degree from insane speech. Intersubjective everyday speech a difference in degree from helpless gossip. Here he provides a foothold where experience can find itself in his claim that we are not in control of ourselves. When we reflect on what we've said or done when drunk we realize (often with shame) that we were not anywhere near as in control of ourselves as we thought at the time, when we were speaking freely or acting (too?) "freely". It felt radically free at the time, but in looking back it feels compulsed. We felt like we were choosing, but we were not. We can draw this analogy out toward times of extreme emotional duress, or mental illness, or in social situations were we get swept up in chains of gossip. Social media has taught us all new lessons about how the "social" dimension of news seems to give the news (and not news) a life of its own, riding along the compulsions of agreements and amplifications, all of which is done by agents who surely feel free - even radically free - in what they claim, but perhaps upon reflection at another point in history will show itself as compulsed. What Spinoza is after is actually this radical sense of freedom that is carried along with these speech acts, hoping to reveal them as actually their opposite. Drunk talk, the talk of mental illness, the social gossip talk are for him actually the model of ALL speech. All speech is conditioned, provoked and propelled by hidden causes, accompanied by a ghost feeling of freedom. I think we do get somewhere with this analogy of the misleading feeling of freedom, but it still doesn't have enough traction to describe our everyday lives and the myriad of choices we make that seem to actually make up who we are, when not under the duress of a substance, an illness or waning character. The reason why we can tell, upon reflection, that we were not free in those more extreme circumstances is that we can compare them to our more sober, more plentiful moments. We can see the difference. But this is a difference in degree for Spinoza, not in kind. Sylvie and I have used the analogy of language to describe the art of Thailand's Muay Thai. For many in the West when we come to Thailand and seriously learn the art of Muay Thai it's as if learning a language. It's words (strikes and blocks) as a fighting art, it's grammar (bodily ruup and tempos) are expressive things, especially because in Thailand fights are judged aesthetically, and not just in terms of damage done to opponents. Once you learn the basics of the language in order to become a proper Muay Thai fighter you have to learn to use them expressively, to express yourself, in the ring. There are hosts of styles and customs of performance that condition this expression, culturally, and like any language the meaning and role of modes of expression go quite deep into the ways of life of the Muay Thai kaimuay, and even of the people of Thailand, but ultimately, you are learning a signification system (a type of language), which physically can control the fight space, but also semiotically can signal or indicate that control, through gestures and postures. The body and the mind run in parallel in the Art of Muay Thai. If you want to look into the richness of this language, its cultural moorings and its study read my Trans-Freedoms Through Authentic Muay Thai Training in Thailand Understood Through Bourdieu's Habitus, Doxa and Hexis. But let's get back to the basics of it. There is a very natural parallel I believe in the experiences of choosing words to say and choosing strikes to throw in a fighting art. When we are fluent in a language the "right" words will just come to us in an unconscious flow, just out of volition of speaking. This is an aim when learning to fight in a fighting art, and why the analogy of language can be an illuminating one. We want the strikes we have practiced to just come to us, at the right time, suitable for the conditions, just as words come to us in our mother tongue. When we look at the greatest fighters of Thailand, the Yodmuay of the 1980s and 1990s, they appear so seamless in their choices. In fact - importantly - they do not feel like choices at all. They fight with almost a condition of inevitability, through their style, rather than like a computer that has weighed a menu of options and then decided on one, the right one. They are poets. Most of us though, just want to speak the language, to use the strikes (and also checks, weight shifts, postures) practiced in a flowing way. But this is what I'm pointing to. Everyone who has trained has the distinct experience that even though it is very clear in one's mind what one wants to do, you cannot do it. The volition is there, the action is not. This can simply be trying to throw a particular kind of kick on the bag and not being able to "get it". Or, it can be the frustration of trying to execute particular strikes, or plans or patterns while sparring. A little bit of pressure and all the volition in the world gets you nowhere. In fact, volition (trying really, really hard to do something) will often take you further from your goal of seamless action. This gap between volition and action is sometimes addressed in non-Thai versions of training by memorizing combinations, or certain footwork patterns. Under the auspices of the idea of "muscle memory" you rigorously train patterns over and over and over and learn to just DO them, regardless of context through commitment. You simplify the program and bite down. One can see how this approach can work to patch the problem, but one can also see how far it is from actual language use. I want to return to that fundamental frustration of the gap between volition and action. What is happening here in Spinozist terms? What a Spinozist would say is that when you for instance freeze under the pressure of sparring, or throw a punch when you probably should be defending, you are under the power of causes you are not aware off. You are being forced into postures or tempos or reactions through your histories as a person, and (instinctively) genetically as an animal. Lineages of causes running out in every direction into the past are shaping you into those reactions. Determining you. When you learn a fighting art you are exposing yourself to new causal chains, new determinations which can over-write those histories and causes. But...importantly for Spinoza, this can only be done if the pleasures of coherence that you experience as an organism, from the training in the new art, are more powerful (joyful) than those of past histories, those causal chains. This is to say, the fluency in the language has to cash out as a greater experience of causal determination, as joy, than the sum of your past histories as a person and a being. Spinoza and Freedom I'm going to now go through the Hasana Sharp page quotations, with some notes: above: For this analysis I'm going to substitute the general idea of choosing strikes in Muay Thai for choosing speech. We have an expectation when sparring or fighting that we should just freely be able to throw the strikes (or in more advanced fighting assume the composures) that we have in our mind and have trained. One of the more powerful dimensions of Spinoza's Philosophy is his parallelism, whereby he asserts that bodies exert causal force on other bodies, and that ideas exert causal force on other ideas, in parallel. In sparring/fighting this parallelism can be vital. Bodies are causally clashing, exerting force upon each other, but also ideas are bumping into each other as well. Warfare is as much mental as it is physical. Spinoza tells us that we are largely ignorant of what is even causing us to be under a certain disposition, or to be doing certain things rather than others. One reason I believe people are drawn to fighting itself is because it dramatically amplifies this regular uncertainty of everyday life, bringing forward. Learning to control oneself under adversity, and express oneself, feels like it is life valued work. above. It is important that in understanding the why and how we throw a strike to not overvalue the experience of volition. This will lead to frustration. If we picture ourselves as fundamentally unfree beings, that is to say, largely conditioned and driven by unseen or unconscious causes, volition itself is not the lever point of action. Anyone learning a fighting art will understand this. The answer isn't "will harder!". Instead its about curating the realm of causes that shape you, and enriching the rootedness in the causal chains you would like to be subject to. above. One of the beauties of Spinoza's approach is that he will fundamentally direct our attention to the affects (which encompasses: feelings, bodily feelings, emotions) we experience when doing something. Our experiences. What gives us to do one thing or another is a complex web of affects that chain down into our histories as a person. One of the most interesting applications of this proposed truth that it isn't our will power that chooses things, but rather how we have become accustomed to feel, is that in our training of Muay Thai or any fighting art, how we feel about the technique (let's say) is far, far more important than how it is technically executed. You can for instance machine part out a technique, but it will never fluidly enter into the matrix of decisions under pressure if you regularly feel bad (for instance self-critical) about that technique. You will seldom be able to "choose" it. I wrote about this a bit in: Precision – A Basic Motivation Mistake in Some Western Training. As mentioned on other occasions, correction (and the corresponding Western fear of building "bad habits") plays very little role in the instruction of Thailand's kaimuay Muay Thai. The reason for this is that the fighting art of Muay Thai is principally affective training, in the Spinozsist sense. Bodies are not being trained to assume positions and make movements while the authoritarian Mind then directs the trained body around, as in Western Cartesian Dualism (or to be directed by a governor coach). Instead the fighter is trained affectively to feel the fight. above. This is really important. We sometimes do not realize just how much the Cartesian world model influences us through its essential split between the world of bodies and that of Mind. I mean, come on now, he was just a Philosopher nobody reads hundreds of years ago. But he's with us all to this day. Descartes articulated a view of the body and the mind which made of the passions of the body an obstacle of mental control. This is to say, the affects of the body are seen as the enemy of the Mind, things to be tamed, tamped down, quieted, so the Mind can just steer the whole thing. As Sharp sums up Spinoza's break from Descartes (who preceded him by a generation): "Self-cultivation is not antipathetic." You don't stop feeling things so you can be in control. The reason why I'm pointing this out so acutely is that this is a radical misunderstanding of many Westerners attempting to fight beautifully in Muay Thai (and possibly other fighting arts). They hear all the time from Thai trainers: "Sabai, Sabai". Relax, be at ease. Western tension is notorious in the rings of Thailand. To the Thai eye it just shows a lack of control. Westerners will war with themselves, trying to get themselves to relax. The reason why they don't understand "relax" is that they are all Cartesians. They believe if they can just drain the swamp of themselves of all feeling and emotion, the chain of ideas that domino through their heads, if they can just stop feeling things, then the Mind can be free to simply direct the emptied body. Like getting your dog to stop barking at the door bell, and listen to you. But Spinoza will tell you, this isn't how it works. You cannot negatively remove a powerful affect. You cannot subtract it from existence. You cannot antipathetize freedom. It's because the Mind and the Body are one thing. The Mind does not hover over an obedient (or rebellious) body. Instead Spinoza will tell you that the only that that can overcome a powerful affect is a MORE powerful affect. If you are in fear and tense, only a more powerful feeling can move the body and mind to a more free state. Muay Thai and its training is about the development of those feelings, those affects. This is a theoretical division in the metaphysics of Philosophy which has immediate bearing on the practice and development of fighting skills, in the ring. above. This is how strikes are "chosen" in the fluency of the art. They are chosen because they flow from the determinations of a cultivated realm of causes, they come out of the necessity of the shape of who you are. It's not because you've emptied yourself of feeling, and your lording Mind is expertly judging what to do. (Video breakdowns of fight footage, as interesting as they are, actually do a disservice when they present the rationalization of choices in segmented parts. I've seen one well-known breakdownist even state something along the lines of "never do anything without a rational reason for it".) In fact, there is a name for this determined, necessity state of causes: Flow State. Sylvie and I talk about Flow State in our Podcast: Muay Thai Bones Podcast #9 - Orca, Sak Yant, Long Guard, Flow. Spinozist self-cultivation starts with the basic acknowledgement that we never wholly and radically act freely, and so relative freedom consists in attending to the realm of causes that shape you, creating physical and mental boundaries around the things that determine you. You are shaping yourself, and how you will naturally respond, though the conditioning of your influences and practice. You can only as a fighter - and a person - express things beyond you, so determining those things becomes an act of self-cultivation. Sylvie and I have talked about how the legend Dieselnoi will emphasize very small things like: How you go back to your corner, or how you come off of pads. How you take a drink of water. How you breathe when fatigued. The muay of legends is found in these very small things, because these are affective states. Affect is where the rubber meets the road in fighting. Not in the mechanics of the body. above. One of the mysteries that Westerners encounter in Thailand is why aggression is so devalued in the Muay Thai ring. Aggression can be the crown jewel of western fighting. It's what Western audiences come to the screen to see. Aggression and its slippery slope step-brother anger. The reason why aggression reads so differently in Thailand is that Thais are Spinozists in the matter. (To be real about it, Spinozism has great parallel with Stoicism, and Stoicism maps quite well onto Buddhism. And Thailand and Muay Thai is Buddhistic.) The anger-prone, aggression filled fighter is the madman, the drunk, the gossip of physical action. He or she is not in control of his or her body or mind. Because traditional Muay Thai is an affective fighting art control and cultivation of oneself is of utmost priority. All the techniques and semiotics are about control: controlling your opponent, controlling the fight space and controlling oneself. And watching an angered fighter is like watching a drunk man. (This is something that is starting to change as Western internationalist values find greater footing withing Thailand's Muay Thai.) above. The Western Man (gendered purposively) has evolved into the atomized Man, conceptually cut off from others at an ideal level. Ideas of Freedom and Willing are born out of a sense of the Self which is a single unit, defined and steered in solitary. There is a citadelled concept of Self and Power in the Western tradition which imagines that power consists of NOT being affected. It is a castle of the Self. We picture certain fighters this way too. Everything bounces off of them, or nothing touches them. Spinoza on the other hand takes the exact opposite stance towards power. Power he defines as the ability to be affected. The problem with something like anger, or bodily tension isn't that you are being TOO affected. Its that you are cut off from being affected by reserves of power and influence which can free you. If you are tense, you cannot see that your opponent has shifted his weight onto his back foot. You cannot be affected by that. You cannot see it. The answer though isn't in draining out the tension so that you are less affected. It's being affected by more, increasing your capacity to be affected. As a fighter, this is where the shapes and disciplines of the 120 year old fighting art that is traditional Muay Thai, as an affective development, open up dimensions of perception and affect otherwise closed to you. As a fighter you want to have those causes coursing through you, as your opponent attempts to take you out of your game. You want stronger affects to be moving through your actions. You want to be more connected, not less. This is the reason why every Muay Thai fight begins with the ceremonial reattachment of yourself to those who trained you, and also your ancestors who preserve you. This is not just a symbolization of customary respect. It's the acknowledgement and stimulation of the resources of what you bring with you into the ring. It's all the things that will flow with you. It's your power to be affected. You are not an atom. The Priority of Defense in the Freedom of The Fighter The Spinozist-Thai approach to fighting excellence calls forward the priority of Defense. In our analogy of language we made the easy comparison of strikes to words. We do often experience the quality of a fighter in terms of vocabulary of strikes, and video study perhaps makes this even more the case. Strikes still feel like volitional expressions of the character of a person, like words chosen. But if we take the quintessential ground of human power to be the capacity to be affected - and Spinoza qualifies the experience of being affected by more and more things as one of Joy...and fewer and fewer things as one of Sadness - we start to see what the role of Defense in the art and freedom of the fighter. When an opponent is striking you the are attempting to affect you. The hoped consequence of that affectation is that you are diminished by it. Your world metaphysically and pragmatically will shrink. If its a simple jab that is landing over and over suddenly all you can see is that jab...a bit too late. Your capacity to be affected by greater and numerically larger forces becomes diminished. In Spinoza's terms, your power to be affected is reduced, you will experience a kind of deflation, a sadness. Tunnel vision. Our lives are filled with it. The one thing that occupies our mind. It can be a jab that keeps landing, or a bill that isn't paid yet, or what your boss thinks of you. Your world becomes small. In traditional Muay Thai the reason why Defense holds so much esteem is that it is the primary art of cordoning off your opponent's ability to affect you. You control their ability to add their beat to your tempo. Yes, you can offensively put the beat back on them, or pressure them with beats that will shrink their world instead of yours, but the self-possesed art of cultivation lies in Defense. Defensive prowess clears the space so that all the causes of the art you have trained in can then fill it. It puts things more on your terms, and the terms of your antecedents. There is a Buddhist saying that comes to mind in regard to the protection of the Self. You can cover the whole world in leather, or you can wear a pair of leather shoes. Defensive prowess is like wearing a pair of leather shoes, so you can more freely walk about. There is another level to Defensive excellence and the illusion of choice to this as well, that we learned from Sylvie training with the legendary Muay Femeu artist Karuhat. As you are defending and taking control over the fight space through deflections, repositioning, tempo changes, and parries, you are also developing a map of your opponent's possibilities. He became expert at reading his opponent's weight shifts and body postures to the degree that he could see the limited choices that an opponent would have, often beyond their own perception of them. This circles us back to the illusions of volition and control which Spinoza attempts to strip from us. Your opponent may very well feel that they have a great variety of strikes available to them, but from his position in the ring and the where his weight is distributed Karuhat may see that he has only three, of which one is most likely. He is actually further into your causal chain than you are. He reads your determinations more clearly than you do. When sparring with him it comes off as mind-reading. He is kicking you where you want to go, almost before you have decided to do it. You walk into his strikes. I believe he does this first though defensive prowess, eliminating your ability to affect him, which then opens up his ability to read (be affected by) your own determinations. He is fighting IN the matrix. The matrix of determinations of what is experienced as "choice". You can even see this in his fights against very skilled opponents. He'll float a check and almost bizarrely his opponent will THEN kick it. This is the next layer of Spinozist truth as a fighting art. If we are never free, in the sense that we experience that we are, the conditions of our relative freedom come through seeing and experiencing our determinations, and the determinations of others. And ultimately, in cultivating our determinations themselves, connecting ourselves to greater and greater matrices of cause.

I look forward to reading this Emma!

One of the more difficult and hidden aspects of gender gym dynamics that I've noticed is that because Muay Thai gyms are almost always male coded spaces it can be that there is a limited amount of social capital that women receive. That is to say, some women will get a desired amount of attention - the quality or kind of this attention may vary by gym - but because this is set up as inherently scarce, women will be even unconsciously forced into competing over that scarcity. This means that other women in the gym who may be more natural allies, making one feel more comfortable or at home, persons of support, inspiration or encouragement, actually become your competitors over "being authentic" or "being treated like a fighter" or even just "the coach pays attention to me". One woman may feel that the gym is pretty fair and supportive of women, because she's competed over the limited resource and won it, but other women may not. I'm not really sure what the answer to this is, other than being really sensitive to the idea that there may be hidden limitations of social capital. It can be very difficult, because a lot of what coaches can do is set up a scarcity in the first place, to motivate students. "I'll pay attention to you if you do it right", "I'll pay attention to you if you work really hard" "I'll pay attention to you if you show toughness". This leads to some very earnest women over-performing, or out-performing males in a space. They want to earn their rightful place in a male coded environment. But, this scarcity which should be a equally distributed scarcity also really easily can become quite gendered. That is to say: it's much more scarce for women than it is for men. In some gyms men will just take for granted something that women end up competing with other women for. Men compete with each other and will tend to bond. Women may experience competition with other women differently. Sylvie's talked about this female competition in the gym space a few times.

More shallow depth of field, psychological work here, this time depicting the close proximity of boxing pressure: https://www.behance.net/gallery/133054865/The-Qualities-of-Boxing

Things can really change quickly in Thailand, and with COVID Omicron on the move we could see serious shutdown by the time you get here in February, if it proves to be as virilient as some are saying. Thailand has shown that it acts pretty quickly against Muay Thai when overall health concerns are at stake (even though tourism economic pressures have been honored lately). It's enough to say, you have to factor it in. We know of very, very few traditional 5 round fights available right now. Some local cards with kids in Pattaya have happened, Lampang in the North has had a repeating card, but that's all I've heard of. As to Isaan, or in the South you'd need a gym with connections, so they would be the one to ask. I don't believe Southern local fights are happening though, as Phettalung was having some COVID troubles. Chiang Mai just started having 3 round cards with westerners on them, at Kawilla Stadium, but the regular shows that were very dependable are not happening at this point. Most of the cards that are happening are televised 3 round entertainment fights like Hardcore, Superchamp and Lumpinee GoSport. These aren't super high level fights really, but maybe beyond your skill? I don't know. As with any fights, its your gym that would be booking you, so they are the ones to really know. There's not a lot going on right now though.

I do appreciate the How To Save Muay Thai Through Marketing ideas, there are a lot of good points to be thought about. Just to confess, because I'm not connected to the realm of an Elon Musk or even a Chartri and unlikely to be involved in any kind of coordinated marketing initiative I am more interested in the idea that perhaps there is a clash of cultures here, that involves us all, and that some of the threatened aspects of Thailand's Muay Thai may be expressive of some very old differences. The Art of the Retreating Fighter I suspect not only unlocks entirely different levels of fight skill, but also speaks to a different way of fighting, fighting from a different place. The reason why I'm interested in this is that it involves a sense of personal attachment, the ways in which we each, directly, connect up to what we are watching. It's how we view and value things. If we are thinking to ourselves that even today's stadium Muay Thai - an admittedly diluted version of what Muay Thai has been - is still expressing some of these perhaps profound differences in culture and meaningful skill, the way that we watch these fights changes. We are possibly watching the slow extinction of vital differences, and rooting for their survival. And there is also a kind of ethical dimension to it all, if we appeal to analogies of biodiversity. I've made the argument before that the great fighters of Thailand are something like Old Growth forest. They are produced in an ecosystem whose complexity runs out in every direction. Yes, we can chop down Old Growth trees and use them in all sorts of ways. It's marvelous wood. It's grown in ecosystems that exist nowhere else in the world. But...if we just start growing a different sort of tree, we don't tend the Old Growth forest and replant those slow growth trees and nurture the forest, if the market harvests the hardwood and does not regrow it (ONE right now is harvesting the evolved skillsets and reputations of fighters ONE could not produce itself, for instance, to soup up the quality of its product), then we are wading into thoughts and concerns over the preservation of culture, culture through the art of fighting. Is Thailand's Muay Thai slowly being monocropped a bit? Is the brother in the ring? These questions kind of condition our own attachment to the art and sport. Is there something of a cultural struggle going on here? Something that has gone on for 200 years? To me that's a fascinating question. To return to analogies of botany: Is aggro-fighting something of an invasive species? Does backwards, timing-oriented counter-fighting represent a line in the sand?