Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu
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Posts posted by Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu
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17 hours ago, Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu said:
Simondon and the Infinite grammatical positions of Becoming
from the same work
I see some parallels in transition a fighter can make between gyms in Thailand, in years as they elapse, as a fighter you ARE your techniques (not of striking, but of training). Avatars of oneself unfold, in series of successions. In the passage below swap out "technology" with techniques-of-training, perhaps, to make the most sense of where I am heading.
An "ontology of positions"
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Simondon and the Infinite grammatical positions of Becoming
from the same work
I see some parallels in transition a fighter can make between gyms in Thailand, in years as they elapse, as a fighter you ARE your techniques (not of striking, but of training). Avatars of oneself unfold, in series of successions. In the passage below swap out "technology" with techniques-of-training, perhaps, to make the most sense of where I am heading.
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Kem's Muay Thai in the Khaoyai Mountains below Korat would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for someone in your position I think.
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Positioning the extraction of techniques from Thailand's trad Muay Thai, into a globalizing culture of technique bent toward expansion.
Fredrico Campagna, Technique and Magic.
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I have long thoughts on this, but I simply can't get myself to write them. The audience for this kind of information simply is crumbling in the face of waves of near-mindless, replicating "content". I sense the ability to even discuss these things is being lost on a slope of consumption.
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More and more I am convinced. You fight exactly how you train...which does mean you execute the strikes you have trained.
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Yesterday I was quite surprised to hear Chatchai Sasakul telling us that people problematically slowdown their punches, and lack the natural acceleration that is necessary at the end. The "shape" of their punches is all wrong. I was surprised because this validated what I wrote 2 years ago, exactly that. I got a lot of flack from internet authority types.
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Regional Golden Age Muay Thai - Khon Kaen
Hanging with Karuhat I asked him: Are there any more good fighters from Khon Kaen (where he is from and famous for very femeu fighters like Pudpadnoi, Himself, Somrak, etc)? He shook his head. No, there was a very big stadium there, like Lumpinee. They had a big card every Saturday, broadcast on channel 4 - which I take to be a local broadcast. The stadium was the focus of the region's entire scene of Muay Thai. The stadium closed maybe 20 years ago. He said he fought in the stadium maybe 4 times.
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On 11/19/2019 at 6:39 PM, Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu said:
The combination of the future alienation, and throw-back aesthetics has a deep and satisfying history in our culture, and there is a sort of sci-fi, Blade Runner experience to many ex-pat realities in Thailand, though these seem quite far from Muay Thai depictions which already turn back up on the real. The Real. But, there is in that Tech Noir history a powerful sense of figure depiction that could play a role in what we could be looking for in Muay Noir meanings. I recent read through the Japanese manga Battle Angel Alita (1993) and its connective books, and was terribly struck by the force of its action depictions, the cleanliness of the lines (Noir contains excessive contrast, purifying the subject) as well as the emotionality of its characters while in action. It is a Tech Noir work of art.
Two recent photos with the Blade Runner Aesthetic:
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This thread relatedly expands on the cultural aspects and difficulties of shooting in Black and White in Thailand, and reflects on the history of Muay Thai photography in the country:
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On 12/25/2024 at 1:48 PM, Everturn said:
I've already added the following to my itinerary:
- Jor Apichat w/ Kru Diesel
- Kem Muay Thai
- I was going to visit Keatkhamtorn but I'm thinking of passing based off of recommendations to spend more time with Kru Diesel & Kem
- While I'd love to Lamnammoon, the travel just isn't feasible (but it's definitely a must-go for my next trip to Thailand)
That looks like a good list. A very toured gym for clinch is FA Group in Bangkok, but you might just be clinching a lot with Westerners? There is a very heavy Western presence, lots of Westerners trying to learn clinch. Kru Diesel is the kru who made FA Group (before it became a destination gym), so if you are looking for the deeper theory of the clinch fighting style kru Diesel is the source. Kem is very good teaching clinch, maybe take a few privates with him for that focus?
A lot of clinch is like surfing, you need to spend time in the waves...but (who are you clinching with) the waves also matter.
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From Yodnaksu magazine 1985...
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The Living Real. Goddess of warfare and wisdom.The goddess Pallas Athena was a divinity of both warfare and wisdom. Sylvie in her 285th fight, embodying both in the material world. The Greeks held ideas to float above us as inconcrete things...toward which we strive. I am inspired by my wife, as I would be by the ideas of Athena. She walks where no one else has and invites us to see. We learn from ideals. We learn from their examples. We learn as we all strive.I see this bloody photo in the corner between rounds, and I see the ideals of Athena, pressed through the mess of the human, the contorting real of bodies and wills clashing, in their techniques and arts (for we are all made of habits). Every Muay Thai fight opens with the embodiment of gods and divinities in the Ram Muay, some might say, quite literally. When fighters enter the ring they take on a role that is beyond the merely human.Athena always has been an anathema. She dictates the priorities of justice, rationality and even democracy, yet she wears the cult-like aegis which puts pure terror into enemies on the battle field. She was reportedly born virgin, from her father's thigh, is a maiden but stays the hand of Achilles with the scales of wisdom.-
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Making a Note. Need to write about this.
How Fatigue and Time Travel relate.
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Deleuze, Guattari and the Machinic
The "combo" or even "the strike", as it lives in the Western conception, would benefit from understanding the machine from a D&G perspective...from the excellent chapter "What is the Body Without Organs? Machine and Organism in Deleuze and Guattari" by Dan Smith. found here:
What is the body without organs_ Machine and organism in Deleuze and Guattari.pdf << pdf
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The West vs Thailand
The more I think about it - and I've thought about it a lot - the huge difference between most combat sport conceptions in the West vs Thailand's Muay Thai is The Burst vs The Continuity. Short Wave vs Long Wave...with the exception perhaps of Western Boxing, which has a tremendous history of long wave fighting. With the advent of the "combo" (which helps people who are not fluent, teach and disseminate) and of the "highlight" (which increasingly becomes the narrative lens through which fighting is digested and understood), The Burst concept has accelerated...to everyone's detriment.
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The clinch battle, and the wonderfully reffed rounds, in Chatchainoi's win (on channel 7) gives trad rules hope.
https://www.watchlakorn.in/มวยไทย7สีวันที่22ธันวาคม2567-video-445579
I put up the best round here:
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Trad Rules and Retreat Scoring
The trad scoring bias for retreat and defense, the forward-and-back game, is as simple (and complex!) as the pick and roll in basketball.
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The Top 10 Greatest Muay Thai Fighters Updated
Saenchai and Samson tied for 10th...
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I was legit sad to see Rajadamnern do away with the lighting they had, with the checkerboard, because it allowed me to take some of my best photos ever. I just loved this photoshoot. It gave such a sculptural light.
But, this informal shot (sorry I don't know who took it) from the new lighting shows that there can be some very dramatic photography in the stadium. I hope I get to shoot there again with the new lighting. Props to whomever made the bold move, from something that was already a strength of the stadium, pushing for something that might be better.
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Some Shocked, Depressed
Some shocked the 3x FOTY Panpayak loses on ONE, knocked out. It's funny, you design a sport so that globalizable White Guys will beat Thai guys, and then fans are surprised that happens. It's baked into the DNA of the sport design. Some Reddit comments.
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The Chicken Wing Punch in Thailand
my answer below to this Reddit question, which the moderators for some reason deleted. Who knows why, maybe some kind of AI filter, etc? This is a very interesting subject though, reflecting on the way techniques get preserved and passed on.
Do people who do muay thai punch oddly?
The author then went onto describe how they've been told by some that they punch like they are throwing an elbow, but that this is how their coach taught them.
I assume you are talking about straights and crosses. In most examples, in Thailand this chicken wing punch honestly is likely just a collective bad habit developed out of bad padholding, often with wider and wider held pads (speculatively, sometimes because Thais hold for very large Westerners and don't want to take the full brunt of power all day long). It also has proliferated because Thailand's Muay Thai has moved further and further away from Western Boxing's influence, which once was quite pronounced (1960s-1990s, but reaching back to the 1920s). Today's Thai fighters really have lost well-formed punching in many cases. It has been put out there that this is the "Thai punch" (sometimes attributing it to some old Boran punching styles, or sometimes theoretically to how kicks have to be checked, etc), but Thais didn't really punch like this much 30 years ago if you watch fights from that time. It's now actually being taught in Thailand though, because patterns proliferate. People learn it from their padmen and krus (I've even heard of Thai krus correcting Westerners towards this), and it gets passed on down the coaching tree. Mostly this is just poorly formed striking that's both inaccurate and lacking in power, and has been spreading across Thailand the last couple of decades. There are Boran-ish punching styles that have the elbow up, but mostly, at least as I suspect, that's not what's happening. We've filmed with maybe (?) 100 legends and top krus of the sport and none of them punch with the "chicken wing" or teach it, as far as I can recall.
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The BwO and the Muay Thai Fighter
As Westerners and others seek to trace out the "system" of Muay Thai, bio-mechanically copying movements or techniques, organizing it for transmission and export, being taught by those further and further from the culture that generated it, what is missed are the ways in which the Thai Muay Thai fighter becomes like an egg, a philosophical egg, harboring a potential that cannot be traced. At least, one could pose this notion as an extreme aspect of the Thai fighting arts as they stand juxtaposed to their various systemizations and borrowings. D&G's Body Without Organs concept speculatively helps open this interpretation. Just leaving this here for further study and perhaps comment.
from: https://weaponizedjoy.blogspot.com/2023/01/deleuzes-body-without-organs-gentle.html
Artaud is usually cited as the source of this idea - and he is, mostly (more on that in the appendix) - but, to my mind, the more interesting (and clarifying) reference is to Raymond Ruyer, from whom Deleuze and Guattari borrow the thematics of the egg. Consider the following passage by Ruyer, speaking on embryogenesis, and certain experiments carried out on embryos:
"In contrast to the irreversibly differentiated organs of the adult... In the egg or the embryo, which is at first totally equipotential ... the determination [development of the embryo -WJ] distributes this equipotentiality into more limited territories, which develop from then on with relative autonomy ... [In embryogenesis], the gradients of the chemical substance provide the general pattern [of development]. Depending on the local level of concentration [of chemicals], the genes that are triggered at different thresholds engender this or that organ. When the experimenter cuts a T. gastrula in half along the sagittal plane, the gradient regulates itself at first like electricity in a capacitor. Then the affected genes generate, according to new thresholds, other organs than those they would have produced, with a similar overall form but different dimensions" (Neofinalism, p.57,64).
The language of 'gradients' and 'thresholds' (which characterize the BwO for D&G) is taken more or less word for word from Ruyer here. D&G's 'spin' on the issue, however, is to, in a certain way, ontologize and 'ethicize' this notion. In their hands, equipotentiality becomes a practice, one which is not always conscious, and which is always in some way being undergone whether we recognize it or not: "[The BwO] is not at all a notion or a concept but a practice, a set of practices. You never reach the Body without Organs, you can't reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit" (ATP150). You can think of it as a practice of 'equipotentializing', of (an ongoing) reclaiming of the body from any fixed or settled form of organization: "The BwO is opposed not to the organs but to that organization of the organs called the organism" (ATP158).
Importantly, by transforming the BwO into a practice, D&G also transform the temporality of the BwO. Although the image of the egg is clarifying, it can also be misleading insofar as an egg is usually thought of as preceding a fully articulated body. Thus, one imagines an egg as something 'undifferentiated', which then progressively (over time) differentiates itself into organs. However, for D&G, this is not the right way to approach the BwO. Instead, the BwO are, as they say, "perfectly contemporary, you always carry it with you as your own milieu of experimentation" (ATP164). The BwO is not something that 'precedes' differentiation, but operates alongside it: a potential (or equipotential ethics) that is always available for the making: "It [the BwO] is not the child "before" the adult, or the mother "before" the child: it is the strict contemporaneousness of the adult, of the adult and the child". Hence finally why they insist that the BwO is not something 'undifferentiated', but rather, that in which "things and organs are distinguished solely by gradients, migrations, zones of proximity." (ATP164)
Journaling - Readings, Muay Thai, Concepts and Articulations
in Kevin's Corner - Muay Thai, Philosophy & Ethics
Posted
The Knowledge Mill
There is a very interesting dilemma that has gradually arisen, as the totalization of cognitive Capitalism takes its hold on the world, which is that so much of our information sphere has become a knowledge mill. This is to say, we all work producing knowledge and perspectives to feed into the mill, day and night, such that the meaning of our knowledge, our experiences, becomes asymptotically less and less. It just wants to be fed. And we grist it all, feeding it back in.
As the producer of perhaps the greatest documentation of a fighting art, in the history of the planet, and art full of nuance, culture and history, as well as great efficacy, how does one keep it from just being ground up by the mill and losing all meaning? Just another set of details, coordinates of interest, to be mapped and ultimately colonized by pure consumption?
We've purposely made much of the documentation hard to digest for such a mill. Hour long videos of narrative structure that force investment and discovery by the viewed. We've made it hard to mine...but still is lacking, other than this mode of resistance, an appropriate expression and conversation of that knowledge, something that honors its meaningfulness.
I've felt myself grow sensitive to this milling, and feeds are populated by advice and social-credit expertise, increasingly a flood of nonsense (from a certain perspective). Just let the mill mill, I say. But, its more than that. It needs a positive form, resistant to that churning mouth of it all.