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The Poetry of Combat: On Thailand's Muay Thai As One of the Great Art Forms of Our Time


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the illustration above is of Karuhat done by graphic artist Luis Pinto, layered over a Van Gogh

At bottom of this post is a segment from a ways back where Sylvie and I touched on some thinking I've had that placed Muay Thai, the art of Muay Thai, as one of the great Art Forms of our time. After reading this you can see the live thinking between the both of us on this. I for some time have tried to position Thailand's Muay Thai - and the all art forms of combat sports as well - in the context of other traditional fine art forms such a poetry, painting, dance, fiction, etc. The two bookends that we extemporaneously covered in the video below were the idea that Muay Thai (and full contact fighting arts), unlike almost all the others, is done under great duress. I think dance can be considered to be under something of intensity which is akin to duress, and we could talk about that as a special case, but the fighting arts, in so far they are arts, involve duress and bodily fear as the material, the paint and canvas, with which they paint. There is something quite special about this, I believe. The fighting arts are heroically expressing themselves at, in and on what can be thought of as the most base, or perhaps animal, in what is human. This canvas and paint is unique.

The other bookend that is brought up below is that the art form of something like Thailand's Muay Thai, and maybe western boxing of the past when it was more composed of communities, is a Way of Life. Which means that it expresses something more than techniques, or excellence. It comes out of lives, values and culture, in a weave that makes it incredibly rich. Rich in an artistic way. I compare it to something like Fishing, which may be considered a craft, which also traditionally is a body of practices and techniques which are embedded in a Way of Life which might express the lives of an entire village. I'm purposely blurring the lines of craft and art here, largely because "art" usually resides in the hands of the privileged, and as we move along the spectrum towards craft we encounter the knowledge and practices of a people. How much of qualifies as Art is part of the question as to whether Muay Thai is a great Art Form, or even an Art Form at all. Given enough historical perspective individual art is understood to be an expression of a people in a historical time, such as the art of the Incas, the tragedies of the Greeks, the Impressionism of late 19th century Europe.

Core to this perspective is raising an appreciation for what combat sports is, the position they have within a society, and laying some claim to the importance of the aesthetics of the combat sport performance. This dimension of fight aesthetics is what elevates fighting to an Art in the societal sense, I'd suggest, in the same way that painting or poetry can possess inherent expressive value, to the culture itself. This means that western boxing, the world's MMA and other combat sports have a claim to artistic value, even though they also ride hard the lines of commerce, popular culture and arguably the role of sheer spectacle, in the "bread and circuses" sense - see Noam Chomsky for that perspective. Perhaps like cinema, the fighting arts in sport operate between entertainment and art, which isn't to deny film or fighting its real value as an Art itself.

This post just wanted to spin out some of those developing ideas, and in thinking about Thailand's Muay Thai explain why I believe it may be the greatest art form in the world. This isn't to say that it is better than poetry, or dance...or better than western boxing or Karate, but rather in a specific way see all the differing threads that it brings together into a single rope, that make of it something that is extraordinarily rich. That we raise up the importance of fighting arts themselves along with this discussion is also a benefit.

To start with, one thing that arguably separates out Thailand's Muay Thai are the firm aesthetic demands that it places on scoring. For some this might make Muay Thai somewhat unreal as a fighting sport, because it's not all about the damage - though it clearly is one of the more violent combat sports on the planet, its full-rules version not even legal in many countries. Muay Thai has a unique combination of very visible violence, but also strong aesthetic guidelines. Things like fighter posture, displays of balance, self-control figure heavily on the scorecard, as well as the ability to express oneself narratively throughout the 5 rounds - narrative itself is the real of many of the fine arts (for more on narrative time in Thailand's Muay Thai see: The 6 Core Aspects of Muay Thai). Fighting in Thailand is expressly, even in terms of score, storytelling. (I believe fighting is also storytelling in other combat sports, in terms of audience appreciation, but this valuation is not expressly embedded in scoring criteria). Muay Thai advocates might say that these aesthetic principles in scoring are actually encoded guidelines for real fighting prowess, so that if you excel in balance, posture, artful dominance, narrative, you become a very effective fighter in the raw sense, but, it is really that there is a strong aesthetic demand that allows Thailand's Muay Thai to ascend up the pyramid of combat sports, as an Art. It is, or has a strong artistic aspect. And if it has a differential of artistic quality from some combat sports, it also distinguishes itself from more "traditional martial arts" that went through long periods of development apart from large volume full contacting fighting, in the hands of masters or teachers who perhaps somewhat aesthetically carved & preserved fighting skills. Thailand's Muay Thai exists pretty much baby bear between let's say western boxing and 1980 Korea's TKD. The product of 100,000s of full contact fights - determining its grounded efficacy - while maintaining an expression of the culture and the people out of which it has sprung, purposely. It is Buddhistic and artistic, but also it is quite reality tested, made from the lab of full-contact physically clashing, highly trained bodies.

It's important to understand because people in combat sports, and traditional martial arts like to argue about which fighting form is superior, in some kind of abstract, almost technical way, as if you could take a blank fighter in art x, and a blank fighter in art y and come out with which art is better. Aside from that being not very close to how real fighting knowledge works, this is not what this is about. And, this is not about badassness, or technical proficiency. Nope. It's thinking about the Art value of Muay Thai, and other fighting sports and arts in general. And in terms of Thailand's Muay Thai, thinking about all the ways that information, distinction, criteria, belief, aesthetic ambition and experience come to be expressed through it, in real world fighting stages. Like other arts, fighting arts are staged. In a way, it's about all the influences of value that are poured into the expression of Thailand's Muay Thai, let's say over the last 100 years of its modernity. Its how much variation and richness, and portrayed human efficacy can be packed into a fighting art and its real world practice, so that we value it artfully, such that a comparison with the Fine Arts becomes interesting. In my mind, in the modern era, the West's culture of boxing say between the 1930s and 1980s is the closest thing I think of, a performed knowledge and rite, flowing out of specific communities & micro-economies that reached very high levels of skilled excellence, somewhat in parallel to Thailand's Muay Thai. The main difference between the two, in terms of Art Form evaluation, is perhaps the aesthetic dimension of Thailand's scoring criteria, the way that its Muay Thai reaches deeper into performance as art, explicitly, though it would be very interesting to talk about the evolving, often unstated aesthetic demands of boxing throughout its history in the West.

There is a deeper dimension of the argument towards an Art, which I've begun talking about in this running short essay series (just below), which attempts to uncover some of the deeper cultural reasons why combat sports themselves carry so much meaning in a culture. They are not just "bread and circuses", but following the thinking of the sociologist René Girard - wikpedia here - who has studied the logic of Sacrifice and victim, they may serve a powerful purpose in equalizing and stabilizing a society or subculture. Much as older rights of sacrifice may have purged a community of inherent violence, combat arts that necessarily produce losers may very well be fulfilling a much older human sociological need. You can read into that possibility as it applies to Thailand's Muay Thai in my unfinished series here:

This is explicitly not to say that Thailand's Muay Thai alone might fulfill this role, in fact almost any sporting event that produces losers (and winners) might be performing this role. But, it is to add importance to the kinds of things that are being expressed by the fighter/artist in the ring, an importance that the writers of history gift to the Fine Arts of the academies. Art is supposed to be transformative, expressive and illuminating, with roots into human rite and ritual. It may very well be that combat sports indeed are creating some of these same values, but perhaps in an older way. If we add the aesthetic dimensions that Thailand's Muay Thai folds back in, we can see the unique nexus of kinds value that may be braided.

It is the very agonistic nature of the performance, the way that adrenaline, blood, fear, Amygdala, technique, self-possession, Buddhism, pain, recovery and respect mix that make of this art and sport at the very least a spectacular art. It's woven of extremely diverse strains of what makes us human, from the very lowest to the most high. And, as mentioned up top, it is not a rarefied art held by "masters". It exists in a living sense in households, community centers, in family relations, in circles and roots of micro-economies, a thick web of a turf of Life, perhaps how fishing or sailing as an art and craft might inhabit a coastal peoples for a century, expressing them. Filled with practical, hard-won knowledge, and also meaningfully imbued practices, the things that cut off the "artist" in the prototypical sense, are re-grounded in the lives of people, and all their beliefs.

It's true. The Muay Thai of Thailand is changing. It could be said that the fabric of which it is woven is unraveling, however slowly or quickly we may not be able to tell, but it is still there before us right now, a certain kind of inheritance. It's the inheritance of a people, the Thai people, but it also I believe the inheritance of the world, because so much of Muay Thai has involved deep international influences, starting with Western Boxing and to a lesser degree Judo at the birth of its modernity in the 1920s. For a 100 years this art form has been catching the strands of the world's fighting arts and woven them into the tapestry, as well.

It's okay if it's not acknowledge as the greatest Art Form in the World, but I do want the very idea of Art Form to be expanded to include the fighting arts, and for aesthetic concerns in a fighting sport to gain some weight when we think of the value of what is being done. It may mean something to us to understand that the fighting arts are performing something primally important to us, and that they are doing it both artfully and brutally.

The Muay Thai Bones segment:

 

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  • Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu changed the title to The Poetry of Combat: Thailand's Muay Thai Might Be The Greatest Art Form of Our Time

Good read. Muay Thai is in a lot of ways for me poetry in motion; as opposed to prose, verse is metered. Every foot in a poem is measured and deliberate. There are no wasted 'movements' so to speak. Like the great nak muay each bar is written, 'thrown', with intent, and draws from the influence of those who came before, from whom they learned. Without knowledge of form and structure, there are intricacies that one will not be able to appreciate. In the same way that an iambic foot can be used to mimic a heartbeat and elicit a reaction from the reader, a feint can be used to elicit a reaction from not just an opponent but the viewers as well. Playing the crowd can often be as important as playing your opponent. And one could say the same for most combat sports, but Muay Thai is more than just a sport as you mentioned. It's a tradition, it's a culture. Just like with poetry, one cannot separate the art from the tradition without misreading (not that most don't try to do just that regardless). Most combat sports (if any?) are not so closely entwined with the history that created it and the culture that surrounds it. Not just for observers, but for participants as well: the anxiety of influence is ever-present, moreso in Muay Thai than other fightsports strictly because of its tradition. Social hierarchy is tightly interwoven with MT, much like the history of poetry even if it is largely neglected in many cases.

Besides the sheer technical ability and 'practical' efficiency, it's the heritage and the community that separates Thai boxing from other sports for me. It, like poetry, is very much involved with the 'human experience' to an inseparable degree and to me art is all about relating the human condition. I love your comparison to fishing, it's very apt.

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On 10/23/2021 at 6:43 AM, Tyler from Florida said:

Muay Thai is in a lot of ways for me poetry in motion; as opposed to prose, verse is metered. Every foot in a poem is measured and deliberate. There are no wasted 'movements' so to speak. Like the great nak muay each bar is written, 'thrown', with intent, and draws from the influence of those who came before, from whom they learned. Without knowledge of form and structure, there are intricacies that one will not be able to appreciate. In the same way that an iambic foot can be used to mimic a heartbeat and elicit a reaction from the reader, a feint can be used to elicit a reaction from not just an opponent but the viewers as well. Playing the crowd can often be as important as playing your opponent. And one could say the same for most combat sports, but Muay Thai is more than just a sport as you mentioned. It's a tradition, it's a culture. Just like with poetry, one cannot separate the art from the tradition without misreading (not that most don't try to do just that regardless). Most combat sports (if any?) are not so closely entwined with the history that created it and the culture that surrounds it. Not just for observers, but for participants as well: the anxiety of influence is ever-present, more so in Muay Thai than other fight sports strictly because of its tradition. Social hierarchy is tightly interwoven with MT, much like the history of poetry even if it is largely neglected in many cases.

I kind of marvel at this paragraph, so much is in there. I love the references to the iambic beats, and the heartbeats. There is inner rhythm - its not just rocking back and forth, the rock sets the metronome so that every variation can ribbon off from that. Like thinking music is just a baseline. But, if you don't learn these rhythms, or even learn to look for the feet of a poem, its true, it just looks like stuff. Maybe cool stuff, oddly beautiful or styled, but its intricate, sophisticated manipulation of an opponent, a stage. You are right, so much as to be known to even be able to read what is going on. Not just technical facts, but cultural facts. The why of retreat. The why of taking an extra measure. Arts of course can always risk becoming too courtly, riding towards inefficacy, playing toward pure aesthetic, those who understand codes. But somehow - though BKK point fighting can be a thing - Muay Thai over the decades has avoided it, enriching itself from constant influx from the minor literatures of rural parlance, dialects of fighting styles far from any palace, and the fact fights are engaged in such full-contact brutality, that works to correct with consequence anything too stylized, too abstract. Muay Thai has always had this highly tensioned dialectic between BKK cosmopolitan sophistication and up-country / down-country labor and creation, which makes it unique as a historical document, and incredibly rich as a fighting knowledge.

I think you are very right though about the anxiety of influence, because when you are touching Muay Thai proper, you are actually reaching across and touching a whole culture, or an array of subcultures. And when you change Muay Thai, you are changing the fabric of something more than a sport.

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Another very interesting fine art parallel, beyond poetry, is that of dance. In this hour conversation I talked with Thais about the ways in which Thailand's Muay Thai sheds light on dance, and even more the case, how dance helps us see into western pursuits of Muay Thai, the development of styles, the role of techniques, pedagogy, and projects of expression.

 

 

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Just some associative writing on the subject of poetry, brought on by @Tyler from Florida's thoughts on poetry and meter.

Last week we were filming with Chatchainoi, a fighter called The Man of Stone in his day - you can see my photo essay on him here - and there were several moments when he would interrupt training and make corrections which really seemed musical. This in the sense, he objected to the rhythms and beats that Sylvie was making, and in fact at one point started making the fight music sounds, on a pretty quick tempo, to indicate what he was teaching. Get on this rhythm. Now, there are a lot of rhythms in Muay Thai, and many ways of fighting within them, off of them, but Chatchainoi has what I suspect is a very old rhythm. He was a very small fighter who pressed his opponents, had heavy hands and knees, and was always in the fight space. He had been with the Dejrat Gym since the 1990s, you can see him pointing to his photo here:

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His trainer was Arjan Surat who still is the owner of the gym, now at the age of 70, and they teach a very old Muay that they trace back to Arjan Surat's Arjan, a Muay Chaiya fighter. They don't "teach" Muay Chaiya (a Southern Style of Muay Boran), but somehow the dark root of their Muay, the Muay of the gym, goes down into that earth, still training very good stadium fighters. It's a hard, defensive, pressing style. All this is to say, Chatchainoi had a rhythm for fighting in his mind, unlike many other Thai trainers. You'll see this in the Muay Thai Library session if you watch it, but there is a point where Sylvie and he do a kind of leg kick battler in sparring, and he was very demonstrative in objecting to how Sylvie was "getting him back". She was getting the point back, but in completely the wrong way. I've been in all these MTL sessions, and around lots of high level Muay Thai, and even though I was there I couldn't quite feel what he was talking about. Sylvie felt it.

What this brings back to my mind was back when I had a great passion for Greek Tragedy, and taught myself Ancient Greek, and begun translating the great tragetists. This is all metered poetry. And there are ostensibly 3 great authors. Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. When you read Sophocles in the Greek you are just almost awestruck by the complexity of the writing. He makes full use of the twists and delays that are possible in Greek, and has an incredible dexterity in his language. It's really something. But, for me, when I read Aeschylus, thought to be less sophisticated, less evolved than Sophocles by many critics, his language was just earth-shaking. It has a stoniness, and oldness, a rigid power that Sophocles's flowing ribbons and wordplay just does not. It's closer to the earth. It feels like its of a time when a tragic play was also a rite, a power.

This is what I felt when watching Chatchainoi's rhythm, the one in his heart that he insisted on. It was older. It did not have the dexterity or sophistication of perhaps another fighter, and I'm pretty sure he was criticized as "low IQ" for how many strikes he purposively took back in the day (a common thing to say about tough, derning fighters), but what I learned in filming that session was that his rhythm, his feeling for what is right and proper poetry as a fighter had structure, a structure of heart and sinew that you learned and conditioned. And, it was not the same as that Arjan Surat had, who trained him. It was his own. But the family of the techniques of that gym were Aeschylean. 

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TANGENT

This from Making Knowledge: Explorations of the Indissoluble Relation between Mind, Body and Environment edited by Marchand, the first chapter discussing the embodied knowledge of Capoeira in Brazil, a fighting art that comes closer to dance than most. The emphasis is on the largely instruction-less, mimetic transmission and creation of the knowledge and art. Without the concretizing ballast of thousands of full contact fights as laboratory, Capoeira may bring forward the social creation of a fighting art, having parallels to aspects of Thailand's Muay Thai training (socially created, often mimetic in transmission). Aesthetics and efficacy in tension.

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If there is one theme when we interviewed legends of the Golden Age and before, it was that nobody actually taught them their style, they created it through social integration in the kaimuay, play (endless sparring, clinch) and by watching. Sirimongkol (FOTY 1972) told us that when he arrived in Bangkok from the provinces he didn't even really know how to fight (a common refrain, but likely a purposeful exaggeration). He learned by his account almost exclusively by watching and imitation, or as Bourdieu would say, mimetic transmission. Continuing on in the essay, making the distinction:

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In my article The Slow Cook vs The Hack Thailand Development, I discuss the metronome effect in the training in a Thai kaimuay, the way that practices and habits of Muay Thai transmit themselves across the social space, almost unconsciously. The nature of this kind of development is a focus of this cited article, an excerpt a little further along. The tension in the theory, as the author examines the teaching and training of Capoeira (which appears in some ways quite different than that of traditional Muay Thai, which is not master-centric, despite sharing non-verbal components), is between just how much skill development is is conscious or unconscious.

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Bourdieu's concept of an unconscious habitus which acts as the generative grammar of a space point to hidden aspects of kaimuay training, such a socially correct hierarchies or gendered expectations, which underwrite the more fulsome aspects of technique and skill acquisition in Thailand's Muay Thai.1697996193_PracticeWithoutTheory6.thumb.png.b3ae3f8e46c9a4279051a2cf1173f603.png

The generative habitus, likened to the painters style, a person's handwriting, a way of being of a class of people, helps explain the transmission of aspects of an art not contained in physical technical imitation:

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Capoeira's malicia is compared to Bourdieu's habitus, an all pervading vision of the subject and the world, positioning and conditioning the art. This is not too different than the acquisition of embodied principles of Muay Thai in the kaimuay, aspects such as auton, ning, ruup, haut, various rhythms and dispositions that communicate the ethos of the art, and even more particularly the ethos of a gym:

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Very interesting article, particularly the delineation between conscious body-learning and unconscious, the clarification between imitation and mimesis specifically. I think it's part of what makes a "natural-born fighter", the ability to not just imitate your teacher but the efficiency of the subconscious to "imitate without question", to perform an action properly without ever consciously having to think about the mechanics behind it. Sometimes thinking about how to perform a move makes you worse at it, I'm sure everyone can relate to being a victim of overthinking. It's often best, as mentioned, to just shut up and do it until it's right. I think the simple roundhouse kick is a great example of this. There are a number of moving parts in a roundhouse: the turning of the shoulder and turning over of the hip, the sweeping of the arms, the pivoting of the feet, etc. There are too many little individual parts to consciously manage in the second or fraction of a second that it takes to throw a proper kick; you just have to do it until it feels right, and when it feels right you'll just know it. And then watching back the video of you throwing it, the difference between the kicks you feel and the ones you don't will be blatantly obvious, at least in my experience. There's also the fact that what feels right for some people doesn't feel right for others. Superbon for example comes up very high on his standing leg when he throws a roundhouse to a degree at which he's basically jumping, yet some people will never throw a roundhouse like that in their entire career and still find great success with it. And still others will watch Superbon and undoubtedly start coming up higher on their standing leg from then on, especially if they're inspired by his recent KO: I personally think things like inspiration and belief of efficacy are subconscious motivators of mimesis, it seems kind of obvious to me.

Outside of physical education, I wholly believe that's a factor in general intelligence too; the most intelligent fellows I know just have an unspoken "understanding" of anything they're being educated on, almost like a knack for learning. I believe you can teach pretty much anything to anybody personally, but it's a particular individual's predisposition to mimesis that determines how quickly they'll catch on in my opinion.

And child development surely highlights the power of mimesis. Young children cannot particularly "think" at a very high level, as their brains are still developing. It's the subconscious ability of the brain to mime what the child is seeing that allows them to recreate actions that we show them.

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I mean, do you really think somebody taught this 3 year old how to throw a cartwheel kick by explaining to them the mechanics behind it? I sincerely doubt it. And they definitely didn't teach him how to celebrate his big strike, it's likely he's seen his papa or fighters he watches smash their fists together in victory before. He didn't 'think' about celebrating, he simply did it. Again interesting article, not just from a Muay Thai perspective but in general. Definitely food for thought.

I love that many of the nak muay you interview mention learning through watching. It's largely what makes me love muay Thai so much, their style is their personality. It's always interesting to me when one fighter teaches something one way, and another teaches it completely differently but neither of them are wrong. Pipa and Silapathai like to do the monkey teep while Ponsaknoi, from the same gym, says that's stupid just throw it like a normal person haha! Like I mentioned earlier I believe inspiration is a great motivator of mimesis, so to see the tactics each fighter subconsciously chooses to employ is in a way looking at what inspired them to fight in the first place. I think "history made flesh" is an excellent way to describe muay Thai, not in the sense of underwriting individual autonomy but moreso in the enculturation of a fighter. I don't think enculturation and the underwriting of individual autonomy are necessarily exclusive in this case as I believe factors that drive mimesis can definitely come from a place of individuality. The things that inspire us are all different. That's not to say the underwriting of individual autonomy is not also at play in muay Thai; the act of miming someone else is by nature not individually autonomous. Just that it's not exclusive, in my opinion.

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  • Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu changed the title to The Poetry of Combat: On Thailand's Muay Thai As One of the Great Art Forms of Our Time

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    • Some of my thoughts on the weigh-in change, and how it reflects back onto deeper aspects of how Thailand's Muay Thai is fought, in this Reddit thread: Recently announced. This should produce much bigger weight differences in the ring, move towards even more power and forward aggression combination fighting, and the diminishment of skilled (femeu) fighting (the longtime hallmark of Thailand's art and sport), and should favor farang who are larger bodied and often more versed in Western style day-before, deeper cut weight drops. It also seems like it will put a greater burden on small kaimuay and provincial fighters, as they would have to come to Bangkok the day before a fight, increasing fight expenses when often its hard to even break even on fights (perhaps there will be some support?). For the longest time day-of weigh-ins were the standard of legit matchup Thai trad fighting. Silently this change could have long lasting effects. and As I mention above (here) there are some aspects about Thai traditional scoring that also keep deep weight cutting in check (these are things people are also trying to change to a more Western style). Thais can cut the way that they do, same day, in part because of how the sport is fought and judged. You just can't cut too deep and still win. Also, Thai trad weight cutting is very different. It's not about making huge plunges close to the fight. It's incrementally getting closer to the weight, with its own science and knowledge. and It's a National PAT (SAT) rule change. It's supposed to cover all Muay Thai, part of a "Grassroots to International" effort. Entertainment Muay Thai was already headed there, or there, so this most dramatically effects traditional stadium Muay Thai in Bangkok I imagine, and major trad promotions. Enforcement of rules in Thailand is quite varied, so I imagine it pragmatically has little to do with trad fighting in the provinces (?) unless a part of the new gov outreach there. (just guessing). Have no idea what it means for fighting in tourist centers like Phuket or Chiang Mai. and Some of deep weight cutting was constrained by two things in trad day-of fighting. The first was because you were fighting later that day you were really limited in how far you could effectively go...but the second hidden aspect is that because trad scoring aesthetics have of a lot of subtle by important aspects to them (ie, they aren't entirely about "points" or "damage" but involve things like "ruup" [posture] and balance), you couldn't really go into the ring very depleted...your ruup and just your substance as a fighter would be down-scored. This was even more reinforced by Thai narrative scoring aesthetics (which a lot of Westerners get upset about). If you FADE in a fight you are penalized, because the fight has an arc to it. You have to be strong in round 4 or you just won't win. This, combined with the same day weigh-in, created a natural barrier for how low you could go. You have to have stamina. You can't artificially pad your lead with early rounds point wins, and coast in the 4th. One of things people don't realize is that if you chop away at the narrative scoring structure (the new rules start heading in this direction), and at trad scoring aesthetics AND add deeper weight cuts, this produces a huge swing which could be dangerous. They are mixing Thai and Western protocols and also Thai and Western fighting aesthetics in ways that I think haven't been completely thought about. Thai practices developed over many decades within their own sport. and Longtime Thais have a very precise understanding of how to cut weight in the trad scene, day-of weigh-in, trad scoring aesthetics. Western weight cutting, and weight cutting competition trends will start to seep in. This is pretty dangerous in my view, because knowledge of how to do the deeper cuts will communicate itself very unevenly. Already there is a lot of pseudo "Sports Science" stuff floating around Thailand, often via lightly qualified farang who offer themselves as advisors or coaches. Lots of Thais will end up having partial or just plain mis- information about how to cut in a Western fashion. Add in the common use of diuretics which amplifies issues. The Western cut is very different than the Thai cut. And mixing the two, or moving back and forth between them could be dangerous. Doing a Thai cut with a Water loading cut or a sodium loading cut, or deep Albolene sweat, who knows what can happen. At least IVs (which are very popular in Thailand) are plentiful, but still, there is danger here. Once pieces of information start entering the culture they can become a game of telephone. Spread this out over an entire sport and its asking for risks. and I suspect that one of the main reasons for this is actually economic...that is as Thailand's labor pool for fighters shrinks its harder to fill the many cards. This rule change means that a wider group of fighters are available for any particular match. Matchmakers are less constrained. Also, it happens to serve folding larger-bodied Westerners into the trad market...ie, they can fight much smaller Thais. This helps with the labor market some (more fighters to choose from), and also helps with Soft Power (selling the sport abroad). More Westerners fighting, and more Western winners (probably more Westerner belt holders as well). It really addresses in the short term several pragmatic issues, and it seems like its a government ambition to kind of codify all of Muay Thai, so that it can export the sport more readily, which is unfortunate because much of the sport's uniqueness and ultimate marketability in a deeper sense, relies on its uncodified, un-rationalized nature. I also am not sure if it just leads to everyone then using the same weight cutting practices, as for instance happens in Internationalized sports, because as I have mentioned in other comments, Thai cuts are very different than Western cuts, and the way that knowledge and practices disseminate in Thailand really is uneven. It's much more likely that Westerners will just hold a significant advantage, as will big Westernized or Western-informed Thai gyms (who already have large political advantages in the sport), and the smaller gyms and provincial fighters will not be able to play the same weight cutting game, and may even be led into dangerous hybrid or misinformed practices.
    • Well, the PAT announced 24-30 hr weigh-in, a huge change the sport. Get ready for tons of weight bullying (including bigger farang fighting small Thais in trad stadium fights). Basically for all practical reasons all weight classes have been expanded. This is in part in relationship to the labor crisis mentioned above, the capacity to draw from a wider range of fighters to fill cards. Trad Muay Thai will likely have greater skill disparities (shrinking talent pools) and now more massive size differences, as well as drawing in more farang who will become part of this solution. This will also likely mean more farang stadium/promotion belts in trad fighting. Of course laws in Thailand are unevenly forced, so there could be major hiccups in implementation, including a significant problem that fighters now have to come to Bangkok the day before, which means even greater costs to fight...which could ALSO shrink the fighter pool. Already many gyms, small kaimuay, have difficulty even breaking even in Bangkok fighting expenses. Will outlying fighters be able to regularly afford to come to fight in Bangkok, especially in a scene that favors the political power of major Bangkok gyms (they can't dependably recoup their expense by betting on their fighters).  These changes could have a massive stylistic impact on Thailand's trad Muay Thai over time, as it gives even more advantage to size and power. Saenchai was famous for his criticism of the loss of femeu fighting after he left the trad stadium scene, because large-bodied power clinch fighters (who he had some trouble with) had become the gambler's favorite. With the even greater increase in size differential now, and the influence of more smashing and clashing fighting styles of Entertainment Muay Thai, it stands to reason that power will become even more effective over femeu skill than ever before. In the Golden Age there were fairly substantial size differences, but the technical skill level of fighters was such - and the trad artful scoring bias in favor of - that small fighters like Karuhat and many others could handle 2 or more weight class (in the ring) differences. This high level of the art just really is missing in this era, and scoring biases are shifting toward the power aesthetic. Trad Muay Thai may become much more combo-heavy smashy with the big man coming out on top. 
    • Some notes on the predividual (from Simondon), from a side conversation I've been having, specifically about how Philosophies of Immanence, because they tend to flatten causation, have lost the sense of debt or respect to that which has made you. One of the interesting questions in the ethical dimension, once we move away from representationalist thinking, is our relationship to causation.   In Spinoza there is a certain implicit reverence for that to which you are immanent to. That which gave "birth" to you and your individuation. The "crystal" would be reverent to the superstaturated solution and the germ (and I guess, the beaker). This is an ancient thought.   Once we introduce concepts of novelness, and its valorization, along with notions of various breaks and revolutions, this sense of reverence is diminished, if not outright eliminated. "I" (or whatever superject of what I am doing) am novel, I break from from that which I come from. Every "new" thing is a revolution, of a kind. No longer is a new thing an expression of its preindividual, in the ethical/moral sense.   Sometimes there are turns, like in DnG, where there is a sort of vitalism of a sacred. I'm not an expression of a particular preindividual, but rather an expression of Becoming..a becoming that is forever being held back by what has already become. And perhaps there is some value in this spiritualization. It's in Hegel for sure. But, what is missing, I believe, is the respect for one's actual preindividual, the very things that materially and historically made "you" (however qualified)...   I think this is where Spinoza's concept of immanent cause and its ethical traction is really interesting. Yes, he forever seems to be reaching beyond his moment in history into an Eternity, but because we are always coming out of something, expressing something, we have a certain debt to that. Concepts of revolution or valorized novelty really undercut this notion of debt, which is a very old human concept which probably has animated much of human culture.   And, you can see this notion of immanent debt in Ecological thought. It still is there.   The ecosystem is what gave birth to you, you have debt to it. Of course we have this sense with children and parents, echo'd there.   But...as Deleuze (and maybe Simondon?) flatten out causation, the crystal just comes out of metastable soup. It is standing there sui generis. It is forever in folds of becoming and assemblages, to be sure, but I think the sense of hierarchy and debt becomes obscured. We are "progressing" from the "primitive".   This may be a good thing, but I suspect that its not.   I do appreciate how you focus on that you cannot just presume the "individual", and that this points to the preindividual. Yes...but is there not a hierarchy of the preindividual that has been effaced, the loss of an ethos.   I think we get something of this in the notion of the mute and the dumb preindividual, which culminates in the human, thinking, speaking, acting individuation. A certain teleology that is somehow complicit, even in non-teleological pictures.   I think this all can boil down to one question: Do we have debt to what we come from?   ...and, if so, what is the nature of that debt?   I think Philosophies of Immanence kind of struggle with this question, because they have reframed.   ...and some of this is the Cult of the New. 3:01 PM Today at 4:56 AM   Hmmmm yeah. Important to be in the middle ground here I suspect. Enabled by the past, not determined by it. Of course inheritance is rather a big deal in evolutionary thought - the bequest of the lineage, as I often put it. This can be overdone, just as a sense of Progress in evolution can be overdone - sometimes we need to escape our past, sometimes we need to recover it, revere it, re-present it. As always, things must be nuanced, the middle ground must be occupied. 4:56 AM   Yes...but I think there is a sense of debt, or possibly reverence, that is missing. You can have a sense of debt or reverence and NOT be reactive, and bring change. Just as a Native American Indian can have reverence for a deer he kills, a debt. You can kill your past, what you have come from, what you are an expression of...but, in a deep way.   Instead "progress" is seen as breaking from, erasing, denying. Radical departure.   The very concept of "the new" holds this.   this sense of rupture.   And pictures of "Becoming" are often pictures of constant rupture.   new, new, new, new, new, new...   ...with obvious parallels in commodification, iterations of the iphone, etc.   In my view, this means that the debt to the preindividual should be substantive. And the art of creating individuation means the art of creating preindividuals. DnG get some of this with their concept of the BwOs.   They are creating a preindividual.   But the sense of debt is really missing from almost all Immanence Philosophy.   The preindividual becomes something like "soup" or intensities, or molecular bouncings.   Nothing really that you would have debt to. 12:54 PM   Fantasies of rupture and "new" are exactly what bring the shadow in its various avatars with you, unconsciously.     This lack of respect or debt to the preindividual also has vast consequences for some of Simondon's own imaginations. He pictures "trade" or "craft" knowledge as that of a childhood of a kind, and is quite good in this. And...he imagines that it can become synthesized with his abstracted "encyclopedic" knowledge (Hegel, again)...but this would only work, he adds, if the child is added back in...because the child (and childhood apprenticeships) were core to the original craft knowledge. But...you can't just "add children" to the new synthesis, because what made craft knowledge so deep and intense was the very predindividual that created it (the entire social matrix, of Smithing, or hunting, or shepherding)...if you have altered that social matrix, that "preindividual" for knowledge, you have radically altered what can even be known...even though you have supplemented with abstract encyclopedic knowledge. This is something that Muay Thai faces today. The "preindividual" has been lost, and no amount of abstraction, and no about of "teaching children" (without the original preindividual) will result in the same capacities. In short, there is no "progressive" escalation of knowledge. Now, not everything more many things are like a fighting art, Muay Thai...but, the absence of the respect and debt to preindividuality still shows itself across knowledge. There are trends of course trying to harness creativity, many of which amount to kind of trying to workshop preindividuality, horizontal buisness plan and build structures, ways of setting up desks or lounge chairs, its endless. But...you can't really "engineer" knowledge in this way...at least not in the way that you are intending to. The preindividual comes out of the culture in an organic way, when we are attending to the kinds of deeper knowledge efficacies we sometimes reach for.
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