Muay Thai and Permanence: Authenticity, The Gym, The Ego and Habits - Agamben

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

A form of life that keeps itself in relation to a poetic practice, however that might be, is always in the studio, always in its studio.

Its—but in what way do that place and practice belong to it? Isn’t the opposite true—that this form of life is at the mercy of its studio?

***

In the mess of papers and books, open or piled upon one another, in the disordered scene of brushes and paints, canvases leaning against the wall, the studio preserves the rough drafts of creation; it records the traces of the arduous process leading from potentiality to act, from the hand that writes to the written page, from the palette to the painting. The studio is the image of potentiality—of the writer’s potentiality to write, of the painter’s or sculptor’s potentiality to paint or sculpt. Attempting to describe one’s own studio thus means attempting to describe the modes and forms of one’s own potentiality—a task that is, at least on first glance, impossible.

***

How does one have a potentiality? One cannot have a potentiality; one can only inhabit it.

Habito is a frequentative of habeo: to inhabit is a special mode of having, a having so intense that it is no longer possession at all. By dint of having something, we inhabit it, we belong to it.

***

from an excerpt from the coming Self-Portrait in the Studio, Agamben

Agamben is a compelling philosopher, in that he reads like a worm, chewing through dusty pages, hunting for words. And he chews down into their etymologies, their occasions, their reasons-for-being. He does not present the Grand View. Especially dear, and perhaps not so apparent, is how much he makes from Wittgenstein's concept of a Form of Life, something he alternately traces down to Franciscan Forms of Life (The Highest Poverty), small, local circles of practices that form their own island States, whether they be 13th century monks or players of chess. He is interested in these privacies that are profoundly social. The above passage is from an autobiography - which he approaches as an autoheterogeny - a looking back on his life through the imprint of its having been lived, through the studios of his writing. Like a fossil that leaves the veins of a plant matter, the minute details of a vital living thing, he imagines the studio to be a certain kind of impression, where all the practices of the writer (the painter, the sculptor) have recorded themselves, as lived, inhabited things. He is in this 80s, and he is looking back through this impression, this studio/s, like a photographic negative.

He wants us to see, to have lived, is to habituated it. One never possesses life or a life. One can only carve the grooves that remain over time. And he wants to look at his life, by examining its grooves. As a writer of history, as that book worm chewing through words, wriggling back through time, he is just following the runnels and rivulets in the wood. He sees it like this.

We film a lot in these kinds of studio spaces in Thailand, gyms that once were heart-beats throbbing with kicked bags, dripping with briney body water, but now are covered with photographs burned by even decades of sunlight, their reputations and their ways of life baked in, and even no longer function, only testifying...an immortal, vital testament, but still only testifying.

above, Dejrat home gym, Bangkok

And then many of these houses of Muay still are beating out the rhythms, driven by the ardor of the man that leads them, even into old age. Furnaces of agonism and Buddhistic peace, hierarchies of selves stacked in simple geometries, like that of Dejat gym, but upon what-already-has-been, with that eternal sense of the Past holding much more than a Future. This is an illusion. This is something Westerners face when they first come to Thailand, open-eyed. Everything - every surface - is brimming with the new, the unexpected, one cannot see the what-already-has-been which sinks down into sedimented layers of granite & limestone selves. Yes, the age of things is seen, but not the already-has-been completed, the lost-to-the-past, just yet. Instead the present moment seems to be breaking like the bow of a boat, cresting the waters. This is where you are becoming.

Agamben invites us to understand - to see - that where we have entered is already a studio of what-already-has-been, we are working within a fossil. Lives have already passed through, lives have already been. You are standing in the bones of memory. You are in an architecture of things that have past, crystalized intentions and aches pressed through an art and a way of Life. So much of what you are standing in is what-already-has-been. It's done. It's over.

We are reading an article written in a Thai boxing magazine in the early 1990s - having it translated, will post it - that bemoans the present era then (1990s), the time of Karuhats, Hippys and Oleys, the Age we now call "Golden". It stands on the ruins of the true Muay Thai of the 1960s and 1970s, the Age of Men...it says. As we age and mature we come to feel more and more of what has past, of things having-been, but what truly is widening is our gaze. We have always been standing in those bones, what Agamben wants us to see as our habits, the repetitions of having lived, the carved-out. Even in our most pristinely new moment, we were in those bones of it all, with blinders on. All that has happened in that our vision has widened to see it.

Instead what this vision should call us to see is not the widening gaze of what-has-been, but rather the consumate gaze back down into what we are creating now, what carvings, what habituations of Selves that we are inhabiting. Inhabiting - Agamben likes this word, this Heideggerian word, I do not. It makes too much of us a Spirit, a ghosting thing, like we are haunting our lives. It is not like that.

I'm writing about the ambitions of those that come to Thailand to beat out a new and authentic self, to expose themselves to new condition, to habituate in a new way, to manifest differently, and what it means to stand in the bones of an art, and a history. And even more readily, to stand in the bones of a house, a gym, a studio, which has made many men, and is always brimming with the what's already-has-been, almost cluttered with it. The hunt of the foreigner in the country: Where do I find the "authentic"? Where do I find that which isn't the already-has-been? Where do I find the "studio"? Again and again the more experienced foreigner, the one who has gained eyes to see beyond the initial innocence of the projected exotic - will be disappointed. They will travel from gym to gym and find the already-has-been. Because this is the natural state. This is the life and state of the artist. Nothing has changed. Only your eyes. Let them change again.

A page from Nicola Chiaromonte’s notebooks contains an extraordinary meditation on what remains of a life. For him the essential issue is not what we have or have not had—the true question is, rather, “what remains? . . . what remains of all the days and years that we lived as we could, that is, lived according to a necessity whose law we cannot even now decipher, but at the same time lived as it happened, which is to say, by chance?” The answer is that what remains, if it remains, is “that which one is, that which one was: the memory of having been ‘beautiful,’ as Plotinus would say, and the ability to keep it alive even now. Love remains, if one felt it, the enthusiasm for noble actions, for the traces of nobility and valor found in the dross of life. What remains, if it remains, is the ability to hold that what was good was good, what was bad was bad, and that nothing one might do can change that. What remains is what was, what deserves to continue and last, what stays.”

The answer seems so clear and forthright that the words that conclude the brief meditation pass unobserved: “And of us, of that Ego from which we can never detach ourselves and which we can never abjure, nothing remains.” And yet, I believe that these final, quiet words lend sense to the answer that precedes them. The good—even if Chiaromonte insists on its “staying” and “lasting”—is not a substance with no relation to our witnessing of it—rather, only this “of us nothing remains” guarantees that something good remains. The good is somehow indiscernible from our cancelling ourselves in it; it lives only by the seal and arabesque that our disappearance marks upon it. This is why we cannot detach ourselves from ourselves or abjure ourselves. Who is “I”? Who are “we”? Only this vanishing, this holding our breath for something higher that, nevertheless, draws life and inspiration from our bated breath. And nothing says more, nothing is more unmistakably unique than that tacit vanishing, nothing more moving than that adventurous disappearance. - Agamben

I think of foreign fighters and ardent students that travel to Nungubon's gym in Ubon. A small studio of a space that is made from his home. It is in the model of a home kaimuay that has made so many fighters of Thailand's Muay Thai. And it is a museum of a space, filled with the pieces of his life and career, just as kaimuay have always been. You are in the bones of it, but still it is what already-has-been. We are standing with a man who has lived the art, in the ring, in the gym. The carved man, but you will also know that it already has passed. This is not an error. This is not flawed. This is the natural state of things. All things already-have-been. Put down the chalice of The Authentic. Everything is already heavily allowed with the past, with the done. It is only you who pulls the thread forward. You and those you metronome with.

The above section from Agamben (bolded) is quite beautiful. It is a subtle drawing out of a Spinoza maxim, like a silken thread from the side of an Idea that is usually taken in a very different way. Spinoza held that there is some portion of the Mind that is Eternal. The Truth within the Mind - not our ego, not our feelings or personal ideas or intents - remains for all eternity. As Agamben draws it out he evokes the ephemera of The Ego in Buddhism, that illusive dimension of ourselves organized around everything that is supposed to matter. Of that, nothing will remain. Why? Because only the Good will remain. Agamben's invocation of the studio, the physical space of the practice, all the materiality of that practice, a sum of those real repetitions that reflect our burning fires, our furnaces, but also the Form of Life that is the art into which we are pressed, suggest that this is more of what is the Good, more of what remains. He wants us to see that all the while when our heart has been beating, we've been carving. What is it that you are carving? What of it will remain? What is the Good.

As fighters this comes into deeper question, for the fight is among the most thin and veiled of performances, best witnessed in person by the ropes. It can be photographed, it can be written about, but what it truly is vanishes like the midnight bloom of a cragged flower, for only the few. And, the endless poundings of the bag, the light-footed shadowboxings? What is to be of that Good, washing into inarticulate neutrality by the Sea? We meet these incredible men, these spiritual athletes, and what has been made by them? Where does it reside? Where is the studio of their permanence?

above, Nungubon's home gym, Ubon

above, Takrowlek's home gym garden, Bangkok

One knows something only if one loves it—or as Elsa would say, “only one who loves knows.” The Indo-European root that means “to know” is a homonym for the one that means “to be born.” To know [conoscere] means to be born together, to be generated or regenerated by the thing known. This, and nothing but this, is the meaning of loving. And yet, it is precisely this type of love that is so difficult to find among those who believe they know. In fact, the opposite often occurs—that those who dedicate themselves to the study of a writer or an object end up developing a feeling of superiority towards them, almost a sort of contempt. This is why it is best to expunge from the verb “to know” all merely cognitive claims (cognitio in Latin is originally a legal term meaning the procedures for a judge’s inquiry). For my own part, I do not think we can pick up a book we love without feeling our heart racing, or truly know a creature or thing without being reborn in them and with them. - Agamben

As we come to study we violate ourselves, our boundaries. We break apart what has been. A new concresence.

In this falls the onus on the artist, on the fighter, in this it is all of us. In many ways we are all nomads without a studio, in that we are ever stepping into the ruins of what already-has-been. The bones of it are already stacked around us, even when in youth you do not see them in your tunneling desire. We travel about like a potter who may find a kiln here or there, and we are made hybrid, cyborg to the matter of which it is made. We throw our clay as we might, and at many times we have to build the kiln ourselves, through an art of kiln-making which we have divined from lore & other practices we intuit. We inhabit houses of the art's keeping at times, but again and again The Good must only be the habits we keep as we build, and the respect we pay to what others have etched and thrown, in their kilns, in the kilns that have been. The Ego will not remain, it will vanish. Instead as we bend ourselves toward a Form of Life, and our respect for it.

This is a form of cooking. We are cooked by our knowing. By our doing.

A medieval legend about Virgil, whom popular tradition had turned into a magician, relates that upon realizing he was old he employed his arts to regain his youth. After having given the necessary instructions to a faithful servant, he had himself cut up into pieces, salted, and cooked in a pot, warning that no one should look inside the pot before it was time. But the servant—or, according to another version, the emperor—opened the pot too soon. “At the point,” the legend recounts, “there was seen an entirely naked child who circled three times around the tub containing the meat of Virgil and then vanished and of the poet nothing remained.” Recalling this legend in the Diaspalmata, Kierkegaard bitterly comments, “I dare say that I also peered too soon into the cauldron, into the cauldron of life and the historical process, and most likely will never manage to become more than a child.”

Maturing is letting oneself be cooked by life, letting oneself blindly fall—like a fruit—wherever. Remaining an infant is wanting to open the pot, wanting to see immediately even what you are not supposed to look at. But how can one not feel sympathy for those people in the fables who recklessly open the forbidden door.

We are all as it cooks tempting to look in the pot, we think it is over. The process close to being done. The practices, our inhabitations surely have done the cooking they are supposed to have done. There's been enough heat, enough time, one senses. Maybe its not completely done, but a little peek won't hurt. But its exactly that. You cannot look. It's not for you to see.

above, Jaroensap's home gym, Bangkok

The above is Baramajanmuay Ket Sriyapai,  ปรมาจารย์มวย เขตร์ ศรียาภัย, the Muay Chaiya master of Arjan Surat, a portrait photo that hangs on the wall of the Dejrat gym in Bangkok. In some material sense this is all that remains of him. Arjan Surat, who still runs this hallowed personal space where hanging bags drape in a garage where he literally parks his car, talks about other Muay Boran manifestations in Thailand, lineages that purports ancient knowledge or ways of fighting. He laughs in his gruff and dismissive gravel voice pointing at the portrait "How can they know, if he didn't know?" But the habits, the inhabitance as Agamben would have it, of Baramajanmuay Ket Sriyapai also live remaining in Arjan Surat himself. The carvings of life, his studio, his life, made by the beating heart of Baramajanmuay Ket Sriyapai have also carved upon Arjan Surat who is now in his 70s, bent on holding daily pads for stadium fighters until 80. "Eeeevery-day" he says in English, drawing out the words to indicate time, the length of it. You do this eeeevery-day. You carve. You are standing in the bones of it, no matter where you are. It all, it all has already past. It's over. It's done. And you pull out this silken thread, weaving it forward, in the very thing you are carving. It looks like it is all finished, but it is barely there.

 

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

I

the bone curvature
contains marrow as the teapot
            carefully painted in lacquer
            dragons coiled
holds its tea.
a flame
underneath

bringing steam and fragrance
to a mad boil

til a careful liquid
harrows still in its cup.

 

*operative ontological concepts: the material, organic substance, vessel, decoration, heat, spiritualization, affect, cup

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Agamben expansive on habit in his work on the poet Holderlin:

Since the ‘original’ can only appear in a state of weakness, it can only be achieved through a round-trip journey that must first have ventured out into the foreign. One can only turn towards the origin—one returns to it without ever having been there before. The free use of the proper is the most difficult thing because what we are born with is not something that can be possessed once and for all, as a given; it can only be experienced as weakness and deprivation. It necessarily assumes the form of a habit, in the sense in which Aristotle defined it in a passage of Metaphysics that Hölderlin might well have known: as the hexis, from echein, ‘to have’—literally the act or state of ‘having’, just as from ‘to be’ the word ‘being’ was formed, or, to give an example from Latin, the verb esse (‘to be’) led to the analogical formation essentia (‘essence’ and also ‘being’). Aristotle used hexis first and foremost in relation to deprivation, as something that cannot under any circumstances be had (‘it is impossible to have a “having” [echein hexin] in this sense; for there will be an infinite series if we can have the having of what we have’— Metaphysics 1022b, 25). In other words, possession of one’s origin is possible only in the ‘habitual’ sense, and only through the dispossession of a habitation and a habit: it cannot be had, one can only become used to it, accustomed to it, habituated to it. To have a having is, in the final analysis, only a way or mode [modo] of being, a form of life.

In an exemplary book on Indo-European languages, Émile Benveniste distinguished between two ways of forming nouns that indicate an action: on the one hand, nouns expressing an attitude or possibility (ending in - tu in Indo-Iranian, - tys in Greek, and - tus in Latin) and, on the other hand, nouns expressing a performed action (- ti in Indo-Iranian, - sis in Greek, - tio in Latin). Thus, in Latin actus means the state or manner in which someone or something moves or can move, actio the concrete action; ductus the manner in which something is or can be led, ductio the action of pulling or leading; gestus a way of behaving, gestio, the performance of an action.  Similarly, the supine, which is formed by adding the - tu suffix, ‘expresses potential: cubitum ire, “to go to sleep”, does not indicate a concrete, completed action, but rather a possibility’. The Aristotelian distinction between potential or possibility (dynamis) and concrete act (energeia) is easy to recognize in these examples, but further elaborating on Benveniste’s considerations might help us gain a better understanding of the relationship between the two categories. Take the Latin term habitus, for instance: as a noun ending in - tus, it expresses an attitude or a possibility—or, more precisely, the way in which a power or possibility is had; not its objective exercise or concrete practice (which would be hexis in Greek; the Latin habitio developed relatively late). It becomes clear why Aristotle, who tried to think through his idea using the term hexis (which, as a noun ending in - sis, expresses a performed action) as a middle ground between mere potential and concrete act, encountered a challenge that proved quite difficult to overcome. Potential, expressed in the way language presents it, isn’t something not real that precedes the act in which it is realized: it is, on the contrary, the only way in which we can have what we do. That is, we can ‘have’ actions insofar as we consider them real possibilities for us: the moment they are performed, these actions become so separated from their subjects that they must be ascribed or attributed (to their actors, or the people who carry them out—hence the notion of guilt, upon which both law and tragedy are based). Custom or habit [l’abito o l’abitudine]—the inhabiting, dwelling life we are attempting to define—neutralize the dynamis/energeia opposition, rendering it inoperative. In keeping with a Hölderlinian penchant which should be familiar by now, they consider opposites in their inseparable coinciding. In 1838, when Hölderlin was still living in his tower on the Neckar, the French philosopher Félix Ravaisson, who had studied with Schelling in Munich, wrote a treatise titled De l’habitude (Of Habit). In dizzying pages that gained the admiration of Bergson and Heidegger, 25-year-old Ravaisson approaches habit as one of life’s ultimate secrets. He describes with meticulous precision the ways in which habit almost imperceptibly causes one’s will to morph into inclination and instinct, in a progressive degradation of effort and intention that, just as in Hölderlin’s work, is both passive and active: ‘The law of habit can be explained only by the development of a Spontaneity that is at once active and passive, equally opposed to mechanical Fatality and to reflective Freedom.’ In the case of conscious reflection and will, which we generally consider higher-level human functions, the end is an idea that does not yet exist and must therefore be brought about through action or movement; in the case of habit, however, the end is confused with the very action or movement that would bring it about, hence the subject and object become indeterminate: The interval that the understanding represents between the movement and its goal gradually diminishes; the distinction is effaced; the end whose idea gave rise to the inclination comes closer to it, touches it and becomes fused with it. An immediate intelligence, in which nothing separates the subject and object of thought, gradually replaces the reflection that traverses and measures distances between contraries, the middle ground between opposing terms.

In 1838, when Hölderlin was still living in his tower on the Neckar, the French philosopher Félix Ravaisson, who had studied with Schelling in Munich, wrote a treatise titled De l’habitude (Of Habit). In dizzying pages that gained the admiration of Bergson and Heidegger, 25-year-old Ravaisson approaches habit as one of life’s ultimate secrets. He describes with meticulous precision the ways in which habit almost imperceptibly causes one’s will to morph into inclination and instinct, in a progressive degradation of effort and intention that, just as in Hölderlin’s work, is both passive and active: ‘The law of habit can be explained only by the development of a Spontaneity that is at once active and passive, equally opposed to mechanical Fatality and to reflective Freedom.’69 In the case of conscious reflection and will, which we generally consider higher-level human functions, the end is an idea that does not yet exist and must therefore be brought about through action or movement; in the case of habit, however, the end is confused with the very action or movement that would bring it about, hence the subject and object become indeterminate: The interval that the understanding represents between the movement and its goal gradually diminishes; the distinction is effaced; the end whose idea gave rise to the inclination comes closer to it, touches it and becomes fused with it. An immediate intelligence, in which nothing separates the subject and object of thought, gradually replaces the reflection that traverses and measures distances between contraries, the middle ground between opposing terms. A sort of ‘dark intelligence’ is at work here, in which not only the real and the ideal coincide, but even one’s individual will and nature tend to infinitely coincide: ‘Habit is thus, so to speak, the infinitesimal differential, or, the dynamic fluxion from Will to Nature.’ As in Hölderlin’s dwelling, inhabiting life, which abdicates both name and identity, ‘the progression of habit leads consciousness, by an uninterrupted degradation, from will to instinct, and from the accomplished unity of the person to the extreme diffusion of impersonality’. The unprecedented culmination of Ravaisson’s thesis—or, if you will, of his philosophical poem—is when habit turns out to provide the key to understanding the most basic functions of life:

The most elementary mode of existence, with the most perfect organization, is like the final moment of habit, realized and substantiated in space in a physical form. The analogy of habit penetrates its secret and delivers its sense over to us. All the way down to the confused and multiple life of the zoophyte, down to plants, even down to crystals, it is thus possible to trace, in this light, the last rays of thought and activity as they are dispersed and dissolved without yet being extinguished, far from any possible reflection, in the vague desires of the most obscure instincts. The whole series of beings is therefore only the continuous progression of the successive powers of one and the same principle, powers enveloping one another in the hierarchy of the forms of life, powers which develop in the opposite direction within the progression of habit. The lower limit is necessity—Destiny, as might be said, but in the spontaneity of Nature; the higher limit is the Freedom of the understanding. Habit descends from the one to the other; it brings these contraries together, and in doing so reveals their intimate essence and their necessary connection.

Seen from this perspective, even love—whereby individual will gives way to nature and desire—is akin to habit, which becomes something like the ultimate basis of life, its deepest core, which we cannot grasp rationally: ‘It is God within us, God hidden solely by being so far within us in this intimate source of ourselves, to whose depths we do not descend.’75 Ultimately, in the book’s supreme ontological conclusion, habit is identified as the very essence of substance according to Spinoza: ‘Finally, the disposition of which habit consists, and the principle engendering it, are one and the same thing: this is the primordial law and the most general form of being, the tendency to persevere in the very actuality that constitutes being.’76 The conatus, the tension through which each thing perseveres in its being, cannot be an act of the will, nor can it be an arbitrary decision: it can only be a habit, a dwelling life.

- Holderlin's Madness: Chronicle of a Dwelling Life (Agamben)