Journaling - Readings, Muay Thai, Concepts and Articulations

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Think of the highest level of Muay Thai fighting 30 years ago, in the Golden Age, in terms of Dynamic Range, as its applied to photography or sound recording. Fighters were able to perform skillfully at an intense range of distances. It wasn't just a matter of styles, it was that every distance was within the spectrum of competence or even excellence.

With the advent of Entertainment Muay Thai, as Thailand seeks to fashion its sport towards the less skillful foreigner, the real aim is to reduce the dynamic range of fighting to only "the pocket" as much as possible, to generate clashes, because that's where memorized combinations favored by Western and other nationalities are the most effective, and that is where large bodied fighters will win exchanges. The entire spectrum, the Dynamic Range of fighting is to be shrunk. And the ranges were Thais especially held court, too-far (counter kicking defense) and too-close (clinch dominance) have been clipped out.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Really enjoyed the Mongkutpetch slow rolling control and domination of the Payahong Raja belt fight. Especially in the first 3 rounds it was methodical, and her size, knee threats and the joining of the hands in the clinch just gradually swallowed Payahong up. Payahong was never really a plus clinch fighter, her strength is timing and kicking, and composure, so one that space was consistently invaded there was little she could do to change the tide. It was great how unrushed Mongkutpetch was.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

That makes two, slowly stalking dominant clinch victories in two weight classes for the women at Rajadamnern, Barabara and Mongkutpetch. Beautiful to see the classic Muay Khao style embraced by Rajdamnern for the women.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Bergson and The Magic of Movement from Bergson Thinking Backwards, Moore (1996).

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

This is a line of reasoning I'd like to pursue, that global Capitalism is deskilling Muay Thai fighters, but changing the rules and aesthetics to breakdown complex fighting knowledge to repetitive tasks, like throwing memorized combos, in order to increase the labor force, making individual fighters less unique and more replaceable, and transfer the knowledge core to promotional and media oriented marketing.

 

the chat gpt summary of deskilling:

The argument that capitalism induces deskilling comes primarily from Marxist and critical labor theorists, particularly Harry Braverman, who expanded on this in his influential 1974 book Labor and Monopoly Capital. Here's a breakdown of the argument:

---

What is Deskilling?

Deskilling is the process by which skilled labor is replaced with less skilled or unskilled labor—often through:

• Technology or automation

• Standardization of work tasks

• Fragmentation of complex jobs into simpler, repetitive tasks

---

Why Would Capitalism Encourage Deskilling?

1. Profit Maximization

Capitalist firms aim to maximize profits. One way to do this is to:

• Replace skilled workers (who are more expensive) with less skilled workers or machines

• Simplify tasks so they require minimal training, which reduces labor costs

2. Managerial Control

Simplifying jobs increases management’s control over the labor process:

• Skilled workers often have more autonomy and bargaining power

• Deskilling reduces workers' independence and makes them easier to supervise, replace, and discipline

3. Increased Productivity

Deskilled labor allows for:

• Mass production techniques (think Ford’s assembly line)

• Faster and more consistent output

• Easily interchangeable workers, which supports scalability

---

Theoretical Roots

• Karl Marx: Believed capitalism alienates workers from the labor process, reducing their work to mere repetitive actions

• Harry Braverman: Argued that capitalist development deliberately strips away workers’ skill and knowledge to concentrate power and expertise in management

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

 

Watched this fight the other day, and as much as Wangchannoi is known as a hard-hitting Muay Maat, his hidden art is really the art of spoilage. Watch him spoil one of the great clinch attacks of the Golden Age. Among the many things that he is doing is that his punching and pinning Langsuan's collarbone on his right hand side grab (unusual for an orthodox fighter).

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

As Capitalism deskills and enshittifies (this is pretty clear now), how come people don't realize that this is happening in Muay Thai? It is not "progress". It is the grinding down of skills and our capacity to perceive.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Wayfinding vs transportation or navigation. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/tp9wr_v4

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Asynchrony in skill and habit development in Muay Thai helps explains why acquiring change sometimes (often) doesn't cascade through all levels, which would make the change/development "stick".

 

 

The Levels: Embodied Cognition

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Here from Eugene Holland's new book, on Markets and Capitalism, talking about the capture and abstraction from artisanship. The "efficiency and increased output" of Bacon's concerns in a Muay Thai context is the efficiency and output of the generation of students/clients (consumers, customers) and of labor for Muay Thai promotions. It's about making the commodity cheaper and faster (deskilling), so that parts and inflection points in the process become replaceable - and therefore less expensive.

This is how Thailand's Muay Thai is being harvested by technique, pushed into global, deskilled commercial production.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

My piece on Muay Dek fighters in Thailand and why they may be the best fighters in the country.

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Balibar on Matheron, on Spinoza and Ego-altruism: 

 

Re-reading this essay, as well as many subsequent conversations involving Simondon's Pre-Individual Field (PI Field) theory of individuation, spurred me to write this Guitar parable explaining some of the developmental dynamics of the Muay Thai kaimuay today: 

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Here is some private discussion traditional Muay Thai description which helped develop this parable of the Guitar. The challenge, from a philosphical sense, but also from an ethnographic sense, is to explain the diversity and sophistication of technique and style that arises in the Thai kaimuay, without much Top Down instruction. Here appealing to Simondon's theory of Individuation.

But...in the Muay Thai (traditional) example, you actually are learning through a communal resonance with your peers, everyone else in the camp.

 

Through a group memesis.

 

It's not a direct relationship to the "music" per se, between you as an individual and an "experience"

 

It's horizontal...

 

how the person next to you is experiencing/expressing the music

 

and relating to the authority and the work.

 

I've compared it to syncing metronomes.

 

youtu.be/Aaxw4zbULMs?...

 

the communal form of the kaimuay (camp) brings together a communication of aesthetic, technical excellence, in which there is very little or NO top down direct control or shaping.

 

young fighters sync up with the communal form, which actually also involves an incredible amount of diversity.

 

Everyone kicking on a bag in a traditional setting has a DIFFERENT kick, because they haven't been "corrected" from the top down...

 

But all the kicks in the gym have a kind of sync'd up quality, something that goes beyond a biomechanical consistency.

 

There is a tremendous Virtual / Actual individuation dynamic that I think you would vibe on.

 

This is what gives trad Muay Thai so much of its diversity. So much of its expression.

 

It's because of its horizontal, communal learning through mimesis and a kind of perspective-ism

 

If you go into a Western Muay Thai gym all the kicks on the bag, from all the students/fighters will be the SAME kick.

 

With some doing it better or worse, with more "error" or less than others.

 

In a trad Thai gym all the kicks are different.

 

...but, its hard to describe...because they all express some "inner" thing that holds them together.

 

Maybe the same thing can be seen in other sports, like inner city basketball or favela football/soccer, things that have a kind of "organic" lineage.

 

They hold together because they are a cultural form that is developed in horizontal context and comparisons with peers (not Top Down), but everyone has their own "game". It is very diverse.

 

When people try to "export" knowledge from these, let's call them "organic", contexts, processes, not only are things "abstracted" (often biomechanically, traced into fixed patterns), but they are also exported with Top Down authority which channels and exacts "faithfullness" to some isolate quality.

 

I think this is Deleuze's main issue with Platonism.

 

The idea that there is a "form" and then "copies" which are more or less faithful.

 

This, I'd argue, is actually something that prevails in "export" (outside of a developmental milieu), under conditions of abstraction (and perhaps exploitation).

 

This is the "cut".

6:29 PM

 

 

 

Here is a video where we slow motion filmed the kick of Karuhat, one of the greatest kickers in Thai history.

 

We not only filmed him, but also Sylvie trying to learn through imitation.

 

He is the only person who has this kick, in all its individuation.

 

You cannot get this kick by just imitating it...(in person, Sylvie) or as a user practicing it from the video.

 

It was developed in a virtuality of the kaimuay, by him.

 

But, in documenting it...some (SOME!) aspects of it are transmitted forward.

 

...its a kick that is very different than many Western versions of the "Thai Kick"

 

The keys to it are about a feeling, an affect array perhaps, and its uniqueness came out of the shared "metronome" of the traditional gym, the horizontal community of training, which also produced other kicks of the same "family of resemblance" (as Wittgenstein would say)

 

Ultimately, its preservation is about returning to the instruction of a "feeling"...but also highlighting that the kick itself came out of a mutuality of feeling, and not a Top Down instruction.

 

It's much closer to something like all the diversity of qualities of different pro surfers, who learned to surf not only one-to-one on individual waves, but in communities of surfers who would all go to one spot, and kind of cross-pollinate, compete in a mutuality (non-formally), steal and borrow from each other, a milieu. Not because there was some kind of Top Down authority of "how to surf" or "what exact techniques to use", or because there was an ideal "form" and a lot of error'd versions of it copying it.

 

Almost everything that Sylvie produces is Sylvie learning through imitation and FAILING before the living example, because what we are actually documenting is not the Ideal vs the bad copy...but rather the actual, embodied, lived relationship that integrates oneself with another, converging in communication. She is "copying", but that's not really it. It's about syncing up, and the material/psychological relationship between two people, which smooths over the biomechanical "copy", and fills in some of the affects.

 

But...this mutuality is really also artificial, because its one-to-one, and this isn't how Muay Thai technique is transmitted. It's developed in community. One-to-many. Many-to-one.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

I'm exploring two aspects of (seeming) spontaneous order (complexity) in Thailand's traditional Muay Thai. At the level of fights themselves there seem to have been a market dynamics in betting customs which drove diversity and escalating skill level, and within the traditional kaimuay there seems to have been an individuation process in training which also escalated skill level and diversity (or at least individualized expression), each of these with not a great deal of Top Down structuring, steering. I'm searching for the nexus between these two "self-organzing" dynamics, which may really be more complimentary, social systems.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Wow, just watched an old Thai Fight replay of top tier female matchup that featured Kero's opponent in her last fight, someone she pretty much overwhelmed right away (with probably a 4 kg advantage). It was amazing to see the difference in performance on Thai Fight. Very skilled, very game, sharp. I came away realizing just how HARD it is to fight up. It changes everything. Sylvie takes 4 kg disadvantages all the time, and honestly overcomes them more often than not. What she does is so unappreciated, not only by others, but by Sylvie herself. Giving up significant weight and winning doesn't just take toughness, it takes an incredible amount of skill to keep that fighter away from what they want to do, to nullify all that size, strength and the angles. It's a complete art. You see this in female fighting all the time, big weight advantages REALLY matter. 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

As Thailand's Muay Thai Turns Itself Toward the Westerner more and more, people are going to yearn for "authentic" Muay Thai

This is one of the great ironic consequences of Thailand attempting to change its Muay Thai into a Western-oriented sport, not only changing the rules of its fights for them, and their presentation, but also changing the training, the very "form" of Muay Thai itself...this is going to increase the demand and desire for "authentic" Muay Thai. Yes, increasing numbers of people will be drawn to the made-for-me Muay Thai, because that's a wide-lane highway...but of those numbers a small subset is going to more intensely feel: Nope, that stuff is not for me. In this counterintuitive way, tourism and soft power which is radically altering Muay Thai, it also is creating a foreign desire for the very thing that is being altered and lost.

The traveler, in the sense of the person who wants to get away from themselves, their culture, the things they already know, to find what is different than them, is going to be drawn to what hasn't been shaped for them.

This is complicated though, because this is also linked to a romanticization, and exoticization sometimes which can be problematic, and because this then pushes the tourism (first as "adventure tourism") halo out further and further, eventually commodifying, altering more of what "isn't shaped for them". This is the great contradiction. There has to be interest and value in preserving what has been, but then if that interest is grown in the foreigner, this will lead to more alteration...especially if there is a power imbalance. So we walk a fine line in valuing that which is not-like-us.

What is hopeful and interesting is that Thailand, and Siam before it, has spent centuries absorbing the shaping powers of foreign trade, even intense colonization, and its culture has developed great resistance to these constant interactions. It, and therefore Muay Thai itself, arguably has woven into itself the capacity to hold its character when when pressed.

This is really what probably makes Thailand's Muay Thai so special, so unique in the world...the way it has survived as not only some kind of martial antecedent from centuries ago (under the influence of many international fighting influences), but also how it negotiated the full 100 years of "modernity" in the 20th century, including decades and decades in dialogue with Western Boxing (first from the British, then from America). The only really worrisome aspect of this latest colonization, if we can call it that, is that the imposing forces brought to Muay Thai through globalization are not those of a complex fighting art, developed through its own its own lineage in foreign lands. It's that mostly what is shaping Muay Thai now is a very pale version of itself, a Muay Thai that was imitated by the Japanese in the 1970s, in a new made up sport "Kickboxing", which bent back through Europe in the 1980s, and now is finding its way back to Thailand, fueled by Western and international interest. Thailand's Muay Thai is facing being shaped by a shadow of itself, an echo, a devolvment of skills and meaningfulness. On trusts though that it can absorb this and move on.

 

some of the history of Japanese Kickboxing:

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

I remember - I've probably written it somewhere else - driving to Phetjeejaa's family gym, which was up a few lanes and a dirt road, when she was the best female Muay Thai fighter in the world, at only 13 years of age, something we did everyday so Sylvie could train with her. And to get there we motorbiked up Khao Talo road, a pretty active road, and would pass by a Taekwondo studio with a large plate glass window showing the training mat inside, where numerous kids around Phetjeejaa's age all glowed in their starched white Gis, Ha-ai-ing in their moves. And I thought to myself...we are driving to where the best female fighter in the world trains and all these kids, the parents of these kids, don't even know she's there...up the road. And even if they did, they wouldn't train with her at her gym, because Muay Thai is low class, its dirty, nothing like the promise of a clean white Gi.

 

The story of Muay Thai cannot be told without this strong division of class.