Journaling - Readings, Muay Thai, Concepts and Articulations

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

timestamped, Kristen Stewart says an interesting here on what would happen if the entire Hollywood machine of movies came crashing down, small film culture would still persist in pockets, people making small films. In a flash I repositioned on what would happen if Bangkok Muay Thai just broke down and was no more. This isn't to say that there isn't important advocacy, or that globalizing, commodifying, tourism-izing trends can't destroy something...but it is to say that there is resilience. 

 

 

 

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

https://www.instagram.com/p/DNJE3xmsiks/

This is how far Entertainment has pervaded. Tapaokaew vs Nuenglanlek. Nuenglanlek losing the fight in the clinch asks Tapaokaew to go toe to toe for the end of the 5th round so fighters can get the bonus. This is basically...let's stop fighting a "real" fight, you know, one fighter out-skilling another, and instead let's "put on a show" for the Entertainment bonus. That RWS itself posts this, selling the action, just is a deeper dive into building a "content" generator sport. This is just the shaping of the sport by commerce and moving to online content and in-person tourism, away from in-person passionate, knowledgeable fandom...which I suspect isn't sustainable as a business model, and certainly won't develop the highest level skills (building the sport long term). It's also an interesting reversal of the supposedly "fake" dance offs in the 5th round, now there is a "show" of action. This likely will become a trend as fighters learn new ways to play the 5th round out. RWS has a tough line to ride, as the nexus space, the limnal space between pure Aggro ONE marketing and gambled traditional stadium Muay Thai. These are nuances and changes in that space.

 

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

 

αἰσθητικῶς ἔχειν

to hold perception (from which we get aesthetics), meaning "to be quick to sense" (Aristotle, Arist.EN1098a2). Aesthetics in this sense is developing the hair-triggers of perceptive experience, to attune. Animals are very quick to perceive, attuned by evolutionary pressures, through aesthetics humans attain something of the animal, in the intensity and the speed. 

When one changes the aesthetics of the sport, its rule set, its judgements, one is changing the speeds of perception, and to what one is attuned. But, culturally, deeper aesthetics develop over time, are embedded in layers, in sediments of perception, in habitus, so external imposition of aesthetics, for instance Westernized or Internationalized fighting aesthetics, messes with perceptual DNA, and with the very experiences of watching. 

In this way the learning of Thailand's traditional Muay Thai is not learning "techniques", or even principles of action. It's learning to sense, to perceive. It is for this reason that proprioceptive things like "balance" and ease (ning) as well as external signatures of each, as well as "ruup" (form) are hidden decisive elements in traditional scoring (and important aspects of training, well beyond things like technical precision). 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Was talking to Sylvie about this very interesting historical cycle involving gambling in Siam and then Thailand. To be very cartoonish about it, provincial farmers would sell their crop and put the money in the ground, literally burying it. This would take the money out of the economy. Gambling worked as a counter to this trend, recirculating currency...but, when they would come to the capital to sell their crops in the 1900s this worked too much to the extreme. Chinese mafia and dens of gambling would drain them of their payouts, leaving them and their families enslaved (servitude). So, capital Chinese mafia gambling, which was very pronounced (gambling at one point in the early 20th century accounting for more than a quarter of the government's income through tax farms) developed a strong moral taint, farmers would loose their livelihood and fall into servitude in dramatic, destructive trends. King Vajirivudh ended up outlawing gambling in the 1920s. But, there is a kind of moral-economic tension or spectrum, between the money that stays in the ground (a traditional picture), and money that circulates in the wider, urban economy, with corrosive effects. And even to this day you have this pattern in Muay Thai, with Chinese ancestry Bangkok promoters who have been aligned with mafia and gambling (scene as a moral vice still), and the provincial fighter, who comes to the capital, looking to win big. There is a tension between tradition and custom in the land, and the (International) urban Casino. What is interesting though, the custom of local market gambling also is that which shaped provincial Muay Thai itself, which I detail here:

 

On the history and psychology of gambling, I wrote about this here (there you can find the pdf of Gambling, the State and Society in Siam, c. 1880-1945 by James Alastair Warren which is very, very good):

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Wow, just had an amazing conversation with Karuhat, him telling us about a Saturday Boxing show put on by OneSongChai which featured lots of Thai Muay Thai stars, in which he fought twice, losing to Nungubon and to a Muangsurin fighter whose name escapes me. Most amazing is that he said that he had no special boxing training, in terms of kru, just mixing up boxing imitation training in his small Sor. Supawan gym, and Thai principles (he's not a bad boxer even today). He lost both fights, but he also said he WANTED to lose, because if you showed promise you would be drafted onto the Thai National team at the time (he even DID get drafted onto the team, it seems, fighting on am boxing fight on the King's Birthday vs a Cuban who was incredibly fast). Amateur boxing meant lots of hard training, but not a lot of fighting, and the pay was horrible. It was the last thing he wanted. He was a star in Muay Thai, had great kaduas, fought every month, honed his femeu style. Even pro boxing wasn't that lucrative because fighters only kept 30% of the purse (in Muay Thai it was 50%), and usually didn't fight that much. He said in one of his boxing fights he even stuck his head out of the ropes, he wanted so not to do this. 

I asked him who was on the Thai National team the brief time he was there and he said Sittichai, Jongsanan and Coban came to mind. 

I also asked why it was that fighters like him could just kind of develop boxing skills without specific boxing instruction, but Thai fighters today can have all kinds of boxing instruction, even from legends, and not develop the same level of boxing skills. He said "electronics"...all the distractions. The phones, etc. He said that you used to really pay attention, go to fights and emulate fighters, really absorb their powers and ways, imitate them in the gym, steal from everywhere, now Thai fighters are just doing what they are told and going to their phones. There is no attentiveness. 

I asked about Namkabuan (who is in one of these SongChai boxing fights below vs Chatchai), and his "nongki bounce" footwork which seemed unusual for Muay Thai, if that came from boxing. And he said that this is just normal Muay Thai to him. You can see some of that in this clip (really, look to the Muay Thai Library session to see so much more).

 

When asked about where Namkabuan got his boxing (in the video below) he said Nongkipahayuth probably (Karuhat spent time up there because he was friends with Namphon). Maybe some from Muangsurin (a big boxing gym the brothers sometimes trained at), but he really didn't think knowing boxing as Namkabuan did was the result of special training. 

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

There is a mode of perception that developing Thais have less of today. Ever notice how your Thai trainer can humorously imitated exactly what you are doing wrong in an exaggerated way? How they can cartoonize the body. This likely comes out of the mode of learning itself back in the day, the way that "ruup" (form) was a mode of education and emulation. Intelligent, affective projection and modeling, in play, was how the art was communicated. With today's attention spans, difference in motivations, and really radically different Gaze Economies in gyms, this channel of development is highly diminished. It's a lost skill of perception. 

The rationalization of the sport, the mechanization and abstraction of the sport certainly doesn't help in this, because the sense of embodied "aura" has been lost. And Westerners enter the sport largely from this other direction, meeting the new gen of Thais in the middle, far from where the sport and art developed and was passed between persons. 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Saw a note on Reddit that Samart beat Netrnoi Sor Vorasingh, a former WBC world champion, in his first boxing match. But then...I looked at what weight Netrnoi Sor Vorasingh fought at.

 

It just shows you have to look beyond headlines.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CuuXPkmp-SK/?igsh=MW1wcW1oZDZtMzgybg%3D%3D

A great little clip of legends Yodkhunpon and Samson clinching back in Roi Et where they were upcoming Isaan fighters. Notably, you see ZERO "pretzel" (the pretzel discussed here at some length: https://www.patreon.com/posts/130545342/ ); also Samson clearly the stronger clinch fighter technically, see how everything is wrists and hands and neck, whereas Yodkhunpon avoids any of those leverages, which Samson sews together somewhat relentlessly. Also, those two nice rips. Yodkhunpon a different sort of clincher, and Sylvie and I joke today that a reason why Yodkhunpon is so anti-clinch in their sparring is that he had to suffer through clinching with Samson on the comeup, a fighter here likely at least a weight class lower. Namkabuan used to talk about how having to train against his Muay Khao brother Namphon really shaped him. 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

What we are witnessing is really a kind of gentrification of Muay Thai. 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

There is a very strange thing happening. Waves of affluent tourism are being sent to what really is a Low Caste art and sport. Many do not realize that Thailand's society is still somewhat an operational, invisible caste system, itself formed from Siam's own, once widespread slavery and indentured servitude. The ironic thing is that some of Muay Thai's most beautiful, meaningful traditions of meaning - the things that lift it from just being a rationalized combat sport, or entertainment violence, and very likely also what made Thailand's nakmuay so incredibly effective as fighters - themselves are woven into and from that invisible caste system. It is quite extraordinary that this lower caste art and sport is becoming gentrified by both hi-so internationism and government tourism ambitions. That the sport itself is being altered so that the affluent can win, and so that traditions (and aspects of invisible caste) will be eroded. I'm not sure anything like this has ever happened before in history, I can't think of an immediate parallel.

 

When (relatively) affluent adventure tourists attempt to partake directly in "traditional" Muay Thai they are crossing many invisible lines in the culture. A (relatively) high status person is trying to enter a low status position, blind to even the nature of "status".

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

 

Buntan vs Hemetsberger. Very cool to see Hemetsberger fight in such a disciplined, and really very Allycia way. And be so very well prepared. 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

 

Somehow this is very beautiful (even if common). What a beautiful fight Crawford fought. I think there were some definite dangers in this fight, that people have been ungenerous with Canelo. That hook to the body was becoming a problem, and could even have won it, but Crawford solved it in a subtle and shifting ways. 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

I think people are becoming aware that there is a kind of tourism pipeline that has developed, from commercial gyms to Entertainment Muay Thai, put on for tourists. Tourists working for tourists in tourism "shows", (notably a sport redesigned for tourists to win). There are a lot of things of value in these fights, but people are also becoming aware that they are on a conveyor belt that was made for them. The Muay Thai they came for is far from these experiences. It's very hard to work your way free from this "system" which has become pervasively pointed at the Westerner. 

Gyms face the problem that people come to them and say: I don't want to fight on these shows, under these rules...because this is actually a tourism system. It's made for you. For you.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

 

Baudrillard. This is the art of Muay Thai. 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Karuhat leaves our house after another PRP treatment this afternoon, a big American seminar tour in Feb. I have trepidation that he literally could be an accidental target for ICE and other anti-foreigner tactics. Going to my home country and maybe at risk. 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Reading the quite excellent Cannibal Capitalism by Nancy Fraser - in theorizing my own piece on the Capitalism Resistant nature of Siam/Thailand's Muay Thai - and she brings me back to a fundamental instinct and position I've had, which is that we must take, really, an ecological view towards Siam-Thai Muay Thai (for any number of ethical and pragmatic reasons, some of them making of it an ideal case for other culturally embedded human capabilities, and some of them according to recognizing the uniqueness of the Siam-Thai Muay Thai example, due to its relationship to violence and the deep involvement with the Body). Her argument ostensibly is that Capitalism is bedded within many layers of non-economic registers, which both enable and resist it. Social reproduction, Natural resource, Polity and what I'd call Social Kinds, The Demoi.

 

She varies in how "anti-" she positions herself, but I am drawn to the notion of embedment, and her insight into the cannibalistic nature of capitalism, the way in which it will - if unchecked - eat into the very things that sustain it, cutting at the layers upon which it is rooted. The ecological position is that this tendency needs to be curbed, if only to maintain the coherent expression. Muay Thai now, as it bends towards commodification and globalization exhibits this tendency, cutting away the tree beneath the fruit upon which the Garden is presented to the world. The Kaimuay, the Hierarchy of its traditions, the Aesthetics of Agrarian Time and Narrative, the Buddhistic fold of Violence into Art, and even its synthetic capacities of retained authenticity. The ecological view pictures Muay Thai as a tree well-rooted, and questions the potentially corrosive role of fruit markets.

I am not of the view that capitalism is inherently bad (I question the libidinal investments in that position), only that it can be and to-some-degree-now is pernicious when unchecked, especially towards the very expressive forces from which it extracts, ever in need of ecological views, ecologies of cultural, human-woven preservation.

I have written on how I view Siam/Thai Muay Thai as successfully developed through local market pressures:

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

One of the most interesting contradictions in the Soft Power growth of international appeal, and the commodification of the Sport for International globalizing others, is that as an exotic, rare, culturally rich practice, the more it there will develop a hunger, a thirst from the traveler to not travel 5,000 miles and encounter the same experiences, same social forms, the same training, the same fighting that they have at Home. They do not want to look into the mirror and see themselves (of course many of them do and will, only coming for stamps of "authenticity" in the personal narrative passport, but...) there will come an increasing pressure to restore or imitate what the corrosive effects of commerce are effacing. It will become as ravenous as the volume of travelers folds in on itself. The Thai desire to "preserve" will actually be commerce driven...until there is a political shift. 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

When Fraser approaches the question of Capitalism and Racism she cuts a dividing line at the perspective of Capitalism in terms of exchange and optimization (occluding, she argues, the constitutive social and institutional elements which support it). It strikes me that something of this leveling of Exchange also occurs in my own perspective of the ritualistic origins of Siam/Thai Muay Thai, the ring providing the exchange where a hierarchy rite is performed (through the production of the "loser" - sacrificed victim), and a formal method of folding in the Other, through the production of loss. This mirrors the Exchange logic view of Capitalism, in that the two fighters when fighting are engaging a kind of equivalency (which in the West is expressed in terms of regulated Fairness - less so in Thailand). In Exchange, there are Winners and Losers. But, in Siam/Thai Muay Thai all of the embodied layers of social investment are actually activated by the fighters, and symbolized by the fighters, finding their regulative/generative effect in the present gambling market, which shapes the fight.

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

A bit from the rough draft of my piece on the Capitalism Resistant nature of Thailand's Muay Thai: 

Quote

"Implicit in this, Thai fighters are not free agents selling their labor in a Labor Market (one of the fundamental dynamics of Capitalism). Fighters are grown in tightly heirarchized social matrixes and symbolically express the conditions from which they developed agonistically in the ring. There is no “market layer” of labor above this. In some sense this is ritualistic social vying. (This of course is much complicated by the new labor resource in Entertainment/Tourism fighting, where Westerns come as a combination of being customers of services - often with the romance of living, training and fighting “authentically”, traditionally, but also as Capitalism-defined “free agents” in an imagined Labor Market - fighting for and who they want to, filling cards for International consumption.)"

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

As Fraser frames it, the question between exploitation and expropriation is of vulnerability, and the controls over that vulnerability. She positions the State as essential arbitrator of vulnerability status. 

 

In the case of Muay Thai's traditional power dynamics, fighters are "dependents" (sometimes literally positioned as de facto children of a kaimuay household, adoptively so), yet are not exposed as "defenseless" before the market, at least in the sense that it is the (imagined) moral character and obligation of Houses to care for their fighters, and to protect them from external predation (though, clearly they do not always fulfill this obligation). Fighters are "protected" in the social form, but also locked into social hierarchies (which many will view as unjust...or, alternately romanticize as formal "respect"). 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

One of the more interesting things that has become clearer in my study of capitalism and Muay Thai is just how much Thailand's traditional Muay Thai is operating within a non-Capitalist organization, much closer to apprenticeship (within the Western tradition), and intimately woven into the Social (re)Production registers (in the West) upon which Capitalism depends. When non-Thais come to Thailand as consumers (or even free agent labor) there is an extreme dysfunction between their motivations and assumptions and the pervading Muay Thai culture they are attempting to integrate with (leaving aside the degrees to which there is a new Tourism-oriented culture which is organized around giving them particular kinds of experiences). As Thailand's Muay Thai turns to Capitalist solutions to its traditional stagnation and decline (much impacted by the COVID slowdown), there are forced mis-translations between cultures, and also increasingly pressured demands for Thais to abandon the values of apprenticed social (re)production.