The Abstract Machine of Thailand's Rural, Festival Muay Thai - Deleuze, Guattari and Expressiveness

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Posting this as a fragment, as a developmental post on the nature of Thailand's native Muay Thai. Usually my posts are more comprehensive, but this time I ran into old Twitter posts were I had done some reasoning work which I believe I didn't continue on with. It's good to move it here in case much more can be made of this. working from McLean's Deleuze, Guattari and the Machine in Early Christianity: Schizoanalysis, Affect and Multiplicity

The thought/analysis ends with this graphic describing the expressive nature of Thailand's Muay Thai:

The above represents the culminative end to which I traced the analysis, but it had begun with the reading of McClean's book studying the Deleuze & Guattari "machine" of the Early Christian Church, really thinking about how the material conditions and the ideas came together expressively. Here were some excerpts that started out my investigation and potential application to Thailand's native Muay Thai: 

 

This is what I wrote following these citations:

Posting as a note to myself for further study. A project of outlining the rural muaywat fesitival fight (form, event) along D&G lines of nondiscursive content & discursive expression. This McLean summation (in the service of the Early Christian Church, using the same as helpful). Ess. the nondiscursive form of the content (the ring, the wat, the festival) & its substance (the bodies, physical money-flows); AND its discursive expression, its form (genre styles of fighting, modes of masculinity) and content (fighting as writing) produces power/knowledge. This will allow us to trace the expressive characteristics of Thailand's native Muay Thai, what is unique to it, as in particular how it relates to violence and its expression, a very meaningful content in contrast to Western modes of violence as entertainment. This would also allow us to trace just how radically the West is reformulating and recoding the expression of Thailand's Muay Thai (to forward and feed its own differing values), and to mark where in the discursive/nondiscursive structure this is occurring.

I also posted this Reddit sourced description of a Deleuze & Guattari Abstract Machine:

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

In tracing this mental landscape I made these notes, with these caps of McLean's work:

"This D&G Disjunctive Synthesis summation by McLean (in analogy for early Xp church) provides a powerful template for explaining the affective powers of ring Muay Thai, esp in the festival setting (and helps explain the surplus value of the deities of the ring & Muay Thai itself)."

"These Deleuze & Guattari dynamics help flesh out a Girardian reading of the sacrificial rite power of the festival Muay Thai ring, how the production of the (sacred) loser helps propitiate the gods/dieties, thru symbolic expulsion, and generate the surplus value of the community."

 

 

"prospectively: The paranoic pole helps us understand how the revulsion against the gamblers (the very organs of the generation of Muay Thai as a sport), produces a low-intensity paranoic body."

 

 

"McLean on "milieu" to give context to territorialization..."

 

and, then noted:
"Getting an enormous amount out of McLean's D&G & Early Xp book, understanding the dynamics of the festival fighting Muay Thai trad, the unwritten development of Muay Thai in the provinces, in the light of the territorializations the early Christian Church. socio-religious flows. I've always had the sense that the traditional, custom-rich festival fight ring was a stage upon which "the god was made to appear", often only in flashes. Girard opened one door to this, but McLean's book opens up the floor plan of the process. The generation of surplus."

 

 

 

 

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

An early note in my reading was on McLean's speculative translation of melos and "machine". Not sure of its bearing here in the trace of thought, but post it because it was an off-shoot of my reading, and might as well preserve the footnote.

At the start of reading a book it is a beautiful virtual space; much is possible. Here @BHMcLean108's new book Deleuze, Guattari & the Machine in Early Christianity starts by retranslating "μέλος" as machine, instead of merely parts. But moves away from them being "organs"