Somaesthetics as Style: The Differences Between Martial Arts

I am going to pose a question that may to some seem niche or nerdy, but whose answer has implications for how we study physical practices. The question is this: What does it mean to be doing one martial art as opposed to another?

In one way, this is a variant of the question of the definition of martial arts, because it asks about limits. It asks what the limits of a practice are, before it becomes something else. Another version this question would be: Where does one style end and another begin?

I have always tended to approach such questions via poststructuralist discourse theory: martial arts are constructions. They are ‘whatever people think they are’.[1] Yet, I have often also wondered: Are styles really/only contingently constructed and more or less arbitrarily demarcated realms? Or is there something more? Is there something ‘essential’ to specific styles? If so, how do we theorise this?[2]

First pass. We might base our answer on technical contrasts. For instance, judo doesn’t punch or kick, while kickboxing only punches and kicks. So, we might try to establish a spectrum or continuum of differences, placing different practices contiguously side by side, partitioned out according to technique differences.

However, stark differences in practice, such as those between judo and kickboxing, are rare. There is often a very great deal of apparent overlap. Many martial arts punch; many martial arts kick; many block and throw; many sweep and choke. So, discussions of essential characteristics (and/or reciprocally, of limits) cannot make appeal to techniques.

Second pass. Perhaps we can capture the essential characteristics of styles (and hence the differences between them) on the basis of repositories of techniques – that is, on the basis of the specific clusters and combinations of techniques that characterise a practice. Here, we might envisage more of a Venn Diagram approach than a simple mapping exercise.

Yet, this, too, quickly runs into problems.

Myriad martial arts punch. However, a punch is never just a punch. There is no degree zero punch. How many ways are there of initiating a punch, sending it, landing it; moving on from it; of forming the fist and the entire rest of the body around it, the fist in relation the position of the body, and all in relation to another person, or people, and environment? Shape of fist, angle, position of elbow in relation to fist and shoulder, position of shoulder, placement of head, movement of torso, movement or position of feet on the ground or in the air or in movement, what is tensed or un-tensed, when, for how long, to what extent, and so many more variables, all come into play – differently across different styles.

A punch is never just a punch. There is no one single neutral natural punch. Every punch is cultural; emanating from an enculturated body, one whose capacities and capabilities were produced via conscious or unconscious discipline, training, habit, happenstance.

Some have argued that there are natural or essential human-animal movements that are innate to us, hence that there may be natural/universal human-animal punches. I dispute this conclusion. In adult humans, there are only enculturated, habituated movements. Even ‘natural reflexes’ are enculturated. Even biomechanically emergent force vectors, contractile fields and supposed points on the body such as dantian or hara do not exist outside of habit-formation.[3] A punch is a cultural convention, based on a theory, expressing an aesthetic – a somaesthetic.

In the world of martial arts, as in all areas of culture, ways of posturing and moving are never separate from values.[4] They are aesthetic. Every teacher and all of their senior students believes passionately that there are only a small handful of correct ways to punch. However, correctness varies radically by class, club and style. I once threw a perfectly executed kung fu style punch in an escrima class. The person I hit with the punch looked at me like I was an idiot. The people who saw it fell about laughing.

I think such laughter is more pertinent to a thinking of the characteristics and differences between martial arts styles than either the map image (in which martial arts are thought of as having quasi-spatial borders) or the Venn diagram image (in which styles both differ from and overlap with other styles). A thousand different things can be called a punch, but a practitioner of one style might well laugh at or feel horrified by 995 of them.

Laughter and disparagement is of prime importance. It is almost programmatically predictable for certain styles to laugh at or disparage each other. This tells us a lot about the values of those styles. Although some people practice both styles, it is not uncommon for BJJ to disparage Krav Maga and vice versa. This is because of the vastly differing values and theories that each assume.[5]

But even if we ignore structures of laughter (and loathing), when thinking about technical and terminological multiplicity and ambiguity, even if we give each of the thousand different things that may broadly be called punches a thousand different names or technical terms, we are no closer to answering the question of what defines identities and the polices the differences between styles.

This is because there is something else in play, something I borrow a term from Richard Shusterman and call somaesthetics.[6] A martial art or a style is not simply a matter of a cluster or assemblage of techniques. Its inside and outside are not simply defined by what’s in and what’s out in terms of valid and invalid techniques. A style is an embodied aesthetic – aesthetics embodied – a quality of movement, or an enclosed embodied value system.

A style has or is a ‘structure of feeling’.[7] It is a quality of movement at least as much as a logic of movement and a range of movement. Certainly, a style has a spatial and temporal logic and a range, outside of which parameters it will break down. But, within its ranges, a style is first and foremost an embodied language of feelings, a distribution of sensations.

My proposition is that taking a more somaesthetic approach to understanding martial arts (and indeed other physical practices) will enable us to disambiguate elements that are more obviously ‘internal’ (or inherent) from those that are more obviously ‘external’ (or extra).

For instance, we can reorient our thinking about martial arts, way from issues such as ‘intentionality’, ‘motivations’, and discursive or ideological claims and beliefs. We can bypass the logocentric fixations on what people say about a practice and get to the qualities of the practice. We can avoid being pulled into ideological and often self-deluding matters such as whether ‘this is for self-defence’ while ‘that is for health’ or ‘sport’, or whatever. Within a somaesthetic approach, all of these things can be called ‘external’. To borrow a term from Jacques Derrida, I call all such matters the ‘attending discourse’.

The ‘attending discourse’ is all the ‘blah blah blah’ that is said and believed and claimed and disputed and argued about a practice. For schematic reasons, I am here calling it ‘external’. So, ‘internal’ somaesthetic is distinguished from ‘external’ discursive. We can think about their overlap or interplay later.[8]

But for now: If we treat somaesthetic qualities as being on the inside and words and meanings as coming from the outside, then we can move our focus away from claims made about practices – especially claims about intentions, motivations, aims or outcomes. As interesting as such matters are, they can tell us nothing about the experiential, affective, phenomenological dimensions of doing one thing rather than another.

This will help us to avoid being led by the nose by declared reasons or alibis, such as ‘Krav Maga is for functional combative self-defence efficacy’, say, or ‘tai chi is for health’. These are claims about a practice, not insights into it. You could just as easily swap them and insist: ‘Tai chi is for functional combative self-defence efficacy’ or ‘Krav Maga is for health’. And you could find ample evidence to justify whatever it is you are claiming. And people do.

But that is not what I am doing here. My purpose is to make a case for ways to move cultural analysis away from a focus on words and pictures and into a different way of understanding practices themselves, as practices.

So, how might a somaesthetic approach help?

First, a somaesthetic approach posits the primacy – perhaps even the ubiquity – of the aesthetic. Second, it proposes that aesthetics does not exist at a distance from our embodied practices – it suffuses them. Our relationship with the aesthetic is not a simple matter of consumption – certainly not in the model of a viewer in an art gallery, contemplating an artwork; or a spectator in a cinema, transfixed by the spectacle. These may be moments. But primarily, aesthetics is elaborated in and along and as the planes or vistas opened up by the practice of an activity: the right positions, postures, the right ways to move, to initiate, to respond – these become the cool ways, the beautiful ways, the genius ways. The wrong ways become the stupid, the ugly, the clunky, the awkward ways. (I once landed a perfect taekwondo-style hook kick to my partner’s head while sparring in escrima. It was perfect and beautiful. I was sternly reprimanded, because high kicks are wrong.)

Right and wrong are premised on and grow in reciprocity with bodily awareness, emergent forms of proprioception, new skills of control and surveillance – breath, elbows, chin, coccyx, toes – you name it. New abilities to sense new things develop; new ways to sense, new ways of making sense, new sensibilities. Different styles are different elaborations of different – and very embodied – ‘distributions of the sensible’.[9] Let me give three quick examples, three somaesthetic contrasts.

Tai Chi

Tai chi first. Tai chi is a good place to start, because it is so organised around increasingly refined attention to the body. I am happy to call tai chi an ‘internal’ martial art for this reason alone. ‘Internal’ is not about magic or mysterious forces or energies. It refers to increasingly refined attention to what is going on in one’s static, moving, positioned, repositioned, and repositioning body. This is mainly done in solo practice; but partner practice in push hands is an amplification of this.

In tai chi practice, you first learn the form ‘square’ (hands to the right place, feet to the right place; then move to the next place). You are taught to relax. Once you have the square dot-to-dot shape of the form, you begin to make what was square into something that is ‘round’. Roundness is a precise kind of attention to movement between points. It is attention to a form of synchronised coordination, in which everything travels self-consciously along certain deliberate paths or lines, and all the major parts of the body start to coordinate together at the ‘right’ speed to arrive at the ‘right’ place at the ‘right’ time.

After roundness comes continuity. What was originally a sequence of different endpoints (the different postures to be struck, one by one), now becomes one smooth movement of unbroken flow. In your mind’s eye, you still see the square corners where you first put your hands in the right place and your feet in the right place, but now you never stop there, and an outside observer might be unable to see anything other than continuous wavy movement.

After continuity is slowness. Then there is high and low, fast and slow, body lightness, and the injecting of different kinds of ‘intent’.

I would argue that the essential somaesthetic quality of tai chi is manifest when roundness and continuity combine with a specific manifestation of slowness. This is when tai chi both looks and feels like tai chi. Any movement or technique brought into this mode of performance might be called becoming tai chi. Conversely, when tai chi techniques are executed outside of this mode of performance, this would be tai chi becoming something else.

Escrima

Escrima next. Escrima is based in stick fighting, or machete fighting, but it includes unarmed striking and grappling. I studied Escrima Concepts, in the lineage of Rene Latosa. It was a heavily deracinated and stripped back ‘no frills’ approach. The approach was influenced by Dan Inosanto, and my teacher’s teacher was also a long-time boxing coach and grappler. All these factors have a bearing on my understanding of escrima, and on what I will say next.

Our escrima’s somaesthetics were heavily structured by the notion of ‘the box’, ‘the guard’, ‘forward thinking’, ‘heavy elbow’ and being ‘loaded’.

The box is a small hypothetical window of space in front of you. It is determined by the shape, size and strength of your own guard, and (decisively) the way you are brandishing your weapon. A small, compact, forward thinking stance, with heavy elbows, while loaded, generates a small box, which is the ideal – as the box is really the only window through which the opponent before you can ‘enter’.

The escrima guard is like a boxing guard, but elongated forward, as one is normally holding a weapon in one’s lead hand. You are leaning forward (forward thinking), in a manner akin to a ‘standing start’ in a sprint running race. You adopt this crouched, leaning forward position for two main reasons. One is to become ‘loaded’, or primed for attack. The other is to ensure that your legs and groin are further away from an opponent, and more easily defended without compromising the guard.

Forward thinking is priming your mind and your body to always go forward. The requisite psychological mindset is trained by adopting the guard, the sprinter’s standing start position, ensuring that your weapons are ‘loaded’, and being drilled repeatedly in situations from which one cannot retreat – most frequently an exercise called wall training. One person stands with their back heel touching a wall. Their opponent is free to move around. The person on the wall cannot move their heel from the wall. They must both defend and counter from that position alone. It teaches you not to retreat. It makes you desperately want to go forward.

The heavy elbow is part of the guard. It is formed by rolling the shoulders forward, contracting the chest, and consciously making the elbow feel heavy and immoveable. For me, making the heavy elbow feels like rolling the lats and serratus around and forward. The heavy elbow is instrumental in delivering ‘short power’ – short hard shots with a fist or weapon, with minimal to no telegraphing.

This can only happen if you are loaded. All of the posture considerations of escrima, as I was taught it, are designed to put you in a position where you are almost desperate to explode forward. Its somaesthetics are akin to something spring-loaded and explosive – a mousetrap, say, or a snare, or a taut bow and arrow.

BJJ

Finally, the somaesthetics of BJJ are different again. I have written about this at some length before, in my article ‘BJJ’s Diary: The Emergence of a New Normal’.[10] Without repeating any of that, let’s merely note here that BJJ itself cannot be thought or experienced outside of the collaborative interaction with a training partner. It is radically distinct from both tai chi and escrima in this regard. For, even though all of these practices can benefit from partner-work, there is no experience of BJJ outside of partner-work. The partner in BJJ is constitutive of it, and the status of the partner is radically different to the partner in other kinds of martial art – even, I would say, its so-called ‘closest relative’, judo. I have done some judo, and on an experiential level it is nothing like BJJ.

Back when I first wrote about the experience of BJJ, I did not think about the constitutive dimension of partner-work. Nor did I think about the different ethical status of the opponent, or partner, back then. But, noticing and noting it here and now, I would argue that this opens a way to link my use of somaesthetics to the other key term of this panel’s title: ‘soma-ethics’.1

The question of the ethics of different styles is something there is no time for me to broach here. But I think it would be possible to argue that different somaesthetics imply different ethics. Those of escrima, as I have experienced it, differ radically from those of tai chi and BJJ. I would suspect that practices like, say, capoeira would differ again. For, even the ‘internal’ sensory experience of capoeira arguably relies fundamentally on elements that I earlier suggested might be ‘external’. However, I do not regard the music, the community, the roda, as part of the ‘attending discourse’. Rather, the assemblage of communal, spatial and musical elements may be regarded as essential for the generation of the structure of feeling that can be said to be ‘internal’ to the experience of capoeira, in much the same way that the consenting opponent, the rules and the mat are constitutive of BJJ.

In each of the practices I have mentioned here, clear distinctions can be made between them on the basis of attention to their somaesthetics, not techniques, and not the discourses about them. Importantly, these distinctions are not (to use Saussure’s famous phrase) ‘only differences without positive terms’. Rather, the somaesthetic approach enables us to learn something essential about each style, yet without positing essentialisms.

Aesthetics arguably always has some relation to ethics – the relation to the other and to the self, the self as other – and sometimes also to politics, or at least to ‘ideology’ (as Peter Katz’s recent work has shown).

But now, my time is up. I hope that this argument might contribute not simply to the well-worn debates about the definition of martial arts, but also and more importantly that it might indicate the usefulness to martial arts studies of translating key concepts from cultural theory, such as ‘structures of feelings’ and ‘partitions of the sensible’ into the study of embodied practices.

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[1] Bowman, ‘The Definition of Martial Arts Studies’.

[2] More importantly, how do we navigate this question without throwing out the baby in the bathwater of poststructuralist theory – anti-essentialism, or the compelling and ethico-politically important arguments against essentialism? I think that anti-essentialism is among the most ethically and politically valuable of concepts and orientations, because of its usefulness in challenging bigotry and prejudice of all kinds. But if we say, ‘there’s an essence to taiji’, or ‘an essence to escrima’, or ‘an essence to BJJ’, and so on, are we not, so to speak, sleeping with the enemy (the enemy of essentialism)?

[3] Beach, Muscles and Meridians; Bowman, ‘Feel the Difference’.

[4] Gilman, Stand Up Straight! A History of Posture.

[5] Bowman, ‘BJJ’s Diary: The Emergence of a New Normal’.

[6] Shusterman, Thinking through the Body.

[7] This term comes from Raymond Williams, and has been elaborated at length across cultural theory and affect studies. However, I am applying the term somewhat differently. It is often connected with a discursive conjuncture or cultural ‘atmosphere’. I am using it literally, to refer to embodied sensation and phenomenological experience.

[8] A quick note: I say all of this in full awareness of arguments about essentialism, the entire oeuvre of Jacques Derrida, his project of ‘deconstructing’ essentialism and problematising distinctions such as inside and outside, and indeed the overarching trajectory of poststructuralism as a whole. I am not seeking to hypostatize essences; I am seeking to distinguish between material realms and registers.

[9] The phrase is from Rancière, but I am using it in a literally embodied sense.

[10] Bowman, ‘BJJ’s Diary: The Emergence of a New Normal’.

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This is a draft paper for a conference. The panel refers to somaesthetics and soma-ethics