Violence in Martial Arts Actor Training

Abstract

The system, the form of presenting a totality to which nothing remains extraneous, abolutizes the thought against each of its contents and evaporates the content in thoughts. It proceeds idealistically before advancing any arguments for idealism.

Adorno 1973: 24

Violence is the structuring logic of martial arts practice; martial arts training is paradoxically charged with limiting the outbreak of violence. However, the violence of martial arts practices is generally unaccounted for and made invisible in discussions of martial arts as actor training. In light of this situation, I use a dialectical perspective to destabilise the cohesive force which organises accounts of actor training around issues such as psychophysicality, and argue that violence, in its non-identity with the ideals of martial arts actor training practices, underscores but also threatens to undermine discourses supporting the use of martial arts as actor training. Using critical procedures from Theodor Adorno's Negative Dialectics, I work to destabilise the 'idealism' that conspires to make violence a literal or ethical non-issue in martial arts as actor training. I conclude by reading the invisibility of violence in martial arts actor training against Žižek's Violence to consider what is 'symptomatic' (2009: 174) about the appearance of violence in this context.

Notes

1 See Wu Society 2013 for a discussion of wude, a concept that describes the ethical dimensions of wushu, exercise or practice of martial skill. It is notable that in my own school, the description of practices as ‘just wushu’ was used to deride practices or practitioners whose physical skill was seen as lacking in internal or wude ‘authenticity’. For a discussion on reflexive decision making see Edinborough 2011; and for the relationship of discipline to self-restraint/self-actualization Spencer 2010 and Burrow 2009.