The Argument of Capoeira

Author: Yuval Klein

What's the point of arguing? In the Hegelian conception, the argument forwards an agonistic process of thought which then reaches a synthesis that brings us closer to truth. For social darwinists and imperialists the manifestly “fit” exploit the less so before staking such and such amenities. For the activist, it is to prove the ideological unassailability of a held belief, which can then be enacted upon meaningfully in the world. The Afro-Brazilian martial art capoeira has a more whimsical and folk conception of what an argument is that I find to be refreshing, and even, widely generalizable. The great capoeira pedagogue Nestor Capoeira writes of stepping onto a roda (the traditional game whereby two capoeira players/capoeiristas are encircled by people and music, meeting at the helm of the circle besides a berimbau – the monochord instrument that establishes a percussive background for the songs – before plunging into the open playspace):

“... [the capoeiristas] realize that it is no longer their friend or training partner who is in front of them, but instead there stands before them a riddle that can present dangerous and unpredictable enigmas in the corporal dialogue that will follow. It is a dialogue made up not of words but rather of movements — exploratory movements, attack movements, defense movements, deceitful movements — questions and answers in the mysterious language of capoeira.”

Capoeira is an organized debate, a ‘corporal dialogue’ between two bodies, but it manifests itself in an altogether more ‘mysterious’ and artful way than some of the fighting sports that could rightfully be classified as such. There are two conceptions of modern capoeira that have been in tension with one another — the dance-centric and fight-centric — and the former has proven more dominant. In linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, which is concerned with how tacit metaphors inform the way we approach almost every facet of perception and thought (they expound upon “metaphors” or “frames” such as more is up and less is down, time is a valuable commodity, and so on), there is a passage in which they address the common framing of arguments, and just as relevant for our sake, they offer a quirky alternative framing. They begin with the premise that arguments are understood in terms of war, citing examples such as “You claims are indefensible,” “He attacked every weak point in my argument,” “he shot down all of my arguments.” Furthermore, their stratification normally track along the lines of war jargon like “attack,” “counterattack,” “defense,” etc. Lakoff and Johnson proceed with what they present as a far-fetched, idiosyncratic alternative to the battle conception of arguments, but which seems to me an apt descriptor of the jogo da capoeira (capoeira game):

“Try to imagine a culture where arguments are not viewed in terms of war, where no one wins or loses, where there is no sense of attacking or defending, gaining or losing ground. Imagine a culture where an argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, experience them differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently. But we would probably not view them as arguing at all: they would simply be doing something different. It would seem strange even to call what they were doing "arguing." Perhaps the most neutral way of describing this difference between their culture and ours would be to say that we have a discourse form structured in terms of battle and they have one structured in terms of dance.”

In a capoeira game, the capoeiristas are modulating their bodies in response to the other’s advances, contorting their limbs in ways that are meant to confound their opponents, but in most contexts – perhaps not in street battles, which are a deeply rooted and still extant part of capoeira culture – the impetus is in forging an aesthetic quality through corporal interactions, not in satiating the urge to conquer an opponent with awesome and manly prowess. In fact, one of the virtues of the game is creating interesting or “aesthetically pleasing” two-sided interactions. I find this to be a healthy approach to arguments in general; rather than every, say, political dispute necessitating by default a sort of severity that precludes 'play' and 'exploratory moves,' people could assume a greater modesty regarding the limited scope of their influence. I don’t mean that personal views, even of geopolitical scope, should be trivialized and met with nihilism; but more often than not, an argument leaves room to “play,” to experiment and derive pleasure from the art of argumentation. There is nothing facetious in loosening convictions in the course of constructive dialogue.

The societies I’m familiar with are defined to an extent by latent Kuhnian paradigm shifts and/or uncompromising atavistic dogmas, unrelenting cultures in which people crusade against blasphemy (be that adherence to non-hegemonic religions, expression of views that presumably don’t cohere with a nation’s interests, or the positing of values that are dissonant with mainstream social justice rhetoric). In all of these cases, we neglect something profound in human interactions: their mystery and plasticity. This relational state is perhaps better expressed in the “language of capoeira” than the more ubiquitous language of war. To add another provocative layer, this could be expressed in the language of porous childish curiosity rather than the socialized goal-oriented rigidity of adults. Alison Gopnik frames childhood cognition as explorative and adult cognition as exploitative, both with their own virtues, but the former of which tends to be neglected.

Often, people who make similar arguments in politics use the term ‘viewpoint diversity.’ I disagree with this formulation; it implies the discourse in a given milieu simply lacks more nodes on the graph, more ingredients in the cuisine; of greater importance, in my opinion, is creating a terrain of discourse that is amenable to viewpoint diversity, a roda, so to speak, for non-corporal dialogue. Viewpoint diversity is not inherently helpful; there’s always the question of what views are actually worth taking seriously; should morally and/or intellectually corrosive views be promoted in elite knowledge gatekeeping institutions such as academia and the press? My insistence upon modifying the original proposition is because I’m less concerned with collecting as many “voices” as possible, more so in fostering a discourse where intelligent arguments can become entangled without one of them winning out.

In Beyond "Culture": Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference, Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson make an analogous case in their critique of multiculturalism. They write:

If we accept a world of originally separate and culturally distinct places, then the question of immigration policy is just a question of how hard we should try to maintain this original order... Indeed, operating with a spatially naturalized understanding of cultural difference, uncontrolled immigration may even appear as a danger to anthropology, threatening to blur or erase the cultural distinctiveness of places that is our stock in trade. If, on the other hand, it is acknowledged that cultural difference is produced and maintained in a field of power relations in a world always already spatially interconnected, then the restriction of immigration becomes visible as one of the main means through which the disempowered are kept that way.

Similarly, if we see ourselves as bound with our interlocutor, occupying an interconnected ideational terrain, we cease to position ourselves in contradistinction to the other side. If the impetus of arguments lies in fighting, then conversations with friction will follow a similar trajectory as wars; one side will eventually be shot down; humiliation, capitulation, gloating ensue; and the dialogue will stop.