CRITICAL NOTE · No. 21

Every Street Fight Is a War That Refuses to End

On Clausewitz, escalation, and the de-escalation no one trains

The principal feature of absolute war, as Clausewitz defined it, is the ascent to extremes: the two adversaries, dialectically, drive toward a paroxysmal violence that ends in the annihilation of the enemy. The street fight, to a degree, echoes this escalation of force. Rarely does a brawl begin with a takedown; it climbs, blow answering blow, each raising the stakes.

But Clausewitz’s key insight is that absolute war is only theoretical. Real war never reaches the pure extreme, because escalation is always countered by de-escalation — by fatigue, by the attainment of the objective, by the subordination of violence to a goal. The same is true of the street: most confrontations can be de-escalated, precisely because neither party fights for annihilation but for something beyond the fight.

Here is the scandal: the martial sports and self-defence clubs train only the escalation — how to hit harder, faster, more. They train nothing of the de-escalation, which is statistically the likelier and safer path out. The capoeira sensibility, which knows the game is subordinated to something larger than the blow, is closer to this truth. To survive the street is, most often, not to win the escalation but to end it. That skill has no belt, and almost no school.

RELATED NOTES

→ Most Kicks in Capoeira Are Lies

→ A Pedagogy of the Emotions

IN THE CORPUS

→ The 1928 Manual That Only Knew How to Attack

→ Reading the Game from the Inside