CRITICAL NOTE · No. 05

Why the Corner Man Is a Confession?

On outsourced thinking, and the fighter who cannot decide alone

In the martial sports, the competing athlete is always flanked by a corner man — usually the coach — whose role is to read the fight and dictate the strategy: what to do, what error not to repeat. In effect, he takes charge of the fighter’s cognition: the perception of the decisive signals, their analysis, the response. The athlete does not think; he executes a programme, and changes it on command.

This externality of the thinking process has almost never been questioned. Yet imagine a chess player, even a weak one, handing his strategic decisions to a third party: the performance would belong to the author of the winning moves, not to the player. In combat sport, strangely, this arrangement provokes no astonishment. The fighter is treated as a body in motion, a mere executor at the service of a disembodied mind — old Cartesian dualism, still at work.

The consequences are grave. A fighter who has spent years inhibiting his own decision-making — how will he react, alone, in a street attack, with no hard drive and no external memory to consult? Autonomy is not decreed; it is acquired, slowly, by the exercise of one’s own judgement. Capoeira has no corner man. In the roda, the player reads, decides and acts for himself, in real time. That is not a lack of support. It is the training of the only faculty the street will actually demand.

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→ To Perform Is to Solve Problems

→ Most Kicks in Capoeira Are Lies

IN THE CORPUS

→ Reading the Game from the Inside

→ The 1928 Manual That Only Knew How to Attack