A Memory Without Thought?

WHY THIS ARTICLE

This article founds the right to analyse. Against the homage that assigns, it establishes that the Black gesture thinks — the theoretical condition of the five-component definition, and of the entire field of Black combat arts. The formula that sums it up: the archive is armed because it thinks.

Can a homage assign?

Since the late twentieth century, capoeira has become a site of memory of slavery and a postcolonial struggle. It preserves a specifically Black culture endangered in the Americas. For some Marxist-influenced authors it is more still: “the antithesis of the authoritarianism materialised in modern societies by the grip of capitalism on individuals and their bodies.” Brazilian historical-critical pedagogy “clearly takes the side of the working class by defending the appropriation, by each individual, of what is most developed in the whole of cultural production.” In this view, capoeira would be “the most accomplished expression of solidarity,” joining “in an indivisible whole the body and the mind, the cultural, the political and the ludic.”

A generous vision. No one disputes it. But it carries a clause whose cost is high: it is monist — refusing any distinction of aspects within the whole it celebrates. And “this vision generally comes with a prohibition on analysing capoeira from the biological or the motor, so as not to reduce it to an organic and mechanical arrangement.” To study the ginga as motor coordination, to analyse a sweep as technique: so many scientific gestures struck with prohibition, because they would seem to dismember the living totality of the game. The intention is protective. The effect is quite other.

The paradox of the “armed archive”

Here it is, stated plainly: “this critique of the biologisation of the body by capitalism and Western thought is often accompanied by a reduction of Black culture to a mere fleshly envelope. Indeed, the body of the capoeirista would be an armed archive, transmitted from generation to generation by gestures in the absence of conscious thought.”

The expression is Julio César Tavares’s, and it is beautiful: the body as armed archive. What higher dignity to confer on the capoeirista’s body than to make it the living repository of a people’s memory? But taken literally — gestures transmitted from generation to generation in the absence of conscious thought — the formula performs a fearsome partition. It mixes “Cartesian dualism and racial stereotypes”: thought on one side, body on the other — and the Black body on the side of body alone, unconscious transmitter of a memory it carries without thinking. One recognises the old colonial assignment — to some the mind, to others the flesh — reconducted in the vocabulary of homage. The homage turns into assignment.

The way out: bodily technique

How to leave this contradiction without renouncing either the memorial dignity of the body or its analysis? “To overcome this contradiction, it seems interesting to question this body. We shall do so from bodily technique: the particular way of coordinating one’s motor movements, of moving in the space of play, of interacting with the adversary, of losing or winning — which makes capoeira a singular activity, easily recognisable among a thousand, and no doubt the reason it enjoys an international rise.”

Measure the shift. To study the ginga, the rabo de arraia, the simulacrum, the near-touch, is not to reduce capoeira to mechanics. It is to grant the gesture the status of a decision, the simulacrum that of a reasoning, the invitation to rupture that of a strategy. In Bernard Jeu’s framework — sport structured by emotion and space, the ordeal that gives “access to the domain of the marvellous” where one “bathes in the atmosphere of the tale, that of death brushed against and threatening” — the game is not the mute execution of an inherited programme. It is a thought in acts.

Reading what the archive wrote

This reversal is the founding theoretical gesture of the whole field of Black combat arts: to refuse the choice between the mute body and the disembodied mind. It commands even the technical definition of capoeira — for to analyse the five components of the game is precisely to take seriously the intelligence lodged in the gesture. And it reconciles Tavares with himself. The archive is armed because it thinks. To analyse it technically is, at last, to read what it wrote.

SOURCES

Tavares, J. C. (on the “armed archive”). — Silva Tomaz, A., Paiva Reis, A. de, Alves Landim, R. A., Nuances: estudos sobre Educação, 27, 1, 2016. — Jeu, B., Le sport, l’émotion, l’espace, Vigot, 1977. — Malo, O., La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020, Opening, “Presentation and preliminary definition.”

IN THE CORPUS

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HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. A Memory Without Thought?. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 19. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/a-memory-without-thought. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.