Jeet Kune Do and Postmodernity I

To the uninitiated, Bruce Lee is simply just another martial arts film star, like Jackie Chan or Jet Li. "Was he really any good?" some might ask. "Did he do those stunts? Did someone show him those moves?"

But for those familiar with the world of martial arts, the claim that Lee was one of the greatest martial artists in living memory is a familiar and justifiable one. Not only was he in top physical condition, having devised numerous training methods and exercises that were ahead of their time; he is also credited with developing a revolutionary approach to the martial arts. Jeet Kune Do- the way of the intercepting fist- is a collection of philosophical and methodological innovations that apply to combat arts, and, as many claim, to life more broadly.

There are many summaries on the web, so I won't belabor one. For a definitive introduction, I direct the reader to Lee's Tao of Jeet Kune Do, one of the most helpful martial books ever written. I will, however, review a few elements that pertain to this post:

Lee was dissatisfied with complex, "flowery," and smug approaches to the martial arts. Simplicity, efficiency, pragmatism became the mantras of his method. He critiqued the guarded traditions of "pure" and "authoritative" styles (e.g., Chang Chuan, Wing Chun, Tien Shan Pai, Choy Li Fut, etc.), believing they had come to stultify growth, innovation and development. Practitioners were burdened with learning and mastering thousands of movements kept alive less for their practicability and combat effectiveness than because of their being part of the tradition. Modern exponents were repeating movements designed for radically different combat contexts, like fighting with armor or on horseback or barefoot. After coming to the U.S. (Seattle and San Francisco), Lee began a productive career of writing, teaching and training, setting out these principles through what he initially called Jun Fan Kung Fu. (It was only much later, after much deserved fame in the martial arts world, that Lee came to the screen- with Fists of Fury (also called Chinese Connection) as his debut which initiated a new tradition of martial arts films.) Lee received much criticism from teachers back in China, as well as prominent martial artists in the U.S., for his perceived cheekiness, subverting tradition and iconoclastically dismantling the edifice of ossified and totalizing martial arts systems. Needless to say, he made a lot of enemies (later to feed into conspiracy theories surrounding his untimely death).


Lee demonstrating his famed "One-Inch Punch"

In many ways Lee's approach served as progenitor to the mixed-martial arts craze going on today, and to the popularity of events like the Ultimate Fighting Championship, which pits various styles and approaches against each other in a "real" fight setting. Schools teaching "JKD concepts" have cropped up everywhere, along with a (counterintuitive) obsession with lineage ("I was trained by X, one of Lee's original students...").

In some ways Lee's was seen as a truly "American" approach, cutting back the extraneous and traditional in the name of pragmatism and effectiveness. There may be something to this. But what strikes me are the postmodern undertones to his project (Lee was doing his work in the 60s-70s). He questioned the view of tradition as pristine, self-enclosed, and able to be passed on without alteration. He challenged conventional canons on martial art technique and training. Application of his method seemed to celebrate diversity and plurality (many have mistaken Jeet Kune Do as a hodgepodge or random sampling of different styles. While this is not the case, there are certain underlying principles that value diversity and that can lend this impression.) Pragmatism and practice served as touchstones over against the authority of tradition, origin, or aesthetics. His injunctions to "use no way as a way" or to "seek to be like water, formless and utterly adaptable," while admittedly Zen-inspired, seem akin to the shifting, transient sands of our current pomo playground.

In a later post, I want to explore the relationship of JKD to tradition, and hazard a way to think about this relationship that, while not only being helpful for martial arts practitioners, may be of use to philosophers in general.