Discussions about an individual being’s potentiality, which has been focused largely on man’s ability to couple with material things as well as immaterial, fictional, technology-based fantasies, imply that its extensibility is boundless. Likewise, the idea of potentiality also confirms an individual’s being, be it a person, a giraffe, a clump of moss, a
chunk of timber, the Earth or a relation between two entities, for there would not be any possible collision or correspondence formed if an individual being is not real. Our connections with fictions, beliefs and ideologies are so real that we are prompted to make differences upon our perception of them.12 Or to speak in a way that ceases to endorse the supremacy of the human subjectivity, we are invited to feel things, including the rippling effects caused by their yoking with us, as they exist and open the “phenomenal display”
(Morton 34) before us. With their ontological reality, things have the potentiality to stimulate visual activities and commence perceptual relations with our consciousness, making us recognize them on the basis of their seemingly invariable contours.
The idea of potentiality suggests that nothing could be reduced to its appearance or perceptual relation with other entities—it is with the prerequisite that “things are objectively present, as they are” (Morton 36) that philosophical discussions about virtuality is feasible.
Such consideration for thingness is ontological and cannot be recapitulated generically in the human-centric, technical resolution of the potentialities of things. The cognitive activities, profuse in the human experience of the world, only manifest a partial, subject-centered relation, while all interactions between entities should be viewed in terms of an ontology that eliminates the subject-object hierarchy and considers things for their own sake. In other words, we are inspired, caught by the uniqueness of things emitted even before we come to realize their influence upon us from a backward, panoramic perspective. The advocates of object-oriented ontology (OOO) argue that a thing is indifferent to relations through which its characters are imparted to another thing, and that any epistemological understanding of the thing in question, which is communicated through its representations, do not contribute to transcendental apprehension of the thing. However, in so far as we construct our knowledge of things upon their representations, it is hardly possible for us to form our understanding of
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12 I adopt Levi R. Bryant’s conception that “to be is to make a difference” (n. pag.) here to explain that the human beings’ responses to externalities, inclusive of incorporeal things like thought and inspiration, are basically results from their being real.
the world without subjective translations, though it does not entail that ethical appreciation of things is inessential.
In this world, we are bound to things in various kinds of relation. Although we tend to interpret things and forge a view of the world from our standpoint, which is often disrupted by new findings in science and susceptible to adjustments, our uncanny feeling towards the world is authentic: there is always a gap between sensations and the reality of things. And magic, in a sense, magnifies this uncanniness so that we may reflect on our accustomed human-centric positioning in our relation with the world. By polarizing the real and the unreal, we reinforce the established impressions of things in the contrasts performed by the magician; at the same time, magic provokes the sense that we are not at home with things, a reflection that can be inferred from anthropologists’ records of the primordial imageries of Nature. While we rely on the comparatively stable representations of things to make judgements and construct a worldview, on the other hand, we are also threatened by the unpredictability of things and prompted to reject our familiarity with them. In an interview, magician Teller talks about a special piece of work that he and his partner Penn once presented before the audience. It was called “Honor System.”
We let people come onstage and examine a wooden box with a hinged lid on top and a plexiglass box with a lid that fits over it like a shoebox lid. We put me in the plexiglass box, then nest that inside the wooden box and lock the lid shut with padlocks. Now how would one escape from that? The wooden box is holding the plexiglass box lid tightly shut. And even if the wooden box had a trap door in it, I couldn’t get to the trap because of the plexiglass wall between me and the wood. It’s a really pure intellectual puzzle.
And then Penn gives the audience a choice. He tells them they can experience the escape with their eyes open or closed. They can take home either a mystery or a solution. Most people choose the eyes-open course, and
for them, we’ve created a clever bit of mechanics they find satisfying. But I think those who are really sophisticated choose the eyes closed. It says so much about people when they can deny themselves the easy answer and relish the mystery and the challenge. Those are the people I’d like to know personally. (n. pag.)
To reveal the trick or not, that is the question. Magic is aimed at amazing the spectator with deceptive skills, and to achieve the goal, the magician distorts or transforms what is real. The desire to transcend reality can be traced back to time immemorial, when the first magic spell was cast to drive away an immediate danger or to fulfill the tribesmen’s wish for good weather. Nowadays, virtual reality technologies generally serve to satisfy modern people’s quest for excitement or wish fulfillment. Michael Heim attributes aesthetic value to this attempt at transcendence: “Perhaps the essence of virtual reality ultimately lies not in technology but in art, perhaps art of the highest order. Rather than control or escape or entertain or communicate, the ultimate promise of virtual reality may be to transform, to redeem our awareness of reality” (124). The reality is bland and dull, and we are tempted to feel more than what is constant and lasting. It is on the ground that a comprehensive grasp of things is not possible that artistic expressions, through which things stimulate another space for conversation, become critical in our relation to the world.
Magic and virtual reality technologies are built on the dualistic distinction between the real and the unreal. To create wonder, the magician models on reality to perform the opposite. And the resulting uncanny feeling, as I have mentioned in Chapter Two, disturbs the spectator’s belief in the invariable real, facilitating him to feel the liveliness of things. Such disorientation, caused by the strange display of things in magic, may as well emerge in the situation of the “broken tool,” an example Heidegger gives to theorize the sudden revelation of the “being” of a thing when it stops functioning as usual. As Heidegger suggests, at the moment when a thing or tool stops functioning as an inconspicuous accessory, we learn about
its singular existence. A sculptor who occupies himself in the chiseling of a piece of wood knows well about the qualities and structure of the wood, but he would not perceive the being of the hammer in his hands nor that of the electric fan at the corner of his studio. And even if he has sufficient knowledge about the wood, can we say that he has access to its potentialities?
And if this is the everyday state we rightly settle ourselves in, how do we consider our relation with things other than adopting the user-tool, subject-object anthropocentrism?
With the help of technologies, physicalists are able to analyze things to the smallest unit and make lists of their composition. Even so, it seems that things are always more than scientific reports and that they slip away every time from our attempt at grasping them comprehensively and giving them a thorough, pertinent description. I can tell that the mug on my desk is made of porcelain, and I can measure its size, weight and density with instruments to know more about this container. But I cannot give a clear description about my feeling towards the mug, which radiates warmth on a sunny morning and conveys thickness when I apply it against a piece of flapping paper. And magic invites us to step over the boundaries set by scientists and turn our thought to another direction of imagination and feeling. That is to say, through magic, things inspire and invite us to feel them instead of sticking to rational understanding and analyses. It is through feeling, claims Shaviro, who bases on Whitehead to develop his discourse in “The Universe of Things,” that one grasps “not just certain qualities of the thing but its total and irreducible existence” (55). What one feels about a thing contributes not only to his understanding of the thing but also to its being, which is indivisible. Moreover, for Whitehead, the experience of feeling constructs the one that feels:
“experience is being; what an entity feels is what that entity is” (Shaviro, “The Universe” 56;
emphasis in original).
In Whitehead’s conception, aesthetics makes up the relation between man and things.
In feeling, man no longer understand things by their usage or qualities. Rather, we feel things
“for [their] own sake” (Shaviro, “The Universe” 53; emphasis in original). In my opinion,
magic provides a singular experience to feel things and enjoy the wonder. Some may contend that there is no real wonder in magic and that the spectator does not touch upon potentialities of things in it. I do not deny the truth in such comments. Magic is about our representation of the world, and so is language. And there are always things unsaid or left out of expressive systems as well. Aesthetic experience is one possibility for us to taste things beyond the limit of knowledge, and we transform ourselves in our feeling for things. Artificial or not, the aesthetic experience we have in magic is every reason for us to experience.
The two magician-philosophers Eugene Burger and Robert E. Neale give a valuation of the widespread “sawing” trick:
Sawing a woman in two can be horrible or humorous. It can also be holy.
Saying this I have not forgotten that it is both witnessed and performed as sexist. Even so, it is, in essence, holy. My assumption is that this twentieth century trick is our leading example of what magic is about, an example that has roots as old as magic itself. The theme is death and rebirth. . . . The horror remains, as does the humour, but both performer and audience are also given the opportunity to participate in the holy. A real magic show is not an arena for secular distraction, but a relatively safe place for us to experience the sacred. (Magic and Meaning 96, 98)
When I tried to pin down a reason for people’s everlasting love of magic, I thought it is the proteanness of things revealed in magic that serves as the hook. But this is only half of the story. The other half lies in the spectator. As a cultural product, magic presents how we human beings envision our relation with things. When all sorts of unbelievable phenomena take place in the magician’s hands, despite the alarm given by the cognitive system that prompts us to clarify mystery, we feel satiated. Through illusions, we bask ourselves in virtuality to experience the unreal as the trick recapitulates the flow of energies between man and matter. In magic we experience death and rebirth, but what weighs the experience is the
holiness, the potential energy that is materialized in our affective connection to matter. As we approach the virtual, we also come close to the material conditions supporting it, feel and experience them as real and alive. The stream of life flows through us in our engagement with matter, of which magic takes up the form of becoming.
Magic broaches questions about our relation with the world. In addition to our tendency towards mystery and imagination, a deeper belief in the epistemological real is embedded in our infatuation for magic. The magician ingeniously transforms our limited knowledge of what the world is and is not, and through his practice our motivated search for and need of some basic, invariable truth beneath the superficial representations of things are manifested. From the perspective of OOO, however, this deep-seated belief in universal principles separates us from proper evaluation of the ontological reality of things. Although the fact that magic is constructed on phenomenal illusions suggests that it be difficult to hold ontological discussions about things through magic, this thesis still finds it illuminating to realize how magic may call our attention to the potential energies things possess through its aesthetic appeal. Magic embodies our relentless grope for truth; on the other hand, it also mirrors the limitation inherent in our feeling subjects allegorically, through which the becoming potentiality of things is uncannily confirmed. Magic offers us a chance to reflect on our subjective assessment of the world, while we immerse ourselves in the illusive appeal to feel and prehend the potentiality of things. Through magic, the cultural product designed for alluring us into an artificial maze, the potentiality of things transcribed to tricks stimulates us to ponder on our current affiliation with the world. And new prospects of relatedness will not generate without such reflection.
My thesis begins with the aim to overthrow the conventional ranking of man and things, and it wades across the discussion of material potentiality to hopefully return to man’s encounter with actual entities and events. As the subject-object scheme is not rejected but expanded to every experience, and man resigns his unique position and acknowledges the
potentiality of things, it is risky but inviting to look into our relation with ourselves through magic. The invention of magic is, after all, a congruence between things and us. We receive external information and express it in our subjectivity; reciprocally, our act affects not only the environment but also ourselves. The performance of magic epitomizes the modulation of things and nature in culture, and these interconnections bring change to the world. As we relish our magical, fantastic transcription of things through metaphysical contemplation, what is left for our task is to keep a modest distance from the inclination to apply overinterpretations to things. We have to keep in mind that, after all, magic secrets and wonders are human imaginary impositions on the objective world, and our role on this planet is not close to an explorer that penetrates, analyzes and gets hold of materials with all his might. Rather, we are nothing but an object that feels and is felt by others.
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