The experience of magic confronts us with the uncanny, an idea brought up by Freud to refer to “that class of the frightening that leads back to what is known of old and long
familiar” (220). In observing a magic trick and trying to discern the gimmick, the spectator tends to feel a sense of strangeness as soon as the display of an ordinary object or movement turns out to break away from the normality. The unusual display invokes in the spectator senses of strangeness and anxiety when events and things are found disconnected from their established subjection to human beings and appear to be unpredictable. Such an uncanny effect induced from “encounters with things that confound established conceptual boundaries”
(Bennett 194) permits the spectator to have unusual touch of vitality of the material world.
On occasion as the magician produces successive wonders in a way that does not allow the spectator to have a thought about it, the latter may well generate a feeling for the liveliness of the objects.
Observation introduces disturbances, letting the spectator lapse into perplexity about the unpredictability of things, but it never causes him to wander too far away from reality. In effect, as I have mentioned in the previous section, modernization modulates human vision for diverse purposes. In a magic performance, the spectator participates disengagedly for most of the time with his senses getting more acute than usual for detecting possible leaks or faults. Even in the presence of magic surprises, the spectator is paralyzed only temporarily. In no time he musters his train of thought again, enrolling in the activity of decryption and relishing the battle of wits. The distantiation from the observed object, which is critical in the penetration of a magic trick, corresponds with the adequate dissociation required by a designer from his working materials. Inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that “to see is to have at a distance” (qtd. in Ingold 72; emphasis in original) and anthropologist Rane
Willerslev’s observation on the conditioning of the close-up by the foresight, Ingold restates the importance to keep a distance from the target during the process of creation:
To see, at least with binocular vision, you must take a certain distance. And in this distantiation lies the possibility for a kind of reflexive self-awareness. You do not just see but see yourself seeing. It is this self-awareness, then, that
makes it possible to come close to another thing or being, and hence to engage with it materially, without actually merging with it. (72)
Being too close to an object prevents the observer to have a clear sight of it. Even in close-up magic and street magic, the spectator is kept at a certain distance to watch the show. To bring out amodal completion or be distracted requires that proper space should be held between the magician and the spectator, not to mention the engagement of the eye in inspection.
But how does the spectator enjoy the performance without “immers[ing] himself in the sensory environment” (Ingold 72)? Were it not for his fiddling with cards or balls and measuring them within his hands, would it be possible that the magician devises intricate gadgets and masters the skills of deception? The key, Ingold maintains, is to manage the ability “to keep [the] distance whilst in the thick of the labours of proximity” through practice (72). Passion and the imaginative foresight need to be held in check with the direct contact with materials that initiates an actual relation with the designer; in spectatorship, on the contrary, the audience has to keep his conscious distance so that the trick in display solicits a feeling of amusement or even the uncanny instead of that of the supernatural, while the possibility to blend himself into the magical scene of transformation is still maintained.
Likewise, if the spectator gets bordered with the magic performance and fails to observe it, the mergence with the magic world may well take place. And this happens to those few invited to participate in the production of magic tricks. In a performance, the magician duo Penn & Teller tried to expose the magical power inside one’s head. They invited one of the audiences up to the stage (who happens to be a female named Donna Jean in this case) and demonstrated before her a solid ring, which was later put on Penn’s neck. Then they asked her to close her eyes, with each of them putting a hand on her eyelids and having the other hand held by her hands. When all was set, they asked her to imagine that the ring can be miraculously ripped through Penn’s neck and linked unto her arm. In fact, the ring had been taken down from Penn’s neck without Donna Jean’s knowledge. Therefore, when she opened
her eyes and saw her imagination fulfilled, the uncanny impact was enormous. In this way, the magicians performed an illusion that was biologically as well as topologically impossible inside her head.11 Obviously all other spectators off the stage had a clear sight of what was happening, and only the chosen spectator perceived the illusion. In her imagination, every piece of information provided by the magician was put together to form an exclusive map that allowed the impossible to take place as the mind’s eye replaced the biological eye to visualize the illusion.
The imagination trick that Donna Jean underwent seems to suggest that only when the function of vision is disregarded can the spectator fully immerse himself in the impossible.
Contrast to the spectator who can use his eyes efficiently to observe the magician’s sleight of hand, hence confronting a strong discrepancy between vision and belief, Donna Jean suspended the functioning of her eyes, relegating her vision to other parts of the body. Even though the experience of seeing still remained in her memory, it became an unstable source of information to confide to. In this circumstance, she entered into a magic world that was less uncanny than real, a world analogous to virtual reality. While it would be ridiculous for Donna Jean to claim that the magical world she once accessed was the real presentation of thingness, it may induce a strong argument that only when one turns his back on the full dominance of rationality, even temporarily, will he be able to reach beyond this human-centered world view and have other forms of intersection with the material world.
The uncanny experience entails “feeling” being the only approach to magic, and there is no way to categorize it under a universal language. “The singularity of experience,” in Brian Massumi’s words, “pass[es] thresholds, arriving unbidden into a context, then setting in and no sooner slipping out to seek ingress elsewhere” (Parables 212-13). In each different event or situation, there is a singularity of experience, a complexity of feelings etched on the plate of our consciousness that turns out to be a singular but not simplified impression. And
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11 For the video of the trick, please link to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43PRfqdCn4c.
even as Massumi claims that the source and end of the singularity of experience is not assignable, I would like to suggest that the singularity of experience always takes place at the intersection of man and matter, which is not confined to tangible, physical things. That is, matter should also include those things that are invisible or even transient, such as thought, fantasy, memory, or a gust of feeling. Magic, as Chiu-Hua Su argues, is the product of man’s connection with the unreal and the irrational, the elements that are involved in modern photoelectric technologies and further applied to the production of modern magic. In the next chapter, I will explore how non-material forces constitutes the technique of magic and the dynamic power generated in magic and feeds back to our relation with the world.
Chapter Three Feeling for Potentiality
In the chapters above, I have talked about magic in terms of technics. In the technical, or even mechanical operation of magic, the magician demonstrates before the spectator perfect couplings of man and things. While the illusions are performed in a balanced state where each of the elements involved corresponds to others in their function, potentialities that are not opportune for the particular coordination are disregarded. This chapter will focus on the discussions concerning potential energies that constitute the technics of magic. Besides, the discussion proceeds with consideration for these questions: If in magic the human prospect of a transformable material world is testified, how do we understand this tendency to displace actualities? When we see magic in light of the humanistic tradition that prioritizes the mind over the body and define magic as a release of human ambition to be in charge of what is external to our mind, what do we acknowledge or neglect to see? If magic represents another representational world whose images are derived from our everyday life, then how do we understand this magical expression that transcribes the second-hand materials about the world? How do we interpret the shift from one representation to another?