技術與潛勢:魔術中的物我動態關係

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(1)! !. Master’s Thesis Department of English National Taiwan Normal University. Technics and Potentiality: The Man-Matter Dynamics in Magic. Advisor: Dr. Han-Yu Huang. Fan-Chen Huang. 106 January 2017. 1.

(2) (becoming). (potentiality) (object-oriented ontology).

(3) Abstract This thesis conducts a reading of magic in consideration of technics and potentiality. Conventionally, magic is seen as illusive play on the audience’s perception to create amusement; in light of the mechanical maneuver of objects and attention, magic is degraded as fools’ pleasure. Predetermined to invert the real, the performance of magic actually derives its appeal from the potentiality in objects as well as in magic events. On this ground, I point out that magic bridges our sensual experiences of the objective world with metaphysical thought. The thesis consists of an introduction and three chapters. In the introduction, I sketch out the co-existence of reasonable schemes and secret hope for wonder that serves as the foundation of magic. Embedded in this paradoxical combination that brings about enchantment, I argue, is the autonomy of things. Chapter One provides an overview of the history of modern magic and emphasizes on the aspect of technics. I suggest that the principles of design and making be valued and that magic be illustrated in terms of the “co-possibility” between man and things. Chapter Two centers on the spectator’s perception, whose uncanny experience of magic permits the touch of vitality of the material world. Chapter Three refers to the conception of becoming and potentiality by Deleuze and Simondon and focuses on the resolution of potential energies in the man-matter dynamics. I conclude this thesis by directing it to objectoriented ontology, in which our ethical and aesthetical consideration of the world is discussed in desubjectification, to expect a possible re-evaluation of magic.. Keywords: magic, technics, becoming, perception, potentiality, uncanny, object-oriented ontology, Stiegler, Deleuze, Simondon.

(4) Acknowledgements This endeavor would not have been probable without the guidance and support of a number of people, whose help to the birth of this thesis is the fire in the hearth, and to whom I am greatly indebted. My thanks go first and foremost to my advisor Cory Han-yu Huang. His inspiring teaching and extensive knowledge of philosophy enlighten me to look for the light in life and keep conversing with myself. I also give thanks to the reviewers of this thesis, Wan-shuan Lin and Sun-chieh Liang, who kindly impart their insight and give suggestions so that I would reflect on my writing and make improvements. I am also grateful to Shih-hong Chuang and Kai-wen Chiu for their generous sharing of thoughts and materials, upon which the thesis is constructed. I thank my partner Chia-yang Lin for his attention to my thinking and writing. I would not have made it this far without his encouragement and company. My thanks to Ioana Luca and Chiung-huei Chang, the mentors who have shown their consideration for me along this journey. And I owe gratitude to my families for their devotion and patience. Many thanks to my friends Hui-zhen Chen, Yu-an Tu, Jing-mei Chiu, Wei-chung Ting, and Jr-Shiuan Su for the emotional support they have given to me over the years. My thanks to my landlords for the hot soup on a dark winter night and to many other people who have kindly shown their hospitality. Without the care and help offered by these people mentioned above, I would not become what I am today..

(5) ! !. Table of Contents. Introduction. 1. Chapter One. Magic as Mechanical Operation. 15. Chapter Two. The Modern Enchantment of Magic. 33. Chapter Three. Feeling for Potentiality. 49. Works Cited. 65.

(6) Huang&1& &. Introduction. Magic has been used since time immemorial for entertainment and religious purposes. Most practitioners were considered agents of supernature before the Enlightenment, an era when people started promoting science and intellectual knowledge and dismissing magic as witchcraft and sorcery. Biblical prophets were branded superstitious, whose claim of direct connection with God was refuted by rationalist thinkers as pure imagination. Radicals like Baruch Spinoza argue that the influence of imagination reflects the shadowy climate of a society where only reason can bring light to it. Today, the development of modern technology has given us unprecedented power over our surroundings, and believing in magic seems to be an outdated, unintelligent act that should be dismissed from serious consideration. However, that nowadays a great number of people still enjoy magic in its various forms is an undeniable fact. People go to a 3D movie and take a virtual space ride, participate in a live concert in which the singer, say, Hatsune Miku (. ), is a projected humanoid with. synthesized voices, or attend a live broadcast of cyber games competition to applaud for virtual combats. Magic, in its broadest term, is everywhere, and so is the obsession with it. Magic is composed both of magical thoughts and magical techniques, and the combination makes this art of performance paradoxically abstract as well as concrete. Marked by the convolution of its double faces, magic is rooted in the basic human relation with the world. Through magic, our ancestors invoked the blessing and protection of the supernatural, and by doing so they magnified their spiritual powers and facilitated their communication with Nature. Such ritualistic practices were constructed upon human interpretations of the world, in which animism was the core. In our times, magic has stopped serving as the connector between man and the world; instead, people understand the world and approach natural danger with recourse to direct observation and rational thinking, and what cannot be studied empirically and deduced from scientific analysis is categorized as.

(7) Huang&2& &. fictional, spiritual, or transcendental. In this vein, most people become accustomed to valuing presentation solely and dismissing what cannot be perceived or sensed. Consequently, the awe of Nature that had been preserved by our forefathers is no longer traceable; in place of the reverence for the world, the human-centered worldview is adopted and applauded. Under this situation, it seems that the world no longer poses any unmanageable danger. Even global warming, for many, sounds like a problem that can be eventually tackled when our science and technology develop to offer a solution and save the Earth from devastation. And magic, without doubt, is not excepted from the human mapping of the world. On the one hand, it converts and conveys man’s self-righteous dominance of the world through the magician’s fiddling of reality, especially when the spectacles unavoidably reflect as well as solidifying the monotonous presentations of the world. On the other hand, paradoxically, when magic reveals man’s craving for the extraordinary, it includes a tale of becoming that takes place at the man-matter interface, where potentiality is sensed and creation inspired. And one insight evolving from my observation of magic is the affirmation of thingness accompanied by a possible elimination of the subject-object hierarchy. In man’s attempt at manipulating and transforming things, taking advantage of things’ being pliable to our willful exercise of power, from the sensual experiences of the extraordinary we seem to taste things with their vigor and liveliness. And such experiences are propitious for carrying out a re-evaluation of things through philosophical discussions of ontology, especially in our empirical denial of the fact that things as well as their relation with each other cannot be fully recognized, understood, and dominated. In the perspective encouraged by the object-oriented philosophical discussions, the relation between man and things may undergo rewriting, and new opinions should be cast on what is normally deemed overpowering dominance over things in daily practice of mechanical operation. In light of this prospect, this thesis focuses on the technical, material, and representational parts of magic and talks about its enchantment on the spectator in the hope that the nonhuman, material potentiality can be realized and.

(8) Huang&3& &. valued.. I.!. Background and Motivations Magic is a compound issue. In our age, magic is often considered antithetical to. science, even though they look unbelievably similar in many ways. For example, the sci-fi movie Lucy (2014) presents extraordinary human potentials that transcend the total capabilities of all living beings and approximate God’s power. As the interviews behind the scenes emphasize the scientific references bolstering the solidity and possibility of such films and make the fiction not only reasonable but also anticipated, science is endowed with the power of futurity. In the history of magic, on the other hand, magic has never ceased to parallel shamanism and technology, both of which are used to negotiate our problems with the Other in respective times. These two disparate points of view often accompany each other, however, even in an age dominated by rationality. While secular magic is widely considered a technically and technologically performing art that “stakes no serious claim to contact with the supernatural” (During 1), Isaac Newton, the greatest representative of scientific revolution, was dubbed “the last of the magicians” in the mid-twentieth century for his sharing the same instinctive curiosity about the world with ancient Magi (Keynes n. pag.). If it is through the demarcation between beliefs in science and in magic that we are capable of defining ourselves as rational beings, the glory Newton received proves that these two ends intersect at some point. Modern magic is undoubtedly not a synonym of fantasy and imagination, nor is it carried out exclusively through realistic calculations. It is neither thought nor technics alone that enables the practice of magic. The situation is, even though technical developments and the yearning for magical effects are simultaneously applied when we produce a successful magical performance or a fantastic sci-fi movie, we believe that the real world is composed of things to which natural laws and order can be attributed. We live in peace with this seemingly paradoxical attitude.

(9) Huang&4& &. because we either take magic for the expression of imagination or become so used to the symbolization of magic that we habitually appeal to the temporary “suspension of disbelief.” On the one hand, we tell ourselves that magic is nothing but dexterous manipulation of our senses and that magical belief belongs to the internal need of religion. On the other hand, we secretly wish for magic or some unknown power to help carry out our thoughts, like what we customarily do in a prayer or superstition. The tradition of separating science and religion can be traced back to the seventeenth century, when intellectuals began to set up a mechanical view of nature. And the studies of modern magic are also built upon this perspective to discuss magic in terms of its technical forms, psychological manipulation, and cultural influences. In this way, objects used in a show are seen as mechanical, passive existences once the supernatural power is disregarded. Nevertheless, in life, dreams or any other occasions where chimera roams, we are still tempted to acquiesce to the power of the invisible and to the idea that something in things calls for our attention. The impressive line in Christopher Nolan’s magic movie The Prestige (2006), “You don’t want to see. You want to be fooled,” is the starting point of this thesis. This line shows the audience’s active participation in a magical performance, alluding to the automatic immersion in the loss of rational judgment. Most audiences would hesitate when they are given the choice to be exposed to a magical secret even though they are informed of the deceptiveness of magical tricks. But by what does magic fool and enmesh us, especially in modern times, if its artifice stops being the selling point? If our folly is founded on curiosity and our admiration on the magician’s craftiness that is unattainable for a layman, what does the simultaneous emergence of fear tell us when we witness the transformation of things on stage? Accustomed to the phenomena of things in our life, do we fully accept things as they are, or do we privately take our knowledge with a grain of salt? In the long run of human history, we have created magic and other skills in which the convolution of man and matter is manifested. We constitute our life and experiences by touching upon things. The thesis.

(10) Huang&5& &. follows this thread of thought and begins with a review of some related conceptions in the philosophy of technics.. II.! Literature Review of Technics The sociologist Marcel Mauss relates magic to technics: “Magic is essentially the art of doing things, and magicians have always taken advantage of their know-how, their dexterity, their manual skill. Magic is the domain of pure production, ex nihilo. . . . It has dealt with material things” (175). Aside from the labor to produce necessities of life, magic or other forms of art are used, with manual labor as well, to achieve certain life-based, mental or spiritual qualities. In a practical way, magical art is closely connected with man’s relation with nature. The earthly explorations in the forms of alchemy, astrology, medicine and pharmacy arise from the same technical core as that of magic (Mauss 176), though demystification and modernization have gradually eliminated the traces of their consanguinity. The above technical formulation of magic accentuates man’s relation with the concrete within the metaphysical compound. In his socio-economical discussion of human society, Max Weber defines the exertion of techniques in general: “The ‘technique’ of an action refers to the means employed as opposed to the meaning or end to which the action is . . . oriented” (65). With specific means or skills, human beings perform actions to carry out certain goals. A technique is required when the conditions are not naturally provided to meet the subjective need, and it follows that the technique applied always varies according to the general conditions and individual demands. The ultimate meaning of a technique lies in its function to alter or bypass hindrance. The study of science is viewed in the same vein. The accumulation of scientific knowledge, according to Weber, results from the choice of “rational technique” that is “consciously and systematically oriented to the experience and reflection of the actor” (65)..

(11) Huang&6& &. While techniques are defined to involve all kinds of skill regardless of the difference between species, human beings are believed to be exclusively endowed with the capability to reflect and categorize on past experiences that would be applied later for making plans. For an advocate of scientific reason like Weber, there seems to be no accidental bridging between the observer and the observed as the former (a craftsman, a scientist, or an engineer) dominantly and independently conducts his experiments over the latter. In the first volume of Technics and Time, Bernard Stiegler takes a different stand on the relation between man and matter. He also secures the status of technics in the history of man, stating that technics involves “all the domains of skill,” and thus every human action has something to do with it, including those exclusive of the use of tools, such as behaving and language (93). But through his reading of the French anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan, Stiegler affirms that the appearance of man is synchronous with man’s coupling with matter. Beyond the Neanthropian, Stiegler asserts, “the organization of the cortex [is] genetically stabilized,” and man continues to evolve instead along a technological course. The very first step in man’s technological history, entailed by the unwitting engagement between man and matter, is described graphically: “One must first ask what mirage of the cortex is experienced [s’éprouve], as pathbreaking, in the hardness of flint; what plasticity of gray matter corresponds to the flake of mineral matter; what proto-stage of the mirror is thus installed (135).” Stiegler’s description of the encounter enlivens inert matter. Conventionally we tend to think of things from a condescending perspective, ranking it to be an accessory of man. But according to Stiegler, things have been indispensable in hominization, a process in which “the human invents himself in the technical by inventing the tool—by becoming exteriorized techno-logically” (141). The essence of man, or humanity, is formed in the interaction of man’s interior and exterior. Based on Leroi-Gourhan’s conception, Stiegler coins the term “epiphylogenesis,” applied to the genesis of both technics and humanity, to subvert phylogeny, a process in which a species develops according to features.

(12) Huang&7& &. inherited from its parental lineage. In epiphylogenesis,1 instead, the development of a species represents “structural coupling in exteriorization,” signifying the respective and reflexive transformation between the species and its milieu (158). The development of man is not possible without the discovery and application of things. This conception of man’s appearance in the technical not only blurs the separation between the living and the non-living; man’s ability of anticipation, which is demonstrated in their diversified manners of coupling with things, points to the question of time and speed in every technological relation and constitutes the bulk of Technics and Time. Anticipation, for Stiegler, is realized in man’s foreseeing their own end. “Between life and death,” he says, “existence is what extends itself [Er-streckung] between ‘already’ and ‘not yet’” (5), implying delimited, calculable life span as well as possibilities experienced at every living moment. Such a conception of “having-to-be,” in Stiegler’s words, constitutes the temporality of Dasein, and the same imprint is also displayed in technics, for it is always within limited encountering with matter that a technique is developed. There is no workable blueprint conceived out of materials that the designer has never confronted. The act of anticipation, in terms of technics, takes root in the inevitable unfreedom of the given. But in addition to taking things as tools or the target for analysis, we wonder if autonomy can be one of their inherent characteristics. In my attempt to explore the credulity evoked by magic, the capricious nature of things unrecognized in their givenness attests to be the key of magic, especially when magicians are used to projecting the “not yet” of an object by reviewing its “alreadyness.” While most studies of magic underscore its symbolic meanings, monopolizing the transformation of things as the result of man’s will, this thesis attempts a lateral reading of magic from the ontological aspect. By disengaging magic from its anthropocentric interpretations, this thesis will take the route of relationalism and turn our attention to the man-matter dynamics surfgraacing in the performance of magic that triggers our willing &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& 1. Stiegler applies the Greek prefix “epi” to mean “after” in his coinage..

(13) Huang&8& &. foolishness. This reading will further lead us to reflect on the relation between our thought and the material world. Therefore, instead of asserting the power of magic on the basis of psychological, subjective need, I would like to argue that the occult, unforeseeable reality of potentiality orients and completes the success of magic.. III.! The Object-Oriented Approach The object-oriented approach I am going to take in the thesis does not arise solely from the fact that objects contribute to man’s development of technics. Objects in everyday life seem to be static, passive and tool-like existence, but in magic they are permeated with inaccessible power, altering their appearances in an unpredictable way. The objects used in a magical performance, or props, are capable of producing similar “focused intensity” that Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht perceives in sports events: “what athletes and spectators ‘focus’ upon—as something already present or something yet to come—belongs to the realm of epiphanies, that is to the events of appearance, more precisely to events of appearance that show moving bodies as temporalized form” (150). In magic, the spectator’s focus is riveted more on space than on movements as he foregrounds an object for inspection. With such intensity he strains to stare at the object, trying to make sure that nothing is different from its standard. The focused intensity helps filtrate any form of intervention in the background, including the magician’s deception and distraction tricks. But as the spectator grows more focused and more convinced in the normality of the object, the greater shock would turn him on, throwing him into a chaos of truth and sham. There would be no appearance of epiphanies except for the realization (or doubt) about the object itself. Here I do not intend to give a wrong color to the nature of magic. Magic succeeds, after all, in the artifice of the exquisitely designed props and the magician’s skills rather than any attainment of supernatural power. While the magician performs traits that appear to violate natural law, it is through the operation of an ingenious mechanism that he creates the.

(14) Huang&9& &. illusion. Every surprise is planned ahead, so the beautiful assistant does not have to be attributed with divine power to escape the deadly cut; the magician does not pick the correct card according to his foresight but to mathematics, and his walking across the brick wall has everything to do with geometry. All applications in magic are legitimately reasonable, and each impossible display is genuinely illusive. But only through these transformations and adaptations are we allowed to transcend the constancy that an object is typically attached with so as to speculate on the nature of objects. That is, through the magician’s hands, we break off our settled knowledge and renew the philosophically conventional question: what is behind the object? Western philosophy has contributed greatly to our understanding of things. Since Kant, however, the concept of “thing in itself” has grounded the thinking on a basic division between the unreachable thing and the perceiving subject. Because men inevitably perceive the world through our shared filters,2 what we see is never the world “as it really is” but only the world “as it appears to our senses” (Blumenau). Such a conception leads to the notion of correlation, according to which “we never grasp an object ‘in itself,’ in isolation from its relation to the subject” (Meillassoux 5). In this regard, the objective world we are faced with exists “only as a correlate of our own existence” (Meillassoux 7), which leads to speculative realists’ disapproval of the correlative point of view. By retrieving the pre-critical concern with “the absolute outside,” they aim to break through the bound of subject-object correlation to explore and theorize, this time on the footing of “being entirely elsewhere,” the things around us as well as those beyond our reach (Meillassoux 7). Speculative realism gets its name from its proponents’ dedication “to metaphysical speculation and to a robust ontological realism” in spite of their different approaches and disagreement on some crucial issues (Shaviro, “Introduction” 5), and this commitment to ontological realism establishes their significance in object-oriented studies of ecophilosophy, &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& 2. These filters, or a priori ideas built in the human mind, are Kant’s Concepts and Categories (Blumenau)..

(15) Huang&10& &. philosophy of science, and aesthetics. The advocates of object-oriented ontology (OOO) affirm, on the one hand, that entities are independent from each other with the same possibility of becoming. On the other hand, some of them oppose to the conception that each entity is independent abstraction from others, emphasizing on the relatedness that an entity is able to generate by “prehending” other entities. In this way, all beings in the world are construed as unique, transformable and extensive regarding space and time. There is undeniable connection of the OOO viewing of the world to the idea of becoming, and an outline of Alfred North Whitehead’s conception of objects here may work for the clarification of this thesis. In Process and Reality, like his predecessors who attempt to cope with the essence of matter, Whitehead gives “the final real things” that constitute the world the name of “actual entities,” or “actual occasions.” Although they differ in their significance and function, all actual entities are on the same level (Whitehead 18). Each actual entity is an independent existence and able to form causal or perceptual relations by “prehending” another entity; that is, in Steven Shaviro’s words, through prehension an actual entity “grasps, registers the presence of, responds to, or is affected by another entity” (29). In this light, a prehension “exhibits the most concrete elements” of an actual entity that is prehended; conversely, an actual entity is “a concrescence of prehensions,” suggesting that an actual entity does not exist outside of the reach of others (Whitehead 19, 23). And it is through prehending that an actual entity involves other entities and becomes what it is. The process is extensive and continual, for “the prehension in one subject becomes the objective datum for the prehension in a later subject, thus objectifying the earlier subject for the later subject” (Whitehead 309). Accordingly, prehension is a key term in Whitehead’s philosophy of organism because the nature of every actual entity to prehend other entities forms the basis upon which a society is built.3 &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& 3. The “togetherness of actual entities” is called “nexus” (Whitehead 20). Where there is “a common element of form” aroused among each member of the nexus through prehensions, there is a society in the nexus defined by the common form (34)..

(16) Huang&11& &. It is manifest that Whitehead tends to interpret and map the world according to the relations between entities. Such a theory may be found terrified even in the end of the twenty-first century, but it does correspond to my interest in magic. This thesis argues that to think magic through the object-oriented approach, of which Whitehead’s philosophy serves as a branch, means to revive our metaphysical thinking about the objective world from a relational perspective, and magic plays the role of mediating the metaphysical (of thought) and the actual (of experience). To put it more precisely, magic provides a space where the metaphysical thought about the apparently insubstantial reality of things can really take shape, even if such an epiphany has to take place in an illusion. Whitehead’s philosophy is therefore able to resound in magic in the same way as Georges Méliès, the conjuror and filmmaker, experimented with his discoveries in cinematography: One trick leads to another. In the face of the success of this new style, I set myself to discover new processes, and in succession I conceived dissolves from scene to scene effected by a special arrangement in the camera; apparitions, disappearances, metamorphoses obtained by superimposition on black backgrounds, or portions of the screen reserved for décors. . . . I introduced into the cinema the tricks of machinery, mechanics, optics, prestidigitation etc. With all these processes mixed one with another and used with competence, I do not hesitate to say that in cinematography it is today possible to realise the most impossible and the most improbable things. (“Méliès”) Like the first man learning to use flint in Stiegler’s description, Méliès happened to discover one day that, by pausing the photographing for a short while before resuming it, he could create an extraordinary effect that “a Madeleine-Bastille omnibus change[d] into a hearse and men into women” (“Méliès”). With different mechanical combinations and arrangements, magicians turn the ordinary appearance of an object into another form in which some.

(17) Huang&12& &. impossible possibility is exploded, and all given knowledge is suspended so that the unknown facets of things can be felt and speculated. Things having been long deemed “undifferentiated endurance” come to life in the space of magic. Patricia Pringle suggests that it be the longing “for space to play with us” that instigates people’s passion for magic, especially in the nineteenth century (50). Similarly, my thesis will maintain that our persistent interest in magic has a lot to do with our intuitive desire for participating in the elusiveness of objects. The familiar, seemingly inert existences around us are in themselves an “interplay of clarity and obscurity” (Pringle 59), which only becomes more obscure and mysterious in the operation of light and space. My attempted thesis gropes into the depth of things. It leads the reader to travel through the conception of definiteness to the conception of vagueness. And both of these features are carried by things. In “The Universe of Things,” Steven Shaviro talks about things’ retreat and eruption—the coexisting movements that allows them to be “forever escaping our grasp” (52). A thing retreats by drawing us into “extended referential networks whose full ramifications [we] cannot trace,” and by “bursting forth” its singularity a thing dazzles us so that any definition is difficult to be applied to it (Shaviro, “The Universe” 52). Things in a magical performance reveal both of these two characteristics. When the magician uses an ordinary object collected randomly from a spectator or invites the audience to check his props before the performance, the object is immediately secularized and thus increases the mystique of magic. That is to say, once the props are suspended from the possibility of trickery and show no difference from things in our life, their power is dispersed into everything. Things become a source of terror when we can no longer identify and delineate them, for they “[stretch] well beyond whatever is immediately apparent or present” (Shaviro, “The Universe” 51). On the other hand, things erupt when they “[flaunt] their autonomy” (Shaviro, “The Universe” 52), which often takes place as the props are given human intelligence or mechanic.

(18) Huang&13& &. automatism. Von Kempelen’s Mechanical Turk,4 IBM’s Deep Blue, and Google’s AlphaGo are examples of thinking machines; William Pinchbeck’s “Pig of Knowledge”5 and Robert E. Neale’s “paper crow”6 among others show that animals and even origami may possess rationality. We generally subordinate machines and non-human beings to our will, so panic overwhelms us whenever their abilities to think, evolve, and finally overpower us is learned. Magicians and Hollywood film industry have simulated this human nightmare repeatedly. But frustration should not be our sole impression of things. Shaviro claims that only by feeling an object aesthetically, that is, by feeling it “for its own sake, beyond those aspects of it that can be understood or used,” can we truly appreciate the object “being what it is” (“The Universe” 53; emphasis in original). Moreover, with reference to Whitehead’s conception of “propositions,” which is defined as “tales that perhaps might be told about particular actualities” or “hybrid[s] between pure potentialities and actualities” (Whitehead 256; 185-86), Shaviro states that “aesthetic attraction (and repulsion)” is triggered by the potentiality of a thing (“The Universe” 54). Aside from using or understanding a thing, we feel it along with its potentialities. Our recognition of a thing becomes indistinct and not function-oriented, as Shaviro puts it: “I feel a thing when it affects me or changes me, and what affects me is not just certain qualities of the thing but its total and irreducible existence” (“The Universe” 55). All in all, magic sets the frame within which the undefinable thingness can be detected in a more dramatic fashion. But magic is just a bait, an activator that galvanizes us to prehend things aesthetically, and through prehensions we become what we are. In magic or in this world where every entity is connected with other entities, a rudimentary reading of OOO proves to be congenial with our experiences. Even though it is inevitable to see this approach &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& 4. Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Mechanical Turk was an eighteenth-century automaton that defeated many excellent chess players, including Benjamin Franklin. See Michael Mangan’s Performing Dark Arts, 88-89. 5 See Michael Mangan’s Performing Dark Arts, 82. 6 In this trick, the magician manipulates a paper crow to do the counting. See Robert E. Neale and David Parr’s The Magic Mirror, 113-18..

(19) Huang&14& &. to the interpretation of the world influenced by our categorization, which confirms Kant’s insight into the limitation of man, I think it is still rich in ethical meanings to enact object-oriented consideration for the interrelation between man and things.. IV.! Overview of Chapters The thesis will include discourses on technics, becoming, and potentiality to talk about the elusiveness of things, and the discussion will proceed within the context of modern magic to bring the unnoticeable angles of things to the foreground. The first chapter begins with a brief history of modern magic, focusing on the different roles magic plays in the human history. In the modern period, magic is widely considered as no more than mechanical operations combining a gimmick and sleight of hand. This mechanical view degrades the value of magic as well as the correspondence between man and things. And I try to read magic with an eye to the principles of design and making to demonstrate its foundation on the becoming. Chapter Two focuses on perception and spectatorship. This chapter talks about how the spectator of magic participates in a show actively, even autonomously, while he may also resist being captivated by the magic spell. In this way, vision functions both as a catalyzer and a regulator of the spectator’s potential becoming. And I suggest that at times, only by dismissing the rational eye can we be bathed in the liveliness of things. Chapter Three begins with the discussion of virtuality. The virtual is intrinsic in all beings, and it is also found in our technical relation with things. With the help of modern photoelectric technologies, we are capable of connecting with the unreal, hence expanding our flexibility and experience of the world. On this ground, I talk about the capability for having aesthetic experience enhanced in viewing magic and explain the importance of feeling in our relation with the material world. And I conclude my thesis by directing it to object-oriented ontology, in which our ethical and aesthetical consideration of the world is discussed in desubjectification, to expect a possible re-evaluation of magic..

(20) Huang&15& &. Chapter One Magic as Mechanical Operation The world is constituted by numerous things. Ever since the beginning of the universe, things compose a symphony partitioned by events of creation and destruction, proceeding synchronistically without the sign of coming to an end. For human beings, the encounters with things form our history and experience. We cannot imagine a waking moment not surrounded by the existence of things. Spatially and temporally, things anchor our existence. We become aware of our position in the relation with things, and we mark our progress, individually as well as collectively, on the change of things. Most important of all, things trigger man’s technics and chronicle the technological developments, and they confront us with the new and unknown. In the introduction, I have already mentioned Stiegler’s wonder about the Neanthropian’s coupling with flint, the first thing with which human beings launched their technical exploration and established the human civilization. Since then, men have evolved along with their engagement with things. The Greeks termed craft as tekhnē (τέχνη), or “technics” in modern English, which contains both epistemological and practical virtues and has been used from Socrates onwards “for thinking about the connections between reason, ends and action” (Brennan). This definition sketches a general picture of technical activities that are constituted by a series of reasoning and planning in the operator, pointing out why human beings usually consider themselves the monopolies of technics. Animals, on the other hand, do possess the ability to learn and carry out certain skills, but their overall accomplishment is limited. Animals’ technical activities do not make up a system, an aggregate composed of different measures to be followed step by step to reach an end. And measures in such an aggregate are generally open to replacement or change. Man’s world is full of these technical systems. Greek mythology sees technics as a complement to man’s deficiency of survival.

(21) Huang&16& &. abilities. Through the story of Prometheus, in which man is bestowed fire and the skill for metalwork from Prometheus as the compensation for Epimetheus’ fault, technicity is interpreted as “an ambiguous, stolen, all too human reflection of power/potential” that turns out to be the foundation of religion and the polis (Stiegler 190). For the ancient Greeks, the origin of technics suggests men’s dissociation from the divine as well as their inevitable demise, but at the same time it also reveals their resemblance and closeness with the supernatural powers. Technicity is reminiscent of mortality while retaining the immanence of immortality. And religious worship, through which men are able to share a community with the Immortals technically, indirectly shows this combination of men’s awe in and need for the divine power. In addition to the involvement of human agency, things are another constituent that propels the formation of a technical system. People cope with things to overcome obstacles and satisfy their needs. In magic, the performances of art founded on deceptive skills, things are practically used as props to create mental and optical illusions; they also evoke human imagination and make up the performance in a dynamic way. Moreover, as I will describe in Chapter Two and Three, the confluence of men and things in magic prompts a sense of virtuality and accounts for the essence of magic. For now in this chapter, I will briefly review the development of magic to reflect on the mechanical aspect of this art. By doing so, I will show that while technicity is largely found in the operation of mechanisms, it cannot be reduced to mechanisticity. According to the Oxford Dictionaries, “mechanism” is defined both as “a system of parts working together in a machine” and as “a natural or established process by which something takes place or is brought about.” This definition corresponds to the performance of magic in three senses: from the angle of designed props, magic tricks largely operate with ingenious devices whose unity contributes to a mechanical environment; from a full view, the props as well as the mechanical environment allow the magician to easily reproduce a.

(22) Huang&17& &. program once he learns the secret behind the trick; artistically, the magician has to undergo repetitious training and practice in order to perform tricks in a natural and flowing style as if his cooperation with the props is the result of spontaneity. Magic as an art of deception in which the magician does his trick with the application of specialized props, gestures and skills relies largely on hidden mechanisms to create illusions. In this sense of being mechanical, magic is not different from other technical production in which objects, means and forces are at man’s service for putting the blueprint in his mind into practice. At times, the magician includes the human body in his performative mechanism, taking some of man’s automatic, reflexive actions as expectable plots that can be put to use in his performance. In this way, organisms become mechanized. The spectator’s observation and reaction are also ingredients to be anticipated and manipulated, and therefore he is also considered as part of the mechanical scheme. Moreover, shouldn’t the magician’s dexterous gestures, witty words and prompt response be considered indivisible from the whole work? Only by being as precise and instantaneous as possible can the magician work in coordination with all other elements perfectly and perform the trick as planned, which entails the magician’s body being programmed as well. Constituted by these elements with different grades of suppleness, magic embodies mechanisticity to some extent—a requisite for most human activities—even though the technicity implicit in its operation engenders more possibilities than the typical conception of mechanical dreariness may contain.. I.!. The Use of Things in Magic: Before the Age of Science The divergence of a thing from its original, practical functions is an important element. in magic and religious rituals, art, and scientific invention. Primitive people associated the uncommon attributes of a thing with magical power and used them to control weather or help with their life on the ground. For example, in James George Frazer’s anthropological record, the Indians of Peru linked the stones with the likeness of maize to the function in the growth.

(23) Huang&18& &. of maize and used other stones with the appearances of potatoes or cattle to benefit the increase of their crops and livestock (33). In this regard, a primitive magician simultaneously served as a scientific explorer, and the technics he possessed varied according to his discovery of the qualities of things. Basically, what he acted out in magic directly corresponded to his appeal in life; by furnishing things with meanings or associating man’s life to fluctuations in Nature, the magician was able to have an influence on the world when he made a change on the counterpart at hand. With his magic “props” as the medium, he could connect with the world as every ingredient in the performance had its correlate in great Nature beyond his direct control. As science and technology developed, the magician also learned to turn various things to be the materials for magic. By implementing ideas onto things, man successfully created various tools to compensate for his limited ability and realize his caprice. As man shifted from nomadic life to settlement, technology developed with greater complexity to help with his life and even provide pleasure. Thence started secular magic, an activity aimed at visual enjoyment that was different from functionality and symbolism pursued in primitive magic. Unlike primitive magic, which appeared in many regions, Western magic was believed to have originated from Ancient Egypt. The cause, according to Simon During, cannot be entirely attributed to the Egyptians’ occult belief or their mastery of supernatural forces. Instead, he speculates that it could be by gathering “the most sophisticated special effects of the period” that the Egyptian temples became the key position of magic development, which was later dispersed to Greece and Rome. In the third century before Christ, Ctesibius (fl. C. 270 BCE) is said to have invented many amazing hydraulic devices. These include water organs and other automatic contrivances, such as “blackbirds singing by means of waterworks, and angobatae, and figures that drink and move and other things that have been found to be pleasing to the eye and the ear.” Hero of Alexandria.

(24) Huang&19& &. (fl. 62 CE) showed an interest in apparatuses whose mechanisms were concealed, and whose effects were more astonishing than their causes. His Pneumatics contains a recipe for the magic water jar from which either wine or water can be poured . . . . His Catoptrics describes magic mirrors in which spectators saw themselves upside down, with three eyes, etc, and others in which Pallas springs from the head of Zeus. (5-6) These mechanical devices exhibited the highly developmental progress of technics at that time. By possessing knowledge about astrology, pneumatics, hydraulics and other sciences, contemporary scientists and artisans were capable of devising extraordinary apparatus to impress the ruler. Interestingly, unlike primitive magicians who followed the Law of Similarity to act upon things in order to procure the same effect, ancient Romans and Greeks might begin creating their automata in the shape of natural creatures in the same manner as young children who obtain the subject matter from their surroundings.7 Moreover, while it is not clear whether the “magic mirrors” were concave and convex, this description shows that people at that time had already learned about the properties of mirrors and the possible transformations achieved through the use of them. In a time when the deity was still considered to reign over the ebb and flow of the world and control the destinies of humankind, the learned priests used scientific knowledge to turn themselves into wonder-workers. Servius, the writer living in the fourth-century Rome, explicated how the mysterious altar fires were produced: “[with] pans of burning coals concealed under the slotted tops of altars. . . . When oil or wine libations were poured on sacrificial heaps surrounded by dry wood, the flammable liquid would have reached the coals through the openings in the surface, causing tongues of fire to leap up immediately, igniting the saturated material” (Christopher 14). Hundreds of years before Servius’s time, Hero of Alexandria had already made the mysterious temple doors based on pneumatics with the &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& 7. The Law of Similarity indicates that an effect can be produced through imitation (Frazer 11)..

(25) Huang&20& &. same purpose to evoke religious piety: One arrangement was based on an airtight metal box concealed at the top of an altar. Heat from the fire expanded the air in the container, forced it through a tube into a large globe filled with water. As pressure mounted, the liquid was siphoned off into a bucket suspended in an underground chamber. Two chains went from the handle of the bucket to a pair of posts extending down from the hinged sides of the doors. The increasing weight of the water caused the bucket to descend, pulling the far ends of the chains that had been wound around the posts. As the posts turned the doors opened. (14; see fig. 1) From the spectator’s perspective, the spontaneous combustion of the altar fires and the automatic doors worked under God’s power. They delivered messages of His invisible yet glaring existence and His boundless power. Hidden from the spectator, the operations were coated with the hue of mystique, while in fact they were constitutions of natural forces and mechanisms not uncommon to architectural and scientific application. Vitruvius, the Roman author, architect and engineer in his multi-volume work De architectura affirms the influence of astrology on the invention of mechanical devices: “[A]ll machinery is derived from nature, and is founded on the teaching and instruction of the revolution of the firmament” (qtd. in Thorndike 1: 187). As early as ancient Rome and ancient Greece, artisans and scientists had demonstrated that clever arrangement of natural elements could elicit feelings of awe in the spectator..

(26) Huang&21& &. Fig. 1. Hero of Alexandria’s mysterious temple doors; Milbourne Christopher and Maurine Christopher 18.. The Middle Ages continued to witness the use of wires, pipes, mirrors, springs, pulleys, geared wheels and trap doors in the theater, while the Catholic authority tended to label “the use of illusion and pretence in the service of theatre, juggling and puppetry” as a form of deception (Butterworth 131) even though their religion was partly built on manifestations of God’s mighty power through bogus exertion of miracles. Still, some.

(27) Huang&22& &. undisclosed mechanisms were applied in religious plays to codnvey symbolic meanings. For example, with the device constituted by cords, an idler, pulleys, cranks, two pairs of lazy tongs and a crossbar secretly attached, an artificial dove would “‘descend with its wings extended’ and return to God ‘flapping’ its wings,” signifying the coming down of the Holy Spirit (122; see fig. 2). In a spectator’s account, the artificial dove was taken to be a toy. Other mechanical devices created around the period did not have the possible magic charm, either. They often appeared as accessories in popular or religious plays in which the horrific, uncanny atmosphere was not provided. A spectator’s reflection on a puppet show reveals it to be nothing akin to an illusory deceit: “[N]o type of dance was not imitated by them, gesturing in marvellous ways with their head, legs, feet, arms, and in such various manners that frankly I confess that I do not understand the method of such artifice . . . but that is no marvel. That, indeed, was beautiful, because the dances and gestures used to fit with the measures of a song” (sic; qtd. in Butterworth 133).. Fig. 2. The artificial dove used in a religious play in the Middle Ages; Butterworth 123..

(28) Huang&23& &. The application of apparatus has always been the key to magic. With a special knife, magicians in the Middle Ages were able to wound the skin and make artificial blood to drop, which can still be seen in the twentieth-century magician’s repertoire with a different adaptation (Butterworth 169; see fig. 3). These cases show that the application of apparatus was a common phenomenon in different types of public performance. With the help of a magician’s play and concealment, however, an ordinary device was allied to deception. Before the Enlightenment, when most people were still restricted from the pursuit of knowledge, ingenious mechanisms could be found in a charlatan’s trickery as well as in entertainment. With knowledge about things and what they were adequate for, practitioners applied them to different purposes, among which magic performance was an example.. Fig. 3. The special knives used in magic shows to thrust through the arm and cut the nose; Butterworth 169..

(29) Huang&24& &. Magic is one manifestation of human beings’ fascination for novelty. Even before the history entered the Enlightenment, people had known that secular magic was meant to be entertaining and seldom confused it with reality. The Enlightenment led to a cultural shift by prioritizing science and reason, and the general recognition of things as inert existences became even more secured with the scientific emphasis upon direct observation. Accompanied by scientific discoveries and technological inventions, on the other hand, the development of magic also testified to man’s inextinguishable curiosity about the complex world. As magic preserved man’s awe of the unknown, throughout modern times it also displayed our knowledge and power over various things and natural forces. Until today, magic still expresses our interest in the material world.. II.! Science and Magic: After the Enlightenment As magic gradually broke away from the control of Christian religion, it turned to be involved in another religion—the religion of science. By the 1720s, people regarded magic tricks at best as domestic entertainment, and magic performances were seldom found in the public space because of its implication in supernaturalism and fraud. As a showman, Issac Fawkes (c.1690-1731) was the first that successfully commercialized magic by explicitly referring to its inherent trickery (During 80-81). In addition to his intentional exposition, the social and cultural conditions were pertinent to the disenchantment of magic. Public exhibition of magic tricks became more legitimate, and entertainment was affordable for more and more people. The publication of trickbooks also helped demystify magic and disseminate it as a diversion. Moreover, by fusing the display of complex, exclusively elite type of automata with the performance of tricks, Fawkes turned magic into an assemblage that “placed the exhibit . . . into the commodity form” and veered the art further into commercialization (During 82). Modern entertainment magic gradually took shape and broke.

(30) Huang&25& &. away from its conventional implication in the supernatural. Among the cultural shifts, the “rational recreation” movement in the late eighteenth century was another expressive force that further distinguished secular magic from its doubles. A pedagogical movement responding to the Enlightenment spirit, rational recreation “aimed at linking conjuring tricks to science and mathematical instruction” (During 87). Some magicians dubbed themselves “professors,” and magic was entrusted with the function of education because its characters of being “facile, bland, delightfully alluring, captivating” could be used to encourage the learning of science (qtd. in During 87). Inversely, the development of scientific education stimulated more efforts to be put in magic entertainments. In the late 1840s, apparatus became so skillfully made that a magician earned his fame for the bare use of complex apparatus. Several magicians, among whom was Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin (1805-1871), son of a successful French watchmaker and later became one of the greatest magicians in the twentieth century, built their reputation with ingenious automata that blurred the line between tricks and nontricks, man and machinery. 8 From another perspective, as magic grew to be more dependent on the invention of apparatus, it also tested the magician’s expressivity and mastery of the show—he had to be more precise about positioning, pace every movement and be more tactical in the expressive details. Robert-Houdin admitted that magicians had become “actors playing the part of magicians” as well as experts in sleights and mechanical effects” (qtd. in During 112), revealing the lack of true wonder behind the guise of acting and designs. In the contemporary era, the mystique of magic has faded in that knowledge about science and technics can be obtained without difficulty, and due to the same reason, the magician finds it more challenging to protect his business. During 1997 to 1998, the Fox network broadcast Breaking the Magician’s Code: Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed, a TV series that profited on audiences’ curiosity by &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& 8. One of Robert-Houdin’s automata, Auriol, was made in the form of a trapeze artist and could “[swing] in time to music, and [cling] to his trapeze solely with legs.” Such sophisticated mechanisms invited the spectator to surmise whether a human operator was involved in the performance (During 121)..

(31) Huang&26& &. practicing the opposite of magic—the exposition of mechanisms and skills used in conventional staged illusions. Not to mention that a layman can buy various sets of magic props in a magic store and learn magic routines from books and the Internet nowadays. To learn about magic—the art that used to be dominated by the prestigious few—is comparable to the acquirement of any other technique for which hard practice compensates for the deficiency of talent and permits success. It is clear that the enlightened thought stakes out a new territory of magic. With the spread of scientific reason, a magician can no longer hawk his skills under the guise of supernature. The old belief in an anthropocentric universe is disavowed and replaced by the new belief in science, according to which the world can be rationalized as heaps of theorems and mathematical principles unaffected by observation. The same atmosphere also encourages people to entrust their judgement to rational thinking. The prevalence of rationality results in a switch of view of the universe, and the conventional regard of God as a personal agent whose conduct on earth carries significance is replaced by the idea of “impersonal orders,” which describes the cosmos as “ruled by causal laws, utterly unresponsive to human meanings . . . like a machine” (Taylor, A Secular Age 280). Strictly speaking, the mechanical perspective can be applied to a great amount of activities in both nature and culture. In magic, undeniably, the performance is established on a series of mechanical operations. Through the function of the mechanism of magic, curiously, the spectator may acquire unexpected surprise, fear, and pleasure not to be experienced in rationalities, and liveliness seems to be restored in the renewed perception of the world. Magic, on the one hand, manifests the perfect combination of controllable elements, while simultaneously it evokes feelings that cannot be verified. In this respect, it is worthwhile to discuss magic in terms of technics and to speculate on the ghostly vitality involved in its technical and technological expressions. The universal principles scientists and anthropologists locate in their studies can merely account for the phenomenon of magic, and.

(32) Huang&27& &. when we impose them on the performance, the flow of life is lost in the analysis. Does this denote that the flow of life is not to be found in mechanical operation, and that only in living beings, religion and art can life be sensed? Is it possible to tell a story about the life-signaled transition of energy, matter and human agency through the demonstration of magic?. III.! The Mechanical Operation in Magic Magic is composed of intelligent design and on-stage presentations of movements and speech. If the components of a trick are extracted from its composition and given a structural analysis, no one would admit the possibility of any magic. Rather, with the application of well-designed-and-tested devices and repeated practices, magic is easily conceived as the outcome of mechanical operation through which manual dexterity, intended distraction and evocation of illusion are achieved. It seems to be self-evident, especially under the sway of Enlightenment thinking, to picture all realities and beings as working in the course of a machine. The perfection of machinery can be a wonder for anyone who is inquisitive. The complex construction and indifference to most externalities of machines cause amazing impression on the eighteenth-century mind. In Emile, Rousseau makes a comment on the instrumentality of science, “This whole apparatus of instrument and machines displeases me. The scientific atmosphere kills science. Either all these machines frighten a child or their appearance divides and steals the attention he ought to pay to their effects” (176). Instead, true science as well as the respectable enlightened spirit, for him, lies in the other way round, “I want us to make all our machines ourselves, and I do not want to begin by making the instrument prior to the experiment. . . . I prefer that our instruments be less perfect and accurate and that we have more distinct ideas about what they ought to be and the operations which ought to result from them” (Rousseau 176). In his nostalgia for the traditional way of production, Rousseau highlights the significance and independence of reason, which suffices.

(33) Huang&28& &. one to be in the vanguard of his exploration of the world and allows him to understand the working behind every entity. And he detests machines for the reason that they simplify the process between causes and effects, leaving nothing for the operator to ponder on. Blocked by the self-independent working system of the machine, he looks forward to realizing the interrelation of different parts inside the machine. For Rousseau, the science-annihilating atmosphere points to the precision and perfection which an instrumental operation aims at and never fails to attain, while the traditional hand-making, by contrast, does induce errors and miscalculation more frequently and thereby allow the maker to grope for the target by his own efforts. What makes he feel worried is not so much the regularity resulting from instrumental operation as the inevitable loss of touch upon the irregular in the process, which accounts for what the machine is made for and how it is made to function. Rather than having the end result directly yielded by the machine, in Rousseau’s opinion, one should participate in the operation of the machine to know about the causes and effects involved in the process. Apart from the efforts to be invested in the observation and analysis of a machine, he emphasizes on making, a process involving experiments and trials on the possibilities emerging from encounters between the maker and his materials. For Rousseau, the perfection of a machine prevents man from participating in the production that should have taken place in his direct relation with the world, an original relation that he longs to recuperate in handiwork. It is easy to attribute the correctness of a machine to a refined scheme. From the standpoint of an observer, what causes an instrument to function and what it is capable of doing are preceded by the acknowledgement of design, which implies an objective set before the exercise of making. Similarly, the observer may find it difficult not to see magic as framed work, for magic has always aimed at pretending the real. Magicians work on formulas, such as appearance and disappearance, transformation, integrity and disintegration, movement and stasis, connection and separation, etc., to conjure impossible scenes opposed.

(34) Huang&29& &. against reality. That is to say, ahead of the creation of a magic trick is the blueprint that adumbrates as well as provides conditions for the magician’s work. Like any technician, architect, sculptor, or the Neanthropian who discovered the use of flint, the magician as a craftsman applies materials and principles within his scope. He knows what effects would be the most perversive to the spectator’s perception as he aims to reverse what is real. At the proper moment the magician may implant gags or tension to enhance the drama and attach meanings to the performance. In any case, a staged illusion begins from the moment the idea of it is generated. By following the procedure of design and production, a practitioner of magic can reenact any great magician’s tricks. Such are what a handbook of magic tricks tries to teach us. To a certain extent, one can even emulate and reproduce the artistry by following instructions. The revelations of the secrets of magic on TV shows instill in us the same thing—that practicing magic is not more complicated than making an origami item only if you follow the instructions. All these conveniences invite the observer to infer that the practice of magic is procedural, mechanical and inflexible. Rousseau’s argument suggests that operations conducted by machines are predestined to produce desirable results, while man can yield the same outcome through labor and practice. Here the mold of making is considered as the employment of materials, tools and skills to carry out the design. In this vein, the output is predetermined before any exercise is enacted, and making foresees a fixed reaction process between matter and form. However, the special attention to causes and effects, typical in man’s view of technics, excludes from consideration an entity’s possible relations with other impacts during the process of formation. Making, argues Tim Ingold, concerns not a one-way “imposition of preconceived form on raw material substance” but “a process of correspondence . . . the drawing out or bringing forth of potentials immanent in a world of becoming” (31). From this view point, preconceived form is displaced from the center of the productive scheme, its position replaced with unpredictable trajectories along which materials travel. In this regard, the.

(35) Huang&30& &. course of making is “not so much an assembly as a procession, not a building up from discrete parts into a hierarchically organized totality but a carrying on—a passage along a path in which every step grows from the one before and into the one following, on an itinerary that always overshoots its destinations” (Ingold 45; emphasis in original). There is no finality in making, in other words, and even if there has to be an end to the journey, the possibilities brought out from engagements between the maker and materials during different phases go beyond what was desired for the fulfillment of the design. Ingold’s sketch of the process of making depicts the composition of a magic performance. In Hiding the Elephant, the magician Jim Steinmeyer recalls his experience as a magic designer of a Broadway show, and he was assigned to reproduce David Devant’s Mascot Moth, a legendary illusion that had not been seen for forty years. With scant cues concerning the technical details from Devant’s book, he and another helper tried hard to piece together those “coarse bits of metal and fabric” and integrate them “into a smooth, dreamlike vision” (222). During the process of their rehearsal, they “worked through the cues mechanically, again and again,” finally figuring out a way to “combine the apparatus with the people” (223). With a rough picture of the illusion in mind, the designer feels the textures of metal and fabric before he is able to shape them to be a workable apparatus. Also, he examines the sizes of the apparatus and the people, experimenting with different forms of combination to carry out the illusive effect. In the process, he may find that the materials are incongruous to each other and bring uncertainty to the performance. Replacing the improper materials or modifying the representation can be an amendment. In any case, instead of fixing each piece of component to its predetermined position, the designer figures out a feasible solution in the process of handling the materials. In the end, the production may not be identical to that printed in the guidebook. The formation of a magic trick undergoes adjustments, and every single performance ultimately inherits from the original design and turns itself to be a replica. The significance of.

(36) Huang&31& &. making diminishes in the reproduction, one might say, for it is constructed on nothing more than mechanical execution. And not only in magic but in other expressions of art do we question about the value of a replica. However, the force that sets a mechanical execution into motion is no less than that to be found in the initial production, for in every piece of work the practitioner recapitulates the anticipation of the future that prods the creative process. Unlike the designer, who “deal[s] in hopes and dreams . . . something that is unknown in advance” (Ingold 71), the practitioner goes after the model while bringing forth another “plane of operation” formed by the new synergy as potentials between him and materials “click together” (Massumi 39). In magic, each gesture is concerned with the creation of a plane of operation. Take the palming for example. It is about the pertinent contraction of the palm muscles to keep the coin at the base of the palm, while the back of the hand remains flexible and looks natural. To effect the coordination, both the palm and the coin resolve their respective potentials: the palm does not do gripping or overstraining; the coin is at the tolerable temperature to be held, and its uneven surface causes appropriate friction that contributes to its flips and suspension in the palm. They fit in with each other when the harmony takes place, and neither the palm nor the coin serves as the accommodator to facilitate their combination. In a magic trick, each plane of operation accounts for the best adaptation, the fullest resolution of contradictory dimensions, and the most stable equilibrium among potentials. On the stage, a magic trick is always liable to failure or exposure. Even with full preparation, no magician can guarantee that nothing goes wrong during the performance and that his assistant, the stagehands, the props and even himself will not lapse from the previous standard. The discourses on making and the potentials engaged in its dynamics illuminate the reading of magic, suggesting that even in mechanical execution both man and things are involved in the becoming of their respective potentials, though in a rather contained way as their potentials are dismissed or reduced in the reproductive activities; not to mention that in.

(37) Huang&32& &. the course of design, the potentials in imagination and materials always rise above the designer’s anticipation. As an expression of human creativity, magic shows that when it is detached from the symbolic meanings informed by the human subject, its mechanical system will be defined not by any predetermined promise but by its rolling becoming..

(38) Huang&33& &. Chapter Two The Modern Enchantment of Magic In the first chapter, I pursue the translation of Ingold’s conception of making into magic. Through my interpretation, the idea of making transforms the typical view of mechanical operation as monotonous action by recognizing the force of becoming in it. In magic, the magician’s coordination with the props should be read as mutual formation, and this aspect of reading prevents any element engaged in the formation from being seen as non-active existence. Another participant liable to be considered passive is the spectator, whose action and reaction are employed by the magician as part of the illusion. While the spectator’s active generation of illusions can be explained through neuroscientific researches, such accounts are generally considered reductive with the spectator serving as an automatically responsive part of the device. Though it is difficult to incorporate a detailed description of the human cognitive system in this thesis, I try to sketch out its autonomous nature in response to the theorization widely approved by many scientists that the human body works in the same way as a machine. In a stance that does not oppose science to the humanities, this chapter aims to capture in the spectator’s malleable but active perception man’s ability to transcend the demystified world. In magic, the spectator is able to revive the sense of wonder, which has been diminished since the scientific revolution. He is temporarily relieved from the boring, inflexible life conducted by human power over nature and becomes reconnected with the feeling of fear and shock. In such an experience of the impossible, perception is no doubt the beginning of imagination, which has the power similar to primitive people’s belief in magic. To a certain extent, perception functions in a way no less magical than the magician’s trickery, and its potency to transform or reconstruct the view in sight contributes to the formation of some staged illusions. According to Stephen L. Macknik, Susana Martinez-Conde, and Sandra Blakeslee, the neuroscientists who conduct researches on the operation of human.