"When we consider that worlds of meaning (nationalities, identities, social narratives, calendrical devices, metaphors, idioms, etc.…) are crafted rather than discovered, we are thinking as magicians. When we accept them as natural, we are essentially fools, in the sense that a fool is the audience, the innocent, the enchanted. There are no pure magicians, and there are no pure fools: life is a turbulence of guile and belief. We need folly on one level to entertain the idea that our language means something, and we need magic to produce those meanings. Thinking about magic, writing about magic, re-presenting magic changes magic by feeding its image right back into the maelstrom. Magic cannot be pinned down because it dwells at the threshold of our capacity to represent. It is in the volatile space that connects to our various drives, before we have come to terms with, before we have named and ordered them. Magic hovers around the body, haunting the flesh of things: neither completely manifest, nor completely abstract. It pertains to acts carried out through the medium of communication, presentation, and performance; acts performed invisibly, such that the results wind up appearing spontaneous and effortless. Charms, sleights, incantations, advertisements, symbolisms, anthems, evocations, projections, codes, and secrets: tools to fabricate worlds. All the fields of magic converge on this point. Magic is the art of hidden causation."
The Art of Hidden Causation - Peter Duchemin
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