Abstract

This essay describes an art method of trickery which employs feats of misdirection, mimicry, and suggestion to conjure illusion. These magical skills revive the body as the locus of semiotic exchange, in opposition to writing as the abstraction of meaning which has generated the postmodern conception of  technological difference. This essay argues that postmodern difference has been recently appropriated by the posthuman movement as an expression of beyond-human sentience. This beyond-human sentience acknowledges the agency of more-than-human agents, which exceeds human knowing, and thereby produces an animate semiosis capable of hijacking anthropocentric worldviews during feats of misdirection and miracles of metamorphosis. This essay shows how this possibility has been exorcised from modern experience but can be recovered by apprenticeship to beyond-humans.

Keywords

semiosis, derrida, magic, posthumanism, postmodernism, posthuman, difference, beyond-human, performance magic, performance

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