On Illusions and Assassination Attempts

On Illusions and Assassination Attempts

Sawyer Macres

July 15, 2024

The Trump assassination attempt looked staged for many of us watching online. I’ll be the first to admit that when I saw the livestream footage I immediately thought it was a poorly acted hoax. The Reagan footage, though brief, was much more cinematic. Assassination attempts are not often televised, and I had imagined that if something like this were to occur it would look less synthetic. What added to my reaction was the fact that Trump’s ear looked fully in-tact, despite the blood—which many people had declared fake in various comment sections. “Mike Tyson’s bite is more powerful than a sniper rifle!” some will say, in comparing the damage between Trump’s ear and Evander Hollyfield’s.

Before hearing the news that the wound was caused by the glass shards from a teleprompter, I couldn’t get over the fact that—if indeed this wasn’t a hoax—that the shooter had missed in a manner most advantageous to Trump’s campaign—he gets the blood and the glory! Such a story hearkens back to the mythologies of America’s canonical heroes like George Washington at Monmouth, who emerged victorious and unscathed at the helm of the battlefield even though the general’s coat was shredded with bullet holes. Who could have survived wearing that coat?

Members of the Right cry, “divine intervention!” in the same places the Left cries, “hoax!” But in the face of such an event we are nevertheless confronted with the capacity for our desire to believe in something. Both outlooks demand a cunning magician.

When Freud inquired into the future of an illusion, he was talking about religion and its place in the future of civilization. The question nevertheless sounds like something a bored audience member asks at a magic show: what’s the future of these illusions? When will this magician learn some new tricks? For a satisfactory answer, however, the audience member must, in a like-minded fashion to Freud, ask a more preliminary question: why do magic tricks work in the first place?

For all intents and purposes, there are two kinds of people in this world: those who enjoy magic tricks and those who do not. Both parties usually agree on the fact that magic does not exist, but one party enjoys the experience of being duped—of temporarily encountering the gap between knowledge and perception, the moment of (dis)belief. It’s a banal but nevertheless important point to note that magic tricks only work insofar as audience members have common expectations with regards to what they expect to perceive based on their knowledge about the world. Knowledge can be considered here as the understood conditions of possibility while perception can be imagined as the raw data of immediate experience.

The successful magic trick ruptures the expectations that knowledge has given to perception. The successful magic trick thrusts the audience member toward a limit, caught momentarily in the pleasurable throes of belief. The audience member must for a moment declare however silently to one’s self—like Decartes, perhaps—“I think, therefore I am,” a temporary indulgence in the sublimity of belief, having evacuated the hierarchy of thought’s content, humbled before the pure form of thought itself—thinking. My doubt is my greatest certainty. This is the limit-point of a signifier as well. We could say, as in the case of a religious believer’s conception of God, that the utterance of something like “God is God” is the very run-in with what Jacques Lacan calls the Master Signifier—the purest encounter with it, at once so empowering and debasing. “How does the magician do it? It’s not possible, but nevertheless I react as though it is. I just don’t know how the trick works.” For a moment, the audience is delightfully thrust into belief.

Of course, not all magic tricks involve “tricks” in a traditional sense. This point complicates the matter. When someone goes to a magic show they sign up for a kind of pseudo-event, in the sense that a magic show must repeatedly elicit the same rupture: newness, surprise, alterity, etc. Herein lies the contradiction at the heart of the magic show, the pro-wrestling match, the haunted house, or even the psychoanalyst’s office: how can someone expecting surprise experience surprise?

The magician David Blaine attempts to provide an answer. In regards to the conditions for magic, there are the kinds of magic tricks that involve the sleight-of-hand, for example, and then there are some magic tricks that involve a subverting of the audience’s expectation for a trick. Such is the case with the “magic trick” where Blaine stabs an ice pick through his hand. While the sleight-of-hand trick generally rouses the question of how—how did the magician pull my card off the top of the deck? The latter “trick” elicits a negative. It’s the kind of trick that works precisely because there is no trick. While we might initially think the ice pick “trick” rouses the suspicion of an audience member through eliciting a how—insofar as one might mistake the ice pick poking through Blaine’s hand for a practical illusion, “how does he do it?”—the ice pick trick only reaches its full effect after the audience member realizes that the ice pick is indeed not an illusion. In the linked video above from eight years ago, Blaine says to Kanye while the ice pick rips through the palm of the magician’s hand, “this is what they want to see, Kanye. Ultimately in magic, that’s what people care about. It’s that—see?”

But what is this “it” that Blaine is referring to here? In the case of the ice pick trick, the gap between knowledge and perception that the magician is allegedly responsible for creating is abdicated to the audience member, who becomes complicit in the experience of the illusion by his desire for it. How so? For sleight-of-hand tricks, the gap which we might as well call “it” concerns an epistemological question. “It” occurs through the point at which the magician was able to pull the wool over an audience member’s eyes, conjuring the antithetical result in spite of the audience’s expectations. There is a knowledge to be had that the audience member does not have, and the mystery involves the magician’s cunning performance. Even though the audience member does not know how the trick works, he only knows this because he also knows that the magician has performed a sleight-of-hand.

If the audience member found out how the trick worked, the effect would dissolve. But since Blaine does not have a trick up his sleeve, the audience must confront their desire for the trick. Blaine is no longer a magician, but a madman. The effect produced by a gap between knowledge and perception no longer belongs merely to the work of the cunning magician, but to the work of the audience member. “How is this not a trick?” the audience member asks. The question reveals not so much the desire for knowledge, but the desire for belief—to instead believe that Blaine has some trick up his sleeve that’s creating the illusion of pictured hand, when in reality the” trick” works because the actor adheres to a cold, analytical, sterile approach at stabbing an ice-pick through his hand. Blaine’s remark to Kanye (“this is what they want to see… It’s that—see?”) in a sense refers to the inner workings of the magic trick that the audience member both wants to see but also doesn’t. The magic trick works inside-out: because there is no sleight-of-hand, the audience demands for one.