Accompanying Keith Thomas's account of its defeat by scientific rationality, supernatural magic, which I designate magic1, receives scholarly attention denied the stigmatized magic2—stage magic and the “gulling” practices popularized by Tondon's con artists and pickpockets, who exploited distraction through sleights of hand, body, language, and thought. As Othello's paratheatrical “entertainment unconscious,” competing and collaborating with theater, magic2 informs the play's sensationalism, gull's gallery, source-tale revisions, and transformation of much traditional tragedy into a genre less about epistemology than about perception. Practicing early modern magicians' fundamentals—conveyance (legerdemain, misdirection) and confederacy—and exposing his own tricks, the entertainer-villain Iago's tactics and handkerchief prop illuminate phenomena such as “inattentional blindness,” important for cognitive psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and performance. His “helpmeet” wife and apprentice Emilia emulates his misdirecting visual and conversational skills, until their team, echoing a celebrity magician-and-animal partnership, finally implodes. Situated between Montaigne's and Adorno's views on distraction, Othello transforms wonder from tragic affect into the capitalist distraction pleasure of a discursive entertainment revolution. Its hero-dupe himself adopts magic2 technology for a spectacular suicide—arguably the suicide of tragedy's tradition.
The Cinema of Exposure: Spiritualist Exposés, Technology, and the Dispositif of Early Cinema
