Metamagic: An Introduction (A Guide to Using Magic as a Medium For Discourse)

The art of magic has reached a crisis point. It is without question that the art of magic has failed to achieve the legitimacy and relevance that other art forms possess so easily. Why? Is it because there are so many “bad” magicians out there? If left to the magic community, the answer to this question would be a definitive “Yes!” I’m much more skeptical. If all art is a field where everything that grows does so through the seeds of its artists, then Metamagic: An Introduction argues that it is not the magician’s seeds that are tainting the field, but the field tainting the seeds. Calling upon the vibrant work of Eugene Burger and Paul Harris to Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Lacan, this treatise asserts that the fundamental structure through which the art of magic operates is the direct cause of the art form’s degradation and posits that, if magic is to return to its former glory, then its magicians must radically shift the paradigms that constitute their practice.