ABSTRACT
This chapter is one of a series of four pieces collectively titled ‘Rough Magic’ about the role in contemporary lives of certain very mundane, but at the same time quite magical, things, which together constitute an effort to prolong this everyday way of thinking through things, in contrast to thinking things through.2 The more abstract, placeless and bodiless our existences, the more we come to live beside ourselves, and encounter the world and each other at a distance and through various kinds of remote control, the odder and lovelier things can become, and the greater the importance in our lives can be of objects that we can lay hands on, manipulate, transform and do things with. Human beings are such incorrigible fidgets, such manipulators of objects, of things we can touch and handle, or think of touching and handling, that it is scarcely possible for us to think, dream and imagine without things exerting their shaping force upon us. We think with shapes and weights and scales and textures. We literally keep ourselves in shape by the ways in which we heft and press and handle things. ‘One does not think’, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have written, ‘without becoming something else, something that does not think-an animal, a molecule, a particle-and that comes back to thought and revives it’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:42).
