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This is an investigation of the trick as it relates to three fields; gravity, language and capital. I will fully break down and unpack what I mean by ‘trick’ later in this introduction, in the mean time I refer to it as something that refutes the systemic validity of the system through which it proceeds. It is a proposal of how circus physicality might be structurally related to a method of ‘circus thinking’ that likewise moves through restrictive fields in order to refute the authority of those fields. In this way the trick is offered as a tool. This is an investigation of how that thinking might operate in any field.

Three distinct kinds of trick are discussed in each of the three aforementioned fields:

TRICK ONE: exposes the limits of a system.

TRICK TWO: conceals the limits of a system.

TRICK THREE: jumps out of the system entirely.

The approach I have taken is to think of these three tricks as occurring within fields of value; in which there are two separate registers: the qualitative and the quantitative. For me then what is exposed, concealed or jumped out of is something I feel is inherent to the subject’s position within a field of value. This is the conflation of incompatible registers of value. This conflation, or false union, is discussed as a cause of tautology within the field that can lead to either subjective or systemic compromise, depending on how the trick is performed. As such the main internal relation of the trick for me, and its place in relation to the formal limits of the system through which it proceeds, is one of contradiction, paradox, impasse, bind or knot. The trick is therefore is proposed as a tool for reconfiguring systems of value; in that its relation to exposing or concealing tautology define how the system of value is perceived; ether as limited or total, respectively.

The work speculates upon systemic restriction and interrogates, through its transposition as a mechanism of tautology, what the trick is supposed to ‘do’. This is done in awareness of what circus practice supposes about itself as well as the way circus is embedded in fields of value as it makes proposals about mobility, agency and individual freedom within them. Parts of this text are marked in red as ‘additional reading’ and in this regard I think of the entire work as an encampment of sideshow booths. You will not have time to visit them all. I have clearly marked in red those that cannot be read, and are outside your temporal economy. [author summary]