… pulling sticky tape away from the skin slowly is the connoisseur’s way.
This is from Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things by Steven Connor (2011). Today’s paraphernalia (my choice) are Batteries and Sticky Tape:
… Curiously, given the fiddling, inquisitive kind of child I was, especially when it came to electrical apparatus, the inner anatomy of a battery has never held much allure for me. This is only partly because of the difficulty of breaking open its top or filing through its metal casing to inspect its innards. I was, and am, intellectually curious about what exists and occurs inside a battery, but I feel obscurely enjoined to leave it in obscurity, knowing that somehow whatever I found inside would be bound to fall short of the delicious half-knowledge I feel I have about it. In fact, a battery has the mystical self-sufficiency of a stone, the composure that comes from seeming to have no inside, and being the same all the way through.
… Batteries are the magical embodiment of what may be called the principle of charge. This is the idea that energy is a kind of substance, which can be packed into a confined space. Batteries are potent because they are full of potential. Like many magical objects, they do not exist to fulfil a particular, designated purpose. A garden trowel or a toilet plunger can both of course be turned to different purposes, and there is a particular pleasure that comes from that. Members of the S & M community take giggly pleasure in the idea of what are called ‘pervertable,’ perfectly ordinary domestic implements, like clothes pegs, washing lines and, well, toilet plungers, I suppose, that may be turned to the subtle pleasures of unpleasantness. But trowels and toilet plungers seem nevertheless to have strongly specific affordance, bodying forth their official purposes in every aspect of their form. But where such objects are like skin cells or liver cells, batteries are pluripotent stem cells — things that exist to give other things power, to make other things possible. And yet, just for this reason, they are the signs of their own potential, they are the embodiment of the general possibility they embody, that is, the unlikely and unlooked-for possibility that possibility itself, that immaterial thing, could take on a physical form.
Onward to Sticky Tape:
… Childhood is, superbly and self-evidently, an epoch of stickiness. Children are magnificently apt to get into a sticky condition, their fists, faces and clothes seemingly having the power to retain traces of everything with which they come into contact.
… But the stickiness of childhood has a larger, more philosophical significance. The day when one starts to find the sticky icky is the day that one starts to unpeel from childhood. Stickiness is the opposite of autonomy, for it advertises your surface, indeed reduces you to it, so that you seem to be possessed of no private depth or interiority. A sticky creature is a contingent, adjacent, epidermal creature, which carelessly and helplessly picks up and displays the marks of anything that just happens to happen to it. This is why stickiness is humiliating in an adult — why it is an acknowledged social duty to rescue a friend from the shame of walking round all day with a smear of chocolate or toothpaste around their mouth.
… Stickiness is parasitic, and indeed many parasites use mechanisms of adhesion to latch and hang on to their hosts. Of course, when we leave behind the stickiness of childhood, we also leave behind the miraculous capacity for unconscious and effortless learning that is its cognitive complement; we may no longer walk around casually emblazoned with the residue of toffees and candyfloss, but equally we cannot any more spontaneously pick up knowledge and skills, like teasel-burrs, in the way in which children cannot but help.
… Sticky tape is magical because it promises that the two sides of the world, the two orders of things, the smooth and the sticky, the distinct and the indistinct, can themselves miraculously be articulated, which is to say, both kept distinct and yet also joined together. Like so many other apparently unremarkable objects, the roll of sticky tape is a philosophical machine.
Which means that, like all machines, especially philosophical ones, it does not always function perfectly, partly because it starts to mate with or mutate into itself. Unless one makes a little hem at the end after using it, to furnish a handle for the next visit, the cellulose may often mysteriously bind together, seemingly melting into itself, leaving no leading edge apparent, no matter how infuriatedly we may rotate the roll. Vision is of little use in this endeavor. All of us know the futile routine you have to adopt, without knowing how or when we acquired it. With one hand, you play the roll through the other hand, while applying a thumbnail or index fingernail to the surface rolling underneath it. The nail has to act as a kind of gramophone stylus, listening as much as feeling for the delicious, decisive little notch that will let you back in to the locked problem of the tape.
… sticky tape also has its own distinctive repertoire of sonorities.
… Most distinctive of all, there is the ecstatic ripping sound as the tape is pulled away from the roll, a sound that can itself be modulated in frequency and timbre by variations in the force applied, rising from the soft sizzle of a slow, even haul to the almost soprano shriek of the most vigorous yank.
… There is an ambivalent delight in the pulling of sticky tape away from itself that foreshadows and is recalled by the pleasure of pulling it away from the surfaces on to which it has been stuck, especially the skin. Ripping quickly and intemperately provides an invigorating severity, the tearing terror of a sabre slash without the pain or injury. But pulling sticky tape away from the skin slowly is the connoisseur’s way. First of all, a whole hand of skin is lifted, and then, as it seems, pore by pore, and hair by hair, it gradually relinquishes its hold, falling back to itself.
My most recent previous post from Connor’s book is here.
-Julie
