From Compulsive to Persuasive Agencies
Whitehead’s Case for Entertainment
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/eph.34908Keywords:
virtual integration, persuasive agencies, entertainment, genetic/coordinate analysis, lures for feeling, transmediaAbstract
Western societies currently face the backlash of violent and militant extremisms practiced in the form of tribalistic-phobocratic politics. The battleground is set between advocates of self-centeredness and those who entertain a world-centered self. To entertain concerns what Henri Bergson calls “zones of indetermination” and assumes A. N. Whitehead’s dictum: “in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is, that it adds to interest” (1978 89, 92, 259). Cultural agencies, processes, and aims that we take an “interest” in have the power to be more influential, encouraging norms of persuasion. Such openness to the persuasion of entertainment is propositional in character, or acts as “lures for feeling” of proposals to be felt without mandates. The first section will discuss the way in which to take up the daunting task of reading Whitehead. The second and third sections will address those aspects pertinent to a philosophy of entertainment that present the cultural-aesthetic underpinnings for the emergence of persuasive agencies. The goal of cultivating tolerance and freedom for civilized societies hinges upon institutional methods and practices that are legitimated more by way of persuasive coercion rather than coercive persuasion.
References
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Sloterdijk, Peter. 2017. The Aesthetic Imperative. Translated by Karen Margolis. Malden, MA: Polity.
———. 2016. Foams: Spheres. Volume 3: Plural Spherology. Translated by Wieland Hoban. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
———. 2013. You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics. Translated by Wieland Hoban. Malden, MA: Polity.
Stengers, Isabelle. 2011. Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts. Translated by Michael Chase Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tygstrup, Frederik and Winkel Holm. 2012. “Cultural Poetics and the Politics of Literature.” In Ernst Cassirer on Form and Technology—Contemporary Readings, edited by Aud Sissel Hoel and ingvild Folkvord. 199–214. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Whitehead, Alfred North. 1996 [1926]. Religion in the Making. New York: Fordham University Press.
———. 1978 [1929]. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, edited by D. R. Griffin and D. W. Sherburne. Corrected Edition. New York: Free Press.
———. 1968 [1938]. Modes of Thought. New York: Free Press.
———. 1967a [1933]. Adventures of Ideas. New York: Free Press.
———. 1967b [1929]. The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: Free Press.
———. 1967c [1925]. Science and Modern World. New York: Free Press.
Auxier, Randall E. 2012. “When the Whip Comes Down.” In The Rolling Stones and Philosophy: It’s Just a Thought Away, edited by Luke Dick and George A. Reisch, 119–142. Chicago: Open Court.
———. 2010. “Reading Whitehead.” In Whitehead: The Algebra of Metaphysics, edited by Michel Weber and Ronny Desmet, 61–92. Brussels: Les Éditions Chromatika.
Auxier, Randall E. 2009. “Whitehead’s Radical Empiricism: Mementoes of a Timequake.” In Applied Process Thought II: Following a Trail Ablaze, edited by Roger Mark Dibben and Rebecca Newton, 75–100. Frankfurt: Ontos. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110328103.75
———. 2008. “Ernst Cassirer and Suzanne Langer,” In A Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought, Volume 2, edited by Michel Weber and Will Desmond. 552–570. Frankfurt: Ontos.
———. 1999. “Influence as Confluence: Bergson and Whitehead.” Process Studies 28(3–4): 267; 301–338; 339–345.
Auxier, Randall E. and Gary Herstein. 2017. The Quantum of Explanation: Whitehead’s Radical Empiricism. New York: Routledge.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1988 [1981]. Simulacra and Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman. New York: Sémiotext(e), 1-13; 23-49. In Jean Baudrillard Selected Writings, edited by Mark Poster, 166–184. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Cassirer, Ernst. 1968. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Vol. 3: The Phenomenology of Knowledge. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Danto, Arthur. 2009. Andy Warhol (Icons of America). New Haven: Yale University Press.
Evans, Jules. 2013. “High Culture in the Age of Mass Entertainment.” In Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations. http://philosophyforlife.org/high-culture-in-the-age-of-mass-entertainment/
Gaskill, Nicholas and A. J. Nocek eds. 2014. The Lure of Whitehead. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816679959.001.0001
Goetsch, James R. 1995. Vico’s Axioms: The Geometry of the Human World. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Goheen, John. 1951. “Whitehead’s Theory of Value.” In Library of Living Philosophers: The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp, 435–460. New York: Tudor.
Hall, David L. 1994. Richard Rorty: Prophet and Poet of the New Pragmatism. Albany: State University of New York.
———. 1973. The Civilization of Experience: A Whiteheadian Theory of Culture. New York: Fordham University Press.
———. 1970. “Whitehead’s Theory of Cultural Interests.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 7(4): 457–472. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-6962.1970.tb02084.x
Henning, Brian G., William T. Myers, and Joseph D. John, eds. 2015. Thinking with Whitehead and the American Pragmatists. Lanham, MD: Lexington.
Herstein, Gary L. 2007. “Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947).” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/whitehed/
Irwin, William. 2007. “Philosophy Engages Popular Culture: An Introduction.” In Philosophy and the Interpretation of Pop Culture, edited by William Irwin and Jorge J. E. Gracia, 1–18. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Jackson, Myron Moses. 2015. “The Eros and Tragedy of Peace in Whitehead’s Philosophy of Culture.” Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism, 23(1): 93–112. https://doi.org/10.1558/eph.v23i1.26923
James, William. 1975 [1907]. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. Cambridge, MA: Harvard university Press.
Jones, Judith. 2010. “Provocative Expression: Transitions in and from Metaphysics in Whitehead’s Later Works.” In Beyond Metaphysics? Explorations in Alfred North Whitehead’s Late Thought, edited by Roland Faber, Brian G. Henning and Clinton Combs, 251–279. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
———. 1998. Intensity: An Essay in Whiteheadian Ontology. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.
Kraus, Elizabeth. 1998. The Metaphysics of Experience—A Companion to Whitehead’s Process and Reality. New York: Fordham University Press.
Langer, Suzanne. 1953. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art. New York: Charles Scribners.
Lewis, Austin. 1991. “The Metaphysical Status of Civilized Society.” Process Studies 20(1): 10–22. https://doi.org/10.5840/process199120126
Latour, Bruno. 2013. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lucas, Jr., George R. 1989. The Rehabilitation of Whitehead: An Analytic and Historical Assessment of Process Philosophy. New York: State University of New York Press.
Mesle, C. Robert. 2008. Process-Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead. Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation.
Montrose, Louis. 1989. “Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture.” In The New Historicism, edited by Harold Aram Veeser, 15–36. New York: Routledge.
Romano, Carlos. 2012. America the Philosophical. New York: Vintage.
Sherburne, Donald W. 1961. A Whiteheadian Aesthetic: Some Implications of Whitehead’s Metaphysical Speculation. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Sloterdijk, Peter. 2017. The Aesthetic Imperative. Translated by Karen Margolis. Malden, MA: Polity.
———. 2016. Foams: Spheres. Volume 3: Plural Spherology. Translated by Wieland Hoban. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
———. 2013. You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics. Translated by Wieland Hoban. Malden, MA: Polity.
Stengers, Isabelle. 2011. Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts. Translated by Michael Chase Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tygstrup, Frederik and Winkel Holm. 2012. “Cultural Poetics and the Politics of Literature.” In Ernst Cassirer on Form and Technology—Contemporary Readings, edited by Aud Sissel Hoel and ingvild Folkvord. 199–214. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Whitehead, Alfred North. 1996 [1926]. Religion in the Making. New York: Fordham University Press.
———. 1978 [1929]. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, edited by D. R. Griffin and D. W. Sherburne. Corrected Edition. New York: Free Press.
———. 1968 [1938]. Modes of Thought. New York: Free Press.
———. 1967a [1933]. Adventures of Ideas. New York: Free Press.
———. 1967b [1929]. The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: Free Press.
———. 1967c [1925]. Science and Modern World. New York: Free Press.
Published
2017-11-22
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Jackson, M. (2017). From Compulsive to Persuasive Agencies: Whitehead’s Case for Entertainment. Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism, 25(2), 221-244. https://doi.org/10.1558/eph.34908
