The character of character

Drawing on affect theorists, such as Brian Massumi and Erin Manning, the embodied phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, and presenting a detailed introduction to the ontology of ‘feeling-tones,’ as described in Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy of organism, this chapter explores the nature of objects. Objects are described as the enduring ghosts of reality, existing at the shimmering edges of the things-in-themselves, and it is through dwelling in objects that we come to recognize character in events. Whitehead’s notion of ‘prehensions,’ ‘lures for feeling,’ the nature of ‘eternal objects,’ and the processes that give birth to new ‘actual entities,’ the building blocks of reality, is explored through concrete empirical traffic events in Ho Chi Minh City, for example, describing how an event involving a bus comes to be imbued with the object ‘motorcycleness.’