Enchantment and the Serious Play of A(musement)

Herein, I interrogate the phenomenological experience of enchantment as a playful sign process. Arguing against the Weberian notion that we are living in a "disenchanted world," I aim to reveal how the existing contours of enchantment's sign condition have significantly morphed in America, however, given our current distracting media-saturated environments. I begin by discussing enchantment as a form or habit of play, drawing specifically from the works of semiotician, Charles S. Peirce, and cultural historian, Johan Huizinga. We discover that enchantments take primarily two forms depending upon the interpretants we communicatively construct: one is indicative of what Peirce describes as a play of musement and the other is a result of what I call the play of amusement. The former is vital for human learning at higher orders of abstraction, growth, and positive ethical relations with others. The latter typically produces a bad ambiguity that eventually leads to an inability to discriminate or assess the relevance of perceived information and events. This form of play also often jeopardizes our relations with others given its primary focus on the self. Through this interrogation, we discover that our current enchantments or habits of play have serious epistemological consequences for cultural life.