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Process ontology, a longish thread.
If a surge of process ontology doesn’t happen now, it won’t. Ever. Where the SR/OOO succeeded in ushering the subject further out of philosophy, it didn’t account for the ac*eleration and movement that’s been happening. A process ontology would be the next necessary step.
Shaviro is probably the most well-known continental process ontologist, and he’s more interested in being a Whiteheadian and a metaphilosopher first and foremost.
He’s quarrelling with Harman all the time, vehemently defending his interpretation of Whitehead, and I have yet to be swayed by his original thinking.
The fact is that it's refreshing to discard notions of substances, objects, and things and to speak of processes, dynamism, and genuine change. No one’s really doing that in a sincere way apart from the analytic philosophers who seem to work from physics.
Genuine process ontology cannot be materialist because of its monism. It promises change but delivers recycling. So, it would appear that it is realism or nothing, if we want the ontology to remain flat.
I am rereading DR and Deleuze's concept of being is one of difference but is still static and eternal. He went all out on the multiplicity irreducible to the one or the many but still claims the most fundamental to be substance.
Being as multiplicity is a great starting point but for process ontology, it has to be dynamic, too. You cannot equate relations with dynamicity; there is something in the latter that the former does not possess.
I feel like there is room for a processual thinking that posits pure becoming, not pure difference, and that may try to push the eternally static to the side as much as possible. One that can accomplish this while still being coherent.
Negation, or non-being, would have to be taken seriously because something that becomes is also something that isn't simultaneously. It's not that being is non-being in a Hegelian sense but that non-being encases or perhaps tracks being.
Ontology without something eternal isn't unstable. As long as the arguments hold, it's stable enough. Some say pure process cannot get at what there is but only what is emerging or declining and to that I point to Timothy Morton's ontology police quote.
Badiou, Plotinus, Simondon, Patrizi, Heraclitus, Deleuze, Whitehead, all of them brilliant people with excellent writings but I think we can push their thinking even further.
Lastly, Ray Brassier said it well in his infamous quote on SR; current philosophers of that flavour only deal with "morsels of process philosophy". We need fully fledged process now. It's not enough with philosophies of difference, or drift, or movement. There is only process.
