Does anybody like process theory?
 

I was rereading some Russell and Whitehead reminding myself of the discussions.

EQ what do you think of this stuff?

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/whitehead/

My encounters with process philosophy (theory?) have been through concepts taken up by C.S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Some of their ideas intersect dialectical materialists like Walter Benjamin, identity theorists like Michel Foucault, or performance-studies and "liminality" researchers like Richard Schechner and I'm very familiar with those. I've read some of the pre-Socratics' work on it (most of them critiqued it, but Heraclitus advocated it), but I haven't looked at that material in a few years and am reticent to go there without review.

Still, I'll go pretty far down the trail with these cats. Their assertion of the primacy of process is persuasive as it shifts the discussion from discrete subjects and objects, and causes and effects (in science terms, a Newtonian universe) to interaction, interpenetration, and dialectic (a quantum universe). As a communications scholar I'll argue all day long that communication is most accurately considered as a process. The anti-form tradition in art tries to express this understanding beginning, perhaps, with Van Gough's blurry brush and continuing through cubism and Pollock's abstract expressionism.

Process philosophy is too often conflated with neo-Hegelian idealism (i.e., it is a scientific way of arguing for the "synthesis" aspect of the thesis-anti-thesis-synthesis triad) and in this way is mythologized (and most readily into manifest destiny progressivism or techno-fascism). I don't buy into the "evolution" rhetoric (I do have a notion of progress, but it's through momentary disruption, as the juxtaposition of the allegorical with the mythological), but I do buy into the "change" and "movement" rhetoric. My reasons for this are complex, but are adequately expressed in Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History. Maybe I'll post on that sometime...

So I'd like to take up process philosophy in more materialist terms than would most positivists. I'd take it back to Aristotle's notion of the accident (which is one way to bring in disruption and emergence that can be messianic) and would move from there into Walter Benjamin's dialectical image and Paul Virilio's dromoscopy (the vision of speed, and specifically of acceleration) and his discussion of Einstein's "information bomb." I'd also interrogate the process philosophy notion of "information" as it seems to be considered (and curiously) as an object (it gets treated like a box of oranges that moves instead of as an in-formation process, as a process of "formation in.")

I'd also want to think about the absences in process philosophy. When it invokes "nature" what is correlatively being constructed as "artificial?" What exactly are the notions of object and subject (of products, in a sense) that are constructed as the "others" of processes?

As far as theology goes, process philosophy would be a good base from which to construct an intellectualy tenable Mormonism. At different times I have informally deployed it for just that purpose with my colleagues (and with good results).

I'm sure you have.

Whitehead's process philosopphy forms the basis for some religious based discussion, even though he was principally known for his scientific process philosophy.

I'll have to read some of those mentioned by your statement.

I think you just made that up.

Care to check him on his references? Me neither.

I like processed meat products. No theory about it.

Not at all.