Meta-Genealogical Reflection: 6 Process, Event, and Becoming

Building on historical reflexivity, we now shift focus from structures and dialectics to process as the primary mode of relational ontology. Here, possibility is not merely mediated through historical or social networks but emerges through temporal, contingent, and emergent interactions.

Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy exemplifies this orientation. Entities are understood not as static substances but as events in relation, each constituting and constituted by its network of relations. Actuality is the instantiation of potentialities, and each event both constrains and enables subsequent events. Possibility, in this view, is a flowing field, co-shaped by relational interactions across space and time.

Henri Bergson complements this perspective with a focus on duration and creative becoming. Temporal unfolding is not reducible to deterministic sequences; it is a qualitative, relational process in which novelty emerges. Potentialities are nonlinear, and the temporal field itself becomes a medium through which construal is enacted.

Key construal strategies include:

1. Temporal relationality — events and processes are intelligible only within the unfolding network of interactions across time.

2. Emergent possibility — new forms and potentials arise from the coalescence of relational processes, rather than from pre-defined structures.

3. Contingent actualisation — what becomes actual is conditioned by relational context; potential is always probabilistic and perspectival.

Modulatory voices underscore this approach. Systems theorists and complexity scientists observe analogous dynamics: feedback, self-organisation, and emergent structures shape what is possible within ecological, cognitive, and social networks. Process-oriented ontologies, whether philosophical or scientific, reveal that relationality is dynamic, contingent, and co-constitutive.

In sum, the processual turn reframes the becoming of possibility: it is not a property of isolated entities or static systems, but of events and relations in flux. Possibility is enacted within the temporal field itself, and relationality becomes both the medium and the measure of what can emerge. This understanding paves the way for phenomenological and embodied construals, where subject, world, and potential co-constitute one another.