​Process Social Ontology
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Three Metamodern Ideas from Jason Josephson-Storm

If you are interested in process philosophy, metamodernism, or both, you will naturally be interested in the work of Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm—particularly his book Metamodernism: The Future of Theory, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2021. (University of Chicago Press). In this book he develops what he calls a process social ontology and links it explicitly with Whitehead.

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Metamodernism: The Future of Theory by Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm is primarily a book for scholars—philosophers, sociologists, ethologists, biologists, linguists, and many others. It is especially suited to readers acquainted with discussions of modernism and postmodernism over the past century of Western academic life.

Just as importantly, it addresses the characteristic moods associated with these movements, especially the postmodern mood: its emphasis on social construction and language, its doubts about the mind-independent objectivity of things, its sense that reality is—or has always been—fragmented, and its preference for irony over sincerity. Its aim is to move past these moods and assumptions, offering a post-postmodern, or metamodern approach to social life.

The book is far too complex to summarize in any simple way. The publisher’s description, offered below, provides a helpful general overview. It is also extraordinarily well documented: Josephson-Storm draws on a vast range of scholarly sources from many different fields. Below I focus on three especially helpful ideas developed in the book: process social ontology, metarealism, and hylosemiotics.
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First, however, a note about the relation of the book to process philosophy. One of the book’s most important contributions is what Josephson-Storm calls a process social ontology. He places himself within the broad tradition of process philosophy and recognizes a growing interest in Whitehead within some academic circles, even though he is not as drawn to Whitehead specifically as some other process thinkers are. He writes:

For those unfamiliar with “process metaphysics” or “process ontology,” it is primarily identified with Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of becoming. But he was not alone in his thinking; a number of philosophers—a handful in the European tradition and many more globally (such as classical Chinese, Indian, and Nahua philosophers)—have argued for the ontological primacy of process over substance, of becoming over being. Process theorists generally reject the notion that everlasting substances are the most basic constituents of existence and argue instead that what appear to be enduring entities are really temporary stabilities in unfolding processes. They also often reject the grounding assumption of much of analytical philosophy: that what is real is what is pure, independent, or unadulterated. Process thinkers tend instead to describe existence in terms of dynamics, change, transformation, impermanence, creation, destruction, entanglement, emergence, interdependence, and interrelation.

Later, he adds:
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There has already been a small turn toward Whitehead in some theory circles. While I’m not as enamored with Whitehead specifically, I am sympathetic to all types of processual thinking.

It is in this broader process-oriented spirit that Josephson-Storm develops his process social ontology. Whereas classical ontology often asks about being or existence as such, process social ontology asks how the fundamental entities and categories of social life come into being, acquire temporary stability, undergo transformation, and disappear. Social realities are not fixed things possessing timeless essences. They are dynamic formations produced, sustained, and altered through identifiable processes.

With regard to ontology more broadly, Josephson-Storm proposes what he calls metarealism, which is reducible to neither materialism nor idealism. Metarealism recognizes that reality comes in different modes. Physical objects, events, social institutions, fictional characters, mathematical entities, absences, and signs may all be real, but they are not real—or existent—in the same way. The pertinent question is therefore not simply whether something is real, but in what sense it is real, in contrast to what, and through what mode it exists.

With this question in mind, I turn to three ideas in Josephson-Storm's work which, in my view, advance and enrich process philosophy and its metamodern expressions.

Process Social Ontology

Josephson-Storm argues that the human sciences need to move beyond both traditional essentialism and indiscriminate anti-essentialism by adopting a process social ontology. His key points are:
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• Anti-essentialism often goes too far. Many scholars have treated every claim about similarity, shared properties, or general patterns as a dangerous form of essentialism. In doing so, they have paradoxically “essentialized essentialism,” treating all generalization as equally mistaken.
• Process thinking offers a way beyond this impasse. Social kinds need not share a timeless essence in order to be meaningfully studied. What their instances may share is a common process. People called “slaves” in different societies may not possess one universal identity or essence, for example, but they have undergone processes of enslavement that can be compared and analyzed.
• Processes are not synonymous with chaos. Some New Materialists and Deleuzians invoke Whitehead or process metaphysics primarily to emphasize flux, contingency, and unpredictable change. Josephson-Storm objects that real processes—chemical reactions, for example—may be probabilistic and variable while still exhibiting intelligible patterns. Process does not eliminate order or knowledge.
• Process must be more than a metaphor. Humanities scholars sometimes declare that everything is processual without identifying the actual processes at work or explaining how they operate. Josephson-Storm wants a more rigorous approach: researchers should identify, describe, and compare specific social processes and revise their methods accordingly.
• The social world is not a fixed structure beneath changing appearances. Against some interpretations of Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism, Josephson-Storm argues that society is not an unchanging, “intransitive” reality to which our changing theories try to correspond. The social world itself changes, just as our theories about it change.
• Change does not make knowledge impossible. Social realities are dynamic, but their transformations can still be studied. A process ontology therefore preserves the possibility of classification, comparison, explanation, and knowledge without treating social categories as timeless objects.

​His central proposal is that social kinds are neither fixed essences nor unknowable constructions. They are dynamic, historically developing patterns produced and sustained by identifiable processes. Process social ontology can therefore retain the critical insights of postmodern anti-essentialism while overcoming its skeptical tendency to make meaningful generalization impossible.

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Metarealism

Josephson-Storm introduces metarealism as a philosophy recognizing that reality comes in different modes. Its central question is not simply whether something is real, but: real in what sense, and in contrast to what?
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• “Real” is always contrastive. Something is real only relative to an alternative: a real person rather than a statue, a real fictional character rather than a character no one has written about, or a real historical manuscript rather than an imagined one. Using “real” without identifying the contrast—such as speaking of “real men”—is often confused or ideological.
• Metarealism moves beyond realism and antirealism. Instead of forcing everything into the binary choice between “objectively real” and “not real,” it recognizes multiple modes of reality. In this sense, it departs from assumptions shared by both modern realism and postmodern antirealism.
• Reality and existence are not identical. Something can be real in one respect without presently existing. Lord Byron’s Memoirs were genuinely written but no longer exist as physical objects because they were burned. Sherlock Holmes is a real fictional character, although he does not exist as a physical human being.
• Being should also be distinguished from existence. Statements can truthfully attribute properties to things that do not exist. “The silver mountain is made of silver,” for example, may be definitionally true even if no silver mountain exists. Having properties—or predicative being—is therefore different from existing.
• Existence itself has different modes. Objects exist through material embodiment; events exist temporally; absences such as holes, shadows, cracks, and silences exist negatively or dependently; and fictional characters exist through representation. Their properties are determined by the works regarded as canonical.
• Different entities require different ontological explanations. A rock, an event, a fictional character, a biological organism, the Catholic Church, a recession, and a social identity do not all exist in the same way. Their differences cannot be adequately understood through a single physical model of existence.

​The larger purpose of this argument is to prepare for an account of social construction. If churches, economic recessions, identities, and other socially constituted entities are real, we must ask not merely whether they exist but how they exist. Metarealism makes that inquiry possible by replacing a single, all-or-nothing concept of reality with an analysis of the different modes through which things can be real, have properties, and exist.

​Hylosemiotics: Sentient Beings in a World of Signs

Josephson-Storm’s hylosemiotics expands semiotics beyond human language and symbolic thought. It begins with Peirce’s insight that a sign becomes meaningful through an interpretant—something capable of perceiving and responding to it. Josephson-Storm proposes that interpretants need not be human. A sentient being, in this context, is any being capable of responding to signs.

Sentience therefore exists along a continuum rather than belonging exclusively to human beings. Animals, plants, bacteria, fungi, enzymes, and perhaps information-processing machines may all possess distinctive forms or degrees of semiotic responsiveness. This does not mean that they have identical minds or experience the world as humans do. It means that they can detect meaningful differences in their environments and respond accordingly. Readers hesitant to attribute consciousness to such beings can treat this proposition pragmatically, using Daniel Dennett’s “intentional stance”: interpreting their behavior as if they were making decisions or following intentions because doing so has explanatory value.

Hylosemiotics also “turns the mind inside out.” What we ordinarily consider private mental activity is partly realized through bodily engagement, material objects, and public signs. Josephson-Storm identifies three dimensions of this outward realization:

• Knowledge emerges through embodied interaction. Mind and body arise interdependently. We learn by exploring, manipulating, and responding to the world, not simply by forming internal representations of it.
• Material things participate in cognition. Writing, images, marks, tools, and computers store information and help organize thought. Human beings have long transferred parts of memory and cognitive work into their physical surroundings; digital technology is only the latest form of this practice.
• Public signs make shared social worlds possible. Collective representations depend on materialized signs. Communities share concepts partly because their members can refer to common words, images, objects, rituals, monuments, and other publicly available representations.

​Hylosemiotics thus moves beyond a postmodern semiotics in which human beings appear imprisoned within language. Signs are not merely elements of an autonomous linguistic system; they arise within bodily, material, biological, technological, and social relationships. Meaning must therefore be studied together with ontology, metaphysics, and biology—especially the study of animal behavior.

The central claim is that sentient beings are semiotic beings. The human capacity to read and use language is an unusually complex expression of a more fundamental capacity, widely distributed throughout life and perhaps beyond it: the ability to perceive signs, interpret meaningful differences, and respond to them.

Metamodernism: The Future of Theory

"Winner of the 2022 American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence (Constructive-Reflexive Studies). For decades, scholars have been calling into question the universality of disciplinary objects and categories. The coherence of defined autonomous categories—such as religion, science, and art—has collapsed under the weight of postmodern critiques, calling into question the possibility of progress and even the value of knowledge. Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm aims to radicalize and move beyond these deconstructive projects to offer a path forward for the humanities and social sciences using a new model for theory he calls metamodernism.

Metamodernism works through the postmodern critiques and uncovers the mechanisms that produce and maintain concepts and social categories. In so doing, Storm provides a new, radical account of society's ever-changing nature—what he calls a "Process Social Ontology"—and its materialization in temporary zones of stability or "social kinds." Storm then formulates a fresh approach to philosophy of language by looking beyond the typical theorizing that focuses solely on human language production, showing us instead how our own sign-making is actually on a continuum with animal and plant communication.

Storm also considers fundamental issues of the relationship between knowledge and value, promoting a turn toward humble, emancipatory knowledge that recognizes the existence of multiple modes of the real. Metamodernism is a revolutionary manifesto for research in the human sciences that offers a new way through postmodern skepticism to envision a more inclusive future of theory in which new forms of both progress and knowledge can be realized."

Publisher's Description
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Interview with the Author

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is an American scholar, philosopher, social scientist, and author. He is the Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Religion and Chair of Science and Technology Studies at Williams College, where he is also affiliated with Asian Studies and Comparative Literature. His scholarship ranges across Japanese religions, European intellectual history, the history and theory of religion, disenchantment, and the philosophy of the human sciences.

He is the author of four books: The Invention of Religion in Japan (2012), The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (2017), Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (2021), and The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History (2026).

​His works in progress include Transcendent Machines: Religion and the Philosophy of Technology, under contract with Cambridge University Press, which explores the intrinsic entanglement of religion and technology, and Glimmering Gods of the Electric Age, which takes the Japanese deification of Thomas Edison as a point of departure for examining how electricity, esoteric currents, and techno-animism helped shape the modern transnational categories of “religion” and “science.”
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Jason Josephson Storm’s Webpage at Williams College