"Can't We Get Beyond It?"

There are some not infrequent requests for OOO and process philosophy to get over the debate on relations. "It's not important," "It's overblown," and so on.

These dismissals seem to me to be symptoms of the syndrome that is precisely why the debate about relations is THE debate of our age.

"Can't we have a bit of both?" This is what the clamor boils down to. But the trouble is, you can't. I don't see how this position isn't just relationism of a particular sort.

The reluctance to have the debate is to do with a misperception of the ontological stakes. The attempt to foreclose the debate before it's even started is perhaps the final gasp of correlationism before we all have to admit we are beyond it.

This makes sense in a world in which Chevron gets to define official reality, via precisely the language of "everything is connected."