Processual Metanoian Language- a turning, reorienting, or re-becoming from within lack or incompleteness- an event of creativity arising from within relational fracture- the unfolding of a caustic rupture that becomes generatively transformative
Continued from Essay1, Part A
Postmodernism inherited that chisel and swung it wide.
It told us, with varying degrees of irony and exhaustion, that:
- Every narrative is partial.
- Every system collapses under its own weight.
- Every attempt at synthesis becomes another form of control.
- Every supposed “meta-position” is just another position wearing a clever disguise.
- Postmodernism could deconstruct, but it couldn’t build.
- It could expose fractures, but it had no grammar for living inside them.
- It could reveal contradictions, but it had no metaphysics of becoming that would allow contradiction to be transformative rather than terminal.
In this sense, Lacan became the architect of postmodern humility precisely because he forced us to relinquish the fantasy of epistemic transcendence - but offered no generative alternative.
A world without metalanguage, in Lacan, is not an open system; it is a permanent enclosure, a symbolic structure incapable of offering novelty, birth, or transformation.
Postmodernism inherited his suspicion, but also his stasis.
So, where do we go?
How do we proceed?
This is the point at which many metamodern thinkers secretly try to resurrect the metalanguage Lacan killed - a “new integration,” a “better meta,” a “bigger perspective.” But this desire often leads straight back into the very illusions Lacan dismantled.
Not a Lacanian immanence - there is no such thing; it is always closed. One that is:
- A looping structure.
- Where meaning arising only from lack - and lack and never resolves.
- Where there is no novelty.
- No emergence.
- Where desire perpetually is deferred.
- Where language is structure and never creative.
- Where language is a prison of immanent recursion disguised as truth.
No.
What was needed was Whiteheadian immanence - immanence as process, relation, and creative advance.
In Whitehead:
- Reality is always becoming, never structured.
- Never closed. Never looped.
- Creativity is always metaphysical.
- Novelty is always real filled with possibility.
- Relational experience always generates new possibilities.
- Process makes transformation continually possible.
- And, God, world, and language are dynamically, complexly, interwoven.
This is processual immanence - an immanence charged with novelty and becoming, not trapped, not closed, not static, not looped.
It RUPTURES LACAN when overlaid in Whitehead's "processual netanoiatic language."
Instead of remaining within Lacanian metalanguage, we transform the symbolic structures themselves into a new metanoetic process language that embodies:
A META-WORLD FILLED WITH PROCESSUAL META-NOIAIC LANGUAGE- a turning, reorienting, or re-becoming from the lack or incompleteness held within
- infinite events of creativity arising from within relational fractures
- unfolding provisions from caustic ruptures which may transform generatively
Postmodernism could describe the wound -
but it could not imagine the wound as a site of birth.
This is precisely where Whitehead’s processual rupture becomes essential for a metamodern world requiring new language.
And it is precisely where we must move towards a post-Whiteheadian analysis and position filled with processual metamodern immanence....
but first, an application for section II...
Application for Section II -
Psychological & Cultural Enclosure as Postmodern Paralysis
The logic of Lacan’s closed immanence did not stay inside psychoanalytic theory. It seeped into culture, identity, and the modern psyche. Postmodernism amplified it until it became the emotional weather of our age.
You can hear it in the way contemporary people describe:
- the exhaustion of identity performance,
- the fear of being “seen through,”
- the suspicion that meaning is always constructed, never encountered,
- the anxiety that any claim to truth is secretly a claim to power.
Psychologically, this produces a subject who is:
- hyper-aware but under-empowered,
- self-conscious to the point of paralysis,
- deconstructive but unable to re-assemble,
- attuned to fractures but unable to inhabit them generatively.
Culturally, the same mood manifests as:
- irony masking sincerity,
- infinite critique without consequence,
- the cultural fragmentation of “takes,”
- oscillation between cynicism and naïve hope,
- the belief that authenticity is impossible because everything is mediated.
- where the mind is trapped inside its own recursive language,
- endlessly decoding itself,
- while never allowing emergence;
- one that is always folding inward,
- but never outward towards generative transformation
- produces psychological cleverness
- but not psychological transformation.
- It produces cultural critique
- but not cultural renewal.
Which is why the shift to Whitehead is not merely philosophical.It is psychological, cultural, existential.
Whitehead offers what Lacan and postmodernism could not: a way for the psyche to re-enter the world as a true participant in creativity, not merely a captive of Lacanian metaianguistic structure.
This sets the stage for Section III.
III. The Limit of Lacan: Structure Without Becoming
Lacan sees language as a structure - a symbolic grid that precedes us, binds us, and loops back upon itself. The subject emerges inside this enclosure:
- Desire is lack.
- Meaning is deferral.
- The self is a wound that never closes.
- Language is a mirror hall with no exit.
And here is the hinge:
Lacan’s post-symbolic order is static.
Rigid.
Formal.
Closed.
It does not grow.
It does not evolve.
It does not generate.
This is where the rupture begins - not because Lacan is wrong, but because his metaphysics cannot imagine transformation.
His symbolic order is a form of closed immanence, a recursive system capable only of exposing fracture, not transfiguring it.
The problem is not his critique.The problem is his ontology.
Whitehead’s world is not structured like a grid.
It moves.
It becomes.
It unfolds.
Reality is process.
Reality is creativity.
Reality is continual metaphysical novelty.
Lacan’s system cannot account for emergence.
It cannot imagine the symbolic order itself evolving.
It cannot picture language as becoming rather than binding.
Whitehead can.
This is the first breach:
processual immanence ruptures closed immanence.
Where Lacan sees permanent enclosure, Whitehead sees:
- creativity as metaphysical
- novelty as real
- relational experience as generative
- becoming as universal
- God, world, and language as dynamically interwoven
But Whitehead is not the final stop.
He is the opening salvo.
Once the world shifts from structure to process, another movement becomes possible - one that neither Lacan nor Whitehead fully anticipated:
a reality / world which is inhabits generative immanence.
This is the metamodern expansion of Whitehead - or it's post-Whiteheadian Metanoeaic synthesis:
- rupture-as-birth from wound
- wound-as-origin of birth
- self-organizing novelty (autopoiesis)
- angiogenesis of meaning (new pathways forming)
- cruciform–resurrectional emergence (death → transformation → relational becoming)
- generativity beyond prior symbolic limits
This is immanence not merely as becoming,
but as becoming-beyond,
without ever leaving the relational field of life.
The question “Which immanence do we mean?” now matters:
-
Lacan’s immanence is closed.
-
Whitehead’s immanence is open.
-
Metamodern immanence is generative.
Lacan collapses us inward.
Whitehead opens the field.
Metamodernism pushes through that field toward emergence.
This is the breach we needed:
not transcendence,
not escape,
not the resurrection of metalanguage,
but the metanoetic transformation of language itself into a new, living form:
Processual Metanoetic Language
- not spoken from above, but birthed from within.- not a metalanguage, but a metamorphosing language.
Lacan could describe the wound.
Postmodernism could analyze the wound.
Only process thought can imagine the wound as the site of birth.
This is where the true rupture takes hold.
And it is where we may introduce post-Whiteheadian Processual Metanoetic Language as the metamodern linguistic mode that emerges from within relational fracture.
Using metanoiaic as an adjective allows we may now talk about:
- metanoiaic immanence
- metanoiaic rupture
- metanoiaic creativity
- metanoiaic emergence
- metanoiaic process language
Application for Section III -
MAGA Culture as Closed Symbolic Immanence
The dynamics described in Section III are not abstract. They appear vividly in contemporary cultural formations, and one of the clearest examples is MAGA culture, not as a political position, but as a symbolic structure.
1. Lacanian Reading: The Closed Loop of Identity and Lack
In a Lacanian sense, MAGA culture often operates as a symbolic enclosure built around:
- perceived loss
- wounded identity
- nostalgia for a vanished wholeness
- desire shaped by lack rather than possibility
- “we believe something precious has been taken”
- “we think the country used to be whole”
- “we believe we must recover what has been lost”
This creates an identity structure organized around lack, mirroring Lacan’s closed immanence:
- the wound cannot be resolved as it is
- identity is stabilized by grievance
- belonging is maintained through shared loss
- novelty feels threatening, not generative
The symbolic order becomes a self-reinforcing loop, where the wound functions as the anchor of meaning.
2. Whiteheadian Reading: Blocked Process as Cultural Stasis
From a process-philosophical standpoint, a system organized around grievance becomes structurally static. It resists:
- relational becoming
- creative advance
- novelty
- transformation
- mutuality
Whitehead’s metaphysics sees identity, society, and culture as streams of becoming. When these streams harden into symbolic enclosures, the result is:
- reduced creative capacity
- inhibited or prevented transformation
- heightened fear of difference
- nostalgia replacing novelty
- reactive politics instead of generative politics (in the philosophical sense)
In Whitehead’s terms, this is the cultural equivalent of a closed actual occasion that cannot integrate new data.
3. Metamodern/Metanoiaic Reading: The Missing Generative Immanence
Where Section III introduces generative immanence, MAGA culture illustrates its absence.
In generative immanence:
- wounds are sites of birth
- rupture leads to emergence (hopefully positive, not negative, as is often the case)
- identity transforms through relational experience
- novelty becomes a valuative path, rather than prohibitive a threat
In closed symbolic cultures (of which MAGA is one example), rupture becomes:
- something to fear
- something to resist
- something to defend against
rather they preserve the wound so that it cannot transform
and refuse to open the fracture so that it heals generatively.
MAGA culture becomes a LACANIAN METALANGUAGE CASE STUDY in:
- identity without becoming
- rupture without emergence
- wound without birth
This is not about ideology - It is about symbolic structure.
Application Summary
MAGA culture exemplifies the dynamics Section III describes:
- Lacanian closed immanence: identity organized around lack
- Blocked Whiteheadian process: becoming replaced by stasis
- Absence of generative immanence: rupture does not lead to creation
This is not offered as a political critique, but as a structural illustration of how cultural formations can crystallize around wounds that remain NEGATIVELY untransformed.
It reinforces the core insight of Section III:
Only generative immanence - the metanoiaic turn - can move a wound from enclosure to emergence.
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