from form to process

in N. Katherine Hayles, My mother was a computer. Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, The University of Chicago Press, 2005, p.211.

As Brian Massumi argues elegantly in " The Brightness Confound", there is a sense in which the world is not a collection of preexisting objects but a continuous stream of processes. Although we customarily assume that the world preexists the processes, from a perceptual point of view the processes come first, and the objects we take as the world emerge from them. It is precisely this flux, this ongoingness of process from which the world emerges, that the realist in effect erases by privileging the underlying forms as the essential reality.