The Matter of Affect in the Quantum Universe

A Possibility of Affective Ontology

In her book, ¹² Zanotti primarily draws on feminist philosopher and quantum physicist Karen Barad in order to explore a particular form of agency as an alternative enactment of becoming. Barad’s understanding of quantum ontologies underpins Zanotti’s conception of ontology. It enables Zanotti to problematise and refute the Cartesian image of agency in IR derived from Newtonian laws of nature rooted in a substantialist ontological imaginary in which ‘matter is inert and causality linear, subjects are monads endowed with a set of fundamental characteristics such as rationality and freedom; and, the reality is governed by a few overarching principles’. ¹³

Highlighting the importance of ontological starting points for formulating agency, Zanotti turns to quantum ontologies to ‘rethink how the world is, how we fit in it, how we get to know it, and how we can bring about change in it’. ¹⁴ Zanotti draws attention to Barad’s claim that ‘we are of the world, not above the world’. ¹⁵ Thus, she calls for ‘entangled ontologies’ in which subjects are not endowed with fundamental qualities because subjectivity is, for her, all about intra-active becoming. ¹⁶ Following Barad, Zanotti subscribes to an ‘intra-active’ framework in order to develop a holistic ontological understanding of agency. Barad uses ‘intra-action’ to ‘signify the inseparability of objects and agencies of observation (rather than interaction, which re-inscribes the contested dichotomy)’. ¹⁷ Here, the idea is that human subjects are not observation-independent realities. Barad writes:

The ontology I propose does not posit some fixed notion of being that is prior to signification (as the classical realist assumes), but neither is being completely inaccessible to language (as in Kantian transcendentalism), nor completely of language (as in linguistic monism). That reality within which we intra-act – what I term agential realism – is made up of material-discursive phenomena. Agential realism is not a fixed ontology that is independent of human practices but is continually reconstituted through our material-discursive intra-actions. ¹⁸

Similarly, Zanotti’s mobilisation of intra-action suggests that there are no pre-existing entities, including human bodies and non-human matter, but rather phenomena whereby these entities come to be in a relational and indeterminate way. There are no primary ontological units and unities, only phenomena. ¹⁹ By phenomena, Zanotti specifically means ‘clusters of relations within which “what is” acquires to shape’. ²⁰ In this understanding, humans do not stand ‘in relations to externality to matter, to each other, and to the practices we [humans] inhabit and enact’. ²¹ Instead, humans as quantum subjects are ‘relational beings immersed in a world endowed with morphogenetic properties which we contribute to shape’. ²² Zanotti considers quantum ontology to be an effect of particular intra-active practices. Furthermore, bringing Michel Foucault into the mix, Zanotti argues that within a phenomenon, matter gains meanings discursively and materialises practically in a certain way, specifically, through the manner by which meanings emerge out of specific intra-actions. Accordingly, Zanotti demonstrates that ‘discursive practices and material phenomena are ontologically imbricated while experimental dispositifs [or apparatuses] are not only heuristics but also performative instruments that have a bearing upon resolving ontological indeterminacy’. ²³

Zanotti’s mobilisation of ‘intra-action’ not only denotes a relational ontology between objects and agencies, but it also brings about a recognition of discursive-material phenomena and an acknowledgment of both the material and the discursive in the making of agency. Seeing us ‘enmeshed in world of ontological indeterminacy’, ²⁴ Zanotti argues that ‘the opportunity for political agency is rooted in ambiguity and performativity on the making and remaking of meaning, subjects, power, and political spaces in the context of intra-active relations’. ²⁵ Therefore, Zanotti comes up with a ‘radical practice-oriented conceptualization of agency’, ²⁶ one that produces ‘ontological effects [that] we only partially control within the material and entangled reality of which we are part and by which we are in turn shaped’. ²⁷ In this way, Zanotti opens up new possibilities for thinking agency as a material-discursive form that is enacted through practices of knowing and doing, and furthermore that generates quantum effects in terms of feeding the indeterminate nature of the universe and of all matter.

In an attempt to further explore the relational ontology between objects and agencies and their quantum effects, Zanotti, in Chapter 5, insightfully touches upon what she calls the morphogenetic effects of the circulation of ‘emotions’ in shaping ideas, politics, and agency. ²⁸ Zanotti emphasises the contagious effects of emotions stemming from embodied social and political interactions and practices. Zanotti contends that the circulation of emotions ‘contribute[s] to the opening and foreclosing of possibilities of materialization of political energy’. ²⁹ Here, it seems that Zanotti starts to perceive a theoretical affinity between Barad’s framework of intra-agential agency and the study of emotions in IR. Zanotti contends that the study of emotions also starts from thinking through intra-activity instead of positing entities, thus embracing ‘practice ontology’. ³⁰ However, Zanotti does not give us a sense of how she defines emotions. She also does not give us a detailed analysis of how emotions, or perhaps affects, circulate and, concretely, shape ideas, agency, and ethics. Still, I suggest that Zanotti’s consideration of the contagious effects of emotions in relation to her notion of intra-action unveils a domain of analysis for thinking about agency as an affective form. In an attempt to extend Zanotti’s consideration of the transmission of emotions in relation to her practice-oriented understanding of agency, in the subsequent section I will discuss affect theory as it has been mobilised by philosopher Brian Massumi. I will seek to show how affect possesses potential quantum effects when it comes to shaping ideas, agency, and ethics.

Affect, Quantum, and Agency

The recent ‘turn to affect’ in the social sciences, to use Patricia T. Clough’s designation, ³¹ has been built on the notion of affect as an excess. The turn to affect is the acknowledgement of the intertwining of the material, the social, and the cultural as well as their interrelational articulations. As Massumi puts it, affect is neither about the cognitive realm nor about the discursive domain, but rather is in excess of a conscious state of perception and of bodily responses. By linking affect to intensity or force, Massumi also sees affect as ‘body movement looked at from the point of view of its potential – its capacity to come to be, or better, to come to do’. ³² Drawing on Spinoza’s concept of affectus, Massumi regards affect as ‘the capacity to affect and to be affected’. ³³ This rather simple definition of affect indicates an openness to the world, a quality of being active in it, a matter of encounter through events, and a capacity to be patient for its return activity. ³⁴ Thus, affect opens up a way for understanding the world as an ongoing process in/of continual transformation’. ³⁵

Furthermore, Massumi contends that affect is ‘autonomous to the degree to which it escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality or potential for interaction’. ³⁶ Its escape from confinement in the particular body indicates that affect is ‘pre-individual’, ‘asubjective’, and ‘transindividual’. ³⁷ As Massumi explains, pre-individual and trans-individual refer to the idea that affect is dynamic and circulating. Following Massumi, Patricia Clough conceptualises affect as ‘pre-individual bodily forces augmenting or diminishing a body’s capacity to act’, and she further points to a ‘dynamism immanent to bodily matter and matter generally’. ³⁸ Affect, then, appears to be ‘collective’ too since ‘it expresses itself in collective individuations’. ³⁹ This means that, in the field of emergence, affective processes connect not only bodies but also all sorts of matter collectively. Consequently, affect appears to have quantum effects too. Therefore, Massumi’s notion of affect gives rise to an alternative conceptualisation of agency. Affective agency is about relations of affective circulation between material elements and the intensive affect that a particular body is capable of at various degrees of potentiality. In other words, the subject emerges as a collection of circuits immanent to both bodily matter and to all matter more generally.

The impersonal and trans-individual dimensions of affect unsettle the notion of subject-centredness, one that is traditionally seen as ontologically detached from matter. Affect disrupts the assumption about the individual as a starting point to everything that matters and takes place as affect exceeds individuality. Put differently, affect decentres the subject and takes relationality as a key principle to imagine complex becoming. As Massumi puts it,

We’re in affect, affect is not in us. It’s not a subjective content of our human lives. It is the felt quality of a relational field that is always “more than human”. . . more-than of ourselves. It can’t be otherwise, because you’re in a situation of uncertainty, you don’t have an overview, there’s no position of mastery, there’s a complexity and diversity in the field that you can’t possibly comprehend completely, and you’re changing with it. . .It’s a kind of double becoming, where you as an individual are being modulated by the collective field, as much as the field is being modulated by your gestures. ⁴⁰

Moreover, and reminiscent of Zanotti’s critique of the deterministic notion of causality, Massumi problematises the closed and linear systems of Newtonian physics. In doing so, he brings the study of affect in contact with chaos theory or complexity theory. ⁴¹ By highlighting the implications of the incalculable number of possibilities that arise when a large number of phenomena interact, ⁴² Massumi points to relational and complex interference patterns whereby many phenomena overlap in a state of indeterminacy. ⁴³ Specifically, Massumi uses chaos theory as a way to articulate the circulation of impersonal affect that runs across the social, the material, and the corporeal and that binds them all together. Massumi also demonstrates how affect is about being sensitive to initial conditions. In this regard, he writes:

There are few things all chaos theorists agree upon. One of them is that chaotic self-ordering depends on a “sensitivity to initial conditions,” no matter how the system has drifted from its initial terminus. What is this continued openness to being affected by a previousness of process? Is not this enduring “sensitivity” a connecting thread of affect meandering impersonally throughout the world? World-affect: life-glue of matter. ⁴⁴

Here, Massumi evokes the possibility of thinking affect as ‘world-affect’, or the sensitivities to affect and to be affected by contingent conditions in which phenomena overlap in a complex way. Affect appears as an emergent relation that makes the separate elements immediately responsive to each other. ⁴⁵ Ontologically speaking, affect is ‘the real-material-but-incorporeal dimension of the body’. ⁴⁶ It is always in matter, of and with its incorporeal potential for activation, because it is an intensity in a world of indeterminacy. As soon as affect turns into a form (for example, as an emotion as a subjective experience), it dissolves back into the world with what we could call its quantum effects. The subject, then, resides within a relational network with all sorts of affective intensities. Thinking the subject entangled with the indeterminate and dense tangle of affective human and non-human relationalities has the potential to enrich and expand Zanotti’s conceptualisation of agency that is in and of the world. Affective engagements potentially make agency into a more complex becoming in a world of indeterminacy. Affect may also be generative for thinking about ways in which agency takes shape in relation to the (affective) effects and excesses of the social, the material, and the corporeal. From such a perspective, agency can be thought of not only as a byproduct of material-discursive practices, but also as an excess of affective and corporeal practices.

Affect, Uncertainty, and Ethics

‘Valid ways of making decisions must be rooted upon careful diagnostic of contingency, embracing uncertainty, asking questions of how and assuming responsibility for consequences.’

Laura Zanotti ⁴⁷

‘Ethics is about how we inhabit uncertainty, together.’

Brian Massumi ⁴⁸

Another potential site of cross-fertilisation between Zanotti’s work and Massumi’s theorisation of affect can be found in considerations of ethics. For Zanotti, the intimate entanglements between objects and agencies of observation are key to being able to consider alternative forms of ethics in IR. Zanotti critiques the Kantian tradition in which ‘ethics is the expression of the rational subject’s ability to grasp universal criteria of behavior’. ⁴⁹ In the Kantian tradition, ethical choices are driven by universal principles, abstractions, and laws that are independent of circumstances and consequences. Thus, the way of determining which course of action ought to be taken relies on ‘a substantialist metaphysics of individualism – i.e. the Cartesian image of the subject as defined by a detached cogito’. ⁵⁰ However, Zanotti, following Jacques Derrida, contends that ethical decisions always ‘exceed the law in a way that situates ethical decision-making in the sphere of uncertainty and personal responsibility’. ⁵¹ And so Zanotti rethinks ethics as a practical engagement that is born out of our relational engagements in an entangled world as we embrace uncertainty. ⁵² For Zanotti, the choices we make and the practices we perform take ontological and epistemological precedence over universal and normative aspirations. ⁵³ As a result, entangled and relational ontologies nurture an ‘ethos of political engagement through plural and uncertain practices and require constant attention to “what-happens” instead of fixations on ‘what-ought-to be’. ⁵⁴ The political ethos that Zanotti proposes here (which she calls an ‘intra-agential ethos’ ⁵⁵ ) is centred around a radical non-substantialism (the performative character of everything) and is rooted in a radical assumption about responsibility for ‘traced paths while carefully assessing the likely consequences and distributive effects of our actions in the context where they are made’. ⁵⁶ Her radical assumption about responsibility also encompasses ‘humility, challenging accepted truths, careful analysis of the situation at hand, and creativity’. ⁵⁷ Thus, for Zanotti, ethical decisions can only be justified through being radically responsible, not merely naming all shortcomings as ‘unintended consequences’, because, she claims, ‘ethics is performative, materially entangled, and cannot be suspended’. ⁵⁸ In short, Zanotti reformulates ‘ethics as a practice where the justifiability of any act needs to be assessed in the context of phenomena within which we exert our agency’ ⁵⁹ instead of ‘grounding it [ethics] upon the nomadic, separate, free, and rational subject as its starting point’. ⁶⁰

Massumi also provides a persuasive account of ethics that, I think, potentially speaks to Zanotti’s intra-agential ethos within the quantum universe. In particular, Massumi introduces an affective aspect of ethics that activates practices. Similar to Zanotti, Massumi challenges a Kantian understanding of universal ethics that is based on a pre-set system of judgement. But, differently from Zanotti, Massumi theorises ethics as a mode of becoming towards affect in a state of constant dynamic change and uncertainty. Massumi defines ethics as follows:

Ethics is completely situational. It’s completely pragmatic. And it happens between people, in the social gaps. There is no intrinsic good or evil. The ethical value of an action is what is bring out in the situation, for its transformation, how it breaks sociality open. Ethics is about how we inhabit uncertainty, together. It’s not about judging each other right or wrong. For Nietzsche, like Spinoza, there is still a distinction between good and bad even if there is still a distinction between good and bad even if there’s not one between good and evil. Basically the “good” is affectively defined as what brings maximum potential and connection to the situation. It’s defined in terms of becoming. ⁶¹

Massumi’s theorisation of ethics slightly extends Zanotti’s intra-agential ethos. It does so because ethics, for Massumi, is not only about inhabiting uncertainty but also about affectively assessing the potential in a particular context while considering subsequent consequences. This ‘potentiality’ is an important component of Massumi’s understanding of ethics. Here, potentiality is not only about having potentia as in Zanotti’s work. It is more about affective attentiveness to what is indeterminately happening and to how things might be different than they currently are. It is about paying attention to subtle, vague, and unpredictable manifestations of affect and its circulations. It is also about being attuned to the eventual and processual character of any given situation. Attention to potentiality found in affect is a way of thinking about change and of rethinking ethics accordingly. In this context, Massumi writes:

Experiencing this potential for change, experiencing the eventfulness and uniqueness of every situation, even the most conventional ones, that’s not necessarily commanding movement, it’s about navigating movement. It’s about being immersed in an experience that is already under way. It’s about being bodily attuned to opportunities in the movement, going with the flow. It’s more life surfing the situation, or tweaking it, than commanding or programming it. ⁶²

Ethics then requires attentiveness to the potential impulse found in affect. It necessitates openness and commitments to the potentiality of the everyday and to all sorts of sensations, even those that cannot be immediately understood or may not necessarily feel good. Affective ethics demands us to simply be attuned to the fact that something is happening and may require a response from us. Thus, it seems that this potentiality, with its constant focus on attentiveness to affective circulations in the process, is what makes the unimaginable practicable.

This affective form of ethics as developed by Massumi might enrich and expand Zanotti’s practice-oriented understanding of ethics and her understanding of how ‘we are of the world’. As I mentioned above, for Massumi, ethics is more than a practice, although practice is still part of it. Rather, ethics (and responsibility as well) arises from the event itself as a collective unfolding of pre-individual and trans-individual potentials over time. ⁶³ During affective encounters, humans leave the marks of their engagements with human and non-human matter. Feeling the relational and collective quality of those affective encounters and their excesses makes ethics a process of temporal activation. This process-oriented understanding of ethics entails being attentive to the affective power of emergence immanent in practices. As Massumi puts it, ‘the felt potential is the jumping-off point, it’s in the very first flush of what’s coming, so it can be treated as a presupposition of the event’s unfolding. . . It’s a kind of thinking-feeling of what’s happening, including what may happen’. ⁶⁴

This affective understanding of ethics, similar perhaps to how politics is materially felt and experienced, entails a dynamic way of feeling-thinking about contingent relations between human and non-human matter. It also necessitates acknowledging contingency and complexity that affect generates as what we could call quantum effects. Thus, affective ethics is about developing a realisation of and an appreciation for the unknown and about imagining the unthinkable. The unknown and the unthinkable appear not as constraints but rather as conditions of possibility for bringing about change through attention to an excess of affective and collective patterns or situations.

Conclusion

In this article, I have sought to highlight how Zanotti’s quantum-inspired account of intra-agentialism together with her exploration of the ontological transmission of emotions opens up a possibility to consider and include affective entanglements of human and non-human matter within the quantum universe. I have raised the productive connection and tension between Zanotti’s ontological consideration of emotions and Massumi’s ontological imaginary of affect in relation to agency and ethics and discussed the ways in which these two ontological imaginaries, in fact, cross-fertilise each other with regards to alternative ways of conceptualising political agency, ethics, and possibly political change. I have argued that while Zanotti’s quantum ontology of practice is crucial to the study of phenomena, it might be also generative to explore what affective circulations (more than circulation of subjective and conscious emotions) are at work before, during, and after we take actions in order to assess, as a way to apprehend the potential in a particular event for creative possibilities, and particularly towards political change. Paying close attention to affective circulations in practices, I contend, might open up politics to a field of emergence in which agency and ethics become an ongoing process. This way of thinking might also open up new avenues for possible future studies in quantum IR.