Quantising Post-critique: Entangled Ontologies and Critical International Relations

The Actuality/Analogy Question in Quantum IR ⁷

As quantum thinking has crossed from physics to other scientific fields, and more broadly into the social sciences, arts, and humanities, the transition and translation has occurred in a variety of ways. In a recent commentary piece on the use of quantum thinking beyond physics, Kathryn Schaffer and Gabriela Barreto Lemos ⁸ identify five possible relationships between quantum and the macroscopic social world: recognising no relation, a focus on the implications of quantum technologies for the social world, ⁹ a deep dive into how one interpretation of quantum mechanics entails wildly different understandings of the world as a whole, ¹⁰ and a repository of analogies and metaphors (mathematical or conceptual). As mentioned in the introduction, the field of IR often approaches discussions of social theory not in terms of these four categories, but the either/or of actuality and analogy. ¹¹ To fully appreciate the importance of Zanotti’s move beyond the actuality/analogy question, it is worthwhile to briefly review how the existing field of quantum social theory deals with it. Part of the appeal of the question is likely because the binary framing is intuitive, but in the IR context, it is likely also due in part to Alexander Wendt’s strategy in presenting his core claims of quantum IR as actuality and not analogy.

Indeed, from the book’s first pages, Wendt’s own vision for a quantum social science grounded in quantum consciousness has a clear answer for the actuality/analogy question. Quantum Mind and Social Science presents a critique of Newtonian social-scientific approaches for their failure to explain the mind–body problem, and proposes instead that cognition, intentionality, sociality, and all of their products emerge from quantum processes in the brain, and Wendt really means it. The actuality of his claims is directly stated in the book’s introduction:

I explore the possibility that this foundational [Newtonian] assumption of social science is a mistake, by re-reading social science ‘through the quantum’. More specifically, I argue that human beings and therefor social life exhibit quantum coherence – in effect, that we are walking wave functions. I intend the argument not as an analogy or metaphor, but as a realist claim about what people really are . . . While one could read this book entirely . . . as an interesting analogy, my personal belief is that human beings really are quantum systems. ¹²

This strategic framing is employed by Wendt consistently through his book, as well as in a recent response to critics ¹³ – his quantum social science is quantum realism. While analogies may help to whet the appetite and open the mind of a potential interlocutor, the real analytical purchase and ontological grounding comes from the claim of actuality. This is one strong case for the actuality side of quantum social science.

Management theorist and pioneer of quantum thinking in the social realm, Danah Zohar is another thinker who grounds her quantum social theory largely – though not entirely ¹⁴ – in claims of actuality. Indeed, while her works in popular quantum social theory from the 1990s is difficult to categorise, she generally appears to be drawing actualist conclusions through a combination of analogical premises and scientific evidence. While a lack of precise attention to detail may be in part explained by the audience – popular rather than academic – there is also a sense that her method of quantum thinking is influenced by moving from analogy to actuality in her own journey. In the introduction to The Quantum Self, she offers the following methodological note:

At times, quantum theory seems to serve as a useful metaphor that helps to draw these reflections into a new and sharper focus, while at others it seems to promise at least a partial explanation for how consciousness, and hence daily experience, might actually work. This book began primarily as an exercise in metaphor but, as it unfolded, metaphor gave way increasingly to evidence, or to what is at least well-grounded speculation about the actual physics of human psychology and its moral and spiritual implications. ¹⁵

But the balance remains uneasy. Drawing lessons inspired from quantum physics for living life differently appears as one mission of the book – or, in Zohar’s word, ‘how the insights of modern physics can illuminate our understanding of everyday life’. ¹⁶ But there are also a fair number of actualist claims included, including a discussion of quantum consciousness at the heart of the book. It is at this point where metaphor appears to almost entirely flee the pages that Zohar states her case: ‘I think that the same Bose-Einstein condensation among neuron constituents is what distinguishes the conscious from the nonconscious. I think it is the physical basis of consciousness’. ¹⁷ While she avoids the strong claims that Wendt would later make through her reliance on the language of ‘I think’, Zohar’s desire to make claims about a quantum actuality is clear throughout the works.

At the other end of the spectrum, we find the ‘quantum-like’ theorists, who are quite content to build conceptual models – often mathematical models – using quantum ideas without any claims of an underlying quantum actuality whatsoever. Emmanuel Haven and Andrei Khrennikov, for example, have offered powerful applications of the mathematics of quantum physics to issues in economics and finance. However, these do not flow from an assumed or claimed actuality of quantum processes. Indeed, in the preface to their Quantum Social Science, they make this point absolutely clear:

The models presented in this book can be called ‘quantum-like’. They do not have a direct relation to quantum physics. We emphasize that in our approach, the quantum-like behaviour of human beings is not a consequence of quantum physical processes in the brain. Our basic premise is that information processing by complex social systems can be described by the mathematical apparatus of quantum mechanics. ¹⁸

As they note elsewhere, this does not preclude the existence of quantum phenomena, ¹⁹ but the result of that question is neither here nor there for the quantum-like paradigm. Quantum thinking is used – pragmatically, above all else – because it is useful in developing models. This represents a clear example of analogical approaches.

As noted above, actuality and analogy are not the only options available to the quantum social theorist. David Orrell’s quantum approach to economics, for example, is

not so much to use quantum physics as an analogy for social processes, or to assert a direct physical link between the two, but instead to start with the idea that money is a quantum phenomenon in its own right. ²⁰

Orrell’s strategy represents one way of theory-building that eschews categorisation along the actuality/analogy axis, quantising particular conceptual blocks that can then be deployed in the analysis of diverse phenomena. But this strategy is undeniably less radical of a quantum theory than that of Zanotti. Beginning from a turn away from existing political and international theory – traditional and critical variants – in favour of a critical-quantum exploration, Zanotti challenges pre-existing social science root and branch, while also offering a radical and relational reimagining of international politics and the ethical stakes that arise therefrom.

Entangled Ontology

Ontological Entanglements begins not from actuality or analogy but through a rejection of substantialism and radical reimagination of the social world, drawing on Barad’s entangled ontological imaginary. Risking oversimplification, we can understand this argument as stating that Zanotti rejects the a priori assumption of a predictable universe consisting of separable constituents in favour of one where all parts of a system are connected – entangled – in a fundamental way. All interactions take place within the system and action within the system entails change for the entire system. Separability and predictability must therefore be cast aside. These premises, emerging from Barad’s agential realist interpretation read through the Foucauldian apparatus, form the core of Zanotti’s worldview.

While Zanotti does comment on the utility of metaphors in ‘establishing horizons of intelligibility’, ²¹ these do not bear directly on what we might call her philosophical methodology. Furthermore, her discussions of analogy almost exclusively appear as a critique of descriptions of power in terms of mass. ²² She does not seek to redirect these analogies – for example, from mass to energy – but to move beyond the Newtonian analogical reasoning to a new way of thinking. It is not a question of describing in a new way or claiming the existence of physical process, but developing an entirely novel way of understanding the world through quantum thinking. We find glimpses of her methodology of quantum thinking throughout the third chapter – perhaps the key chapter to understanding how Zanotti contextualises her own argument, and one therefore worth reflecting upon if we want to more fully appreciate the stakes of adopting an entangled ontology in IR theory.

For Zanotti, relations are at the ontological core of quantum physics. When introducing the promise of quantum thinking for critical IR, it is through a declaration that ‘quantum physics begins with relations, not entities’, which means that it ‘affirms an ontology of entanglement that allows for re-imagining how we fit in the world and how we may justify ethical decisions’. ²³ She contrasts Wendt’s approach, framed as a critique of materialism that mobilises quantum consciousness to build a social theory that nevertheless reinforces liberal assumptions about free will, with Barad’s worldview that began with entanglements and then worked outwards from that central point. ²⁴ Because Wendt’s quantum world is will-centric and consciousness is a superposition of brain-states, Zanotti feels that the project is largely a ‘quantum reformulation of the constructivist view that we are socially co-constituted’ rather than a novel form that fully embraces the relationality of quantum entanglement. ²⁵ Conversely, it is precisely Barad’s decision to start from entanglement that allows Zanotti to build a worldview that transcends considerations of framing individual units or constitutive acts of the will. Rather than inter-actions between separate units, we find intra-actions of entangled parts with the rest of the system; rather than unique causal acts of will, we find phenomena within which particular agential cuts may be made; and rather than entities that come into relation, we find relations that pre-exist their relata. While she sees Wendt’s focus on consciousness as a reification of substantialism (through the assumption of consciousness existing as a quantum entity), Zanotti’s justification of an entangled ontology is a direct rejection of both substantialism and the binary categories that often (but not always) accompany it – ‘Barad establishes an ontology that repositions the human within a web of practices that are neither mental nor material, but entangled intra-actions’. ²⁶

Our position in the world –in the sense of both feeling like an actor and feeling like a social scientist – radically overestimates both our epistemological and ontological separateness. I am not a separate being, but entangled with all other parts of the system. Thus, what I perceive as my actions are not actions upon other entities, but actions within the broader system. This distinction does not limit the importance of what I perceive as my willed actions – indeed, Zanotti’s point is precisely the opposite. Whereas in a Newtonian world where I act upon an object, my relation is to that object (perhaps alone, or perhaps to other entities, but only indirectly), a starting point of entanglement means that I am connected to all other elements of the system. When I act within that system, I contribute to the production of a radically different reality for the entire system. Rather than fashioning a particular future, I participate in the continual production of the entangled system’s becoming.

Three chapters later, we find this entangled ontology applied directly to a theorisation of the international, and the ethical stakes of Zanotti’s argument are unmistakable. Following from the Baradian assumption of relations preceding relata (for both researcher and subject matter), all research is necessarily reflective upon the positionality of the researcher. ²⁷ The practice of research is productive and creative just as the practices of the social world are productive and creative of its continual unfolding. ‘Knowledge’, Zanotti states, ‘is not a detached, anodyne activity that reflects reality while leaving it untouched’, but rather ‘it is an ethico-political engagement that produces ontological cuts and therefore requisites assumption of responsibility’. ²⁸ Because of a fundamental ontological assumption of entanglement, agents are inseparable from the system within which they are found, and therefore bear responsibility for the changes they help to produce for the entire system. And, crucially, the same holds for the researcher, who bears responsibility for the reality produced alongside particular investigations.

The critique of Newtonian substantialism focuses on assumptions of separability, rationality, and objectivity that Zanotti identifies throughout theories of IR – visible in practice in the example of applying abstract notions like the responsibility to protect in different world-political contexts. Rather than claiming an actual quantum reality or suggesting useful analogies for understanding relations, Zanotti’s strategy is to explore a quantum worldview that challenges Newtonian substantialism by affirming both the fundamental entanglement of all elements that we might call components of a system and the complexity that any action within that system entails. Therefore, her critique is not of Newtonian science as such, but of its onto-epistemological worldview – not of specific analogies from Newtonian science or actual Newtonian claims in the realm of physics, but of the primordial worldview within which all thought takes places. This shift entails a critical rethinking of both researcher and subject matter, calling for radical assumption of responsibility over all possible effects in the system, recognising the connectedness within the world, and the scientific and ethical pitfalls of assumptions of separability, rationality, and objectivity.

What I would like to suggest is that this quantisation of the foundational assumptions of reality represents a new way of practicing critique in IR theory. While reflexive approaches have long called attention to the agency of the researcher in co-constituting subject matter, or the importance of relations invisible under assumptions of rationality, Zanotti’s practice of critique is not one that uses a specific tool for a precise intervention. The stakes of her engagement are no lower than the entirety of how we understand, act in, and ethically judge the world. ‘In making ethical decisions’, she argues, ‘we exceed what can be calculated or delimited by law’ – that is to say, agents’ actions within a system cannot be judged by the imposition of abstract principles presumed before the complex entanglements are carefully examined. But this is not merely an argument about a world out there to be studied. Rather, the call to remember relationality holds for the researcher as well: ‘our critique is never waged from an external standpoint of absolute knowledge, but is inevitable imbricated in the very foundations we criticize’. ²⁹ The critique of Newtonian substantialism has important implications for the world and the researcher in it – precisely because the researcher can never be apart from the world.

While her approach should generally be understood as a critical intervention into IR – and Ontological Entanglements does indeed open up important space for critical-quantum IR – her project is more directly one of post-critique. As I will review in the next section, it is the post-critique movement that seeks out these kinds of radical relational reimaginings that Zanotti’s entangled ontology demands of both researcher and subject matter.

Post-critique and Critical IR

The idea of ‘Critical International Relations’ was introduced by Robert Cox in the early 1980s, presented as a contrast to problem-solving theories of IR. ³⁰ The latter theory, which included both political realism and liberal international theory, ‘takes the world as it finds it’ with the practical aim of ‘mak[ing] . . . relationships and institutions work smoothly by dealing effectively with particular sources of trouble’ and the analytical goal ‘to arrive at statements of laws or regularities which appear to have general validity but which imply . . . the institutional and relational parameters assumed in the problem-solving approach’. ³¹ In short, the problem-solving approaches assume the existence of the world as such and seek to make small changes to improve the function of the world. Critical theory, instead, ‘does not take institutions and social and power relations for granted but calls them into question by concerning itself with their origins and how they might be in the process of changing’ – meaning the critical theorist is not one who assumes that things are rightfully so, but one who stands apart from the existing order, asks how it developed, and how it might be transformed otherwise. ³² Cox’s definition is directly invoked in the early texts of critical security studies, ³³ yet even where he does not appear, the framing of critical IR as an exercise of asking how power constructs particular orders and how it might be otherwise has become a generally understood definition. ³⁴

Recent decades have witnessed important work from the broad ‘critical’ tent of IR theory on the various power structures, inequalities, and barriers that produce current international orders and arrangements. As it would be beyond the scope of this intervention to review the entire history of such developments, the key outcome is the move to post-critique in the work of Jonathan Austin and others. Bound up in Austin’s critique of critique is the idea that long-standing critical approaches have stylistically failed because they embody a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ – leading researchers always to look for secret causes – and instead proposes an alternative, relational critique that searches for multiplicity and connectivity. ³⁵ The Coxian (critical) approach to critique is about drawing attention to the way that problematic aspects of the existing order came about, with claims to novelty emerging from singular new insights, interpretations, and inroads. A post-critical critique, however, calls forth a new form of academic practice, challenging the status quo by embracing kinder practices, following models including companionship. ³⁶ Therefore, the practice of critique becomes one not of detective work, but communal study. ³⁷

The post-critical move in IR theory is radical not merely in its call to pose new kinds of questions – indeed, this has been a common practice among self-professed critical scholars since Cox. But it is a recognition that the unceasing suspiciousness that drives the first half of Coxian critique – questioning how existing orders came to be, especially in their problematic aspects – can work directly against the second part – the pursuit of transformational and emancipatory political alternatives. ‘Critique of the status quo is needed now more than ever before’, Austin argues, ‘but the disasters of today demand a different kind of critique – something “post” critique as we now know it’. ³⁸ Moving beyond the existing strategies towards a relational and inclusive critique demands a rethinking of practices of research, the social world, and the relationships between researchers of that social world. Relationality must be at both the onto-epistemological and the practical core of post-critique – and what I would like to suggest is that the radical embrace of an entangled ontological imaginary in Ontological Entanglements allows Zanotti to make a fundamentally post-critical move, opening up space for a new, quantum mode of critique.

Relationality, Entanglement, and a Quantised Post-critical Path

Bringing together the threads of quantum IR and post-critical IR can help us to understand the novelty of Zanotti’s work in Ontological Entanglements. Her quantum perspective does not question commonly accepted conclusions about the contemporary condition by calling attention to previously unrecognised quantum phenomena actually occurring, nor by mobilising a particularly powerful analogy that helps clarify or communicate previously obscure inequalities in the world. Rather, her quantum perspective begins from a recognition of relationality. The world is a complex web of entanglements, where nodes cannot be understood in isolation nor even separated from the broader context. Researchers, too, can only understand the world because they participate in it. Practices of research – like practices of democratic engagement, labour, or socialisation – are entangled with their contexts and inseparable therefrom. The consequences of actions are not necessarily localised and easily predictable through the application of abstract principles, but include the rippling changes produced throughout the web of entanglements. Responsibility, in this view, can only be fully lived out when it is radically accepted to the web’s ends. Zanotti’s quantum critique of IR (and of existing theories seeking to explain it) enrols the agency and responsibility of all actors, constituents, contextual factors, and researchers, embracing precisely the relationality and connectivity that the post-critical movement in IR theory seeks to unpack.

Zanotti’s quantum social theory-inspired approach to IR offers a contribution to the post-critical movement. Asking a new question that by its very premises necessitates a central role for relationality and enrolment brings the researcher and the context closer together as a matter of onto-epistemological necessity. Rather than the descriptive critique working against the possibility of future collective pursuit of transformational politics, the relationality inherent in Zanotti’s form of quantum thinking can perhaps only be accomplished when both parts come together – the critique of Newtonian substantialism is always and already an articulation of the importance of relational solidarity, and the pursuit of relational solidarity is only thinkable in a world that critiques the shortcomings of Newtonian substantialism.

By way of conclusion, I would like to speculate about what Ontological Entanglements might mean for the future of quantum IR, in terms of its disciplinary sociology. As mentioned at the outset, the intuitively divisive question of actuality or analogy has largely been a function of sorting field contributors rather than a source of bitter debate within quantum IR. While some interventions have been clearly identifiable as making claims about actual quantum properties, others are precise in limiting their discussion to the space of the metaphor. For many interlocutors (and I would suspect this is especially true for those who seek to mobilise quantum IR as an approach to critique), the quantum question is one of thinking differently. Rather than fracture between actuality and analogy, I wonder if future limits to debate in quantum IR will not emerge in frames more familiar to the disciplinary sociology of IR. Critical theorists might seek to question and transform existing orders while problem-solving theorists offer new and innovative solutions to tough problems in foreign policy. Rationalist proponents of quantum IR might address mathematical improvements to game theory while reflectivist scholars draw attention to the observer effect as an explanatory model for the politics of category-making. The growth of quantum thinking in IR marks a significant expansion in the kinds of conceptual tools available, but the future of that discussion may well be one that looks similar to the lines of debate that occur in ‘Newtonian IR’. Ontological Entanglements marks a significant expansion in the breadth of quantum IR debates, and the impact of that radical expansion is – perhaps fittingly – radically uncertain.