781691

research-article2018
MIL0010.1177/0305829818781691Millennium: Journal of International StudiesArfi

Forum: Social Theory Going Quantum-Theoretic? Questions,

Alternatives and Challenges
Millennium: Journal of

Challenges to a Quantum-
International Studies
2018, Vol. 47(1) 99­–113
© The Author(s) 2018
Theoretic Social Theory Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829818781691
https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829818781691
journals.sagepub.com/home/mil

Badredine Arfi
University of Florida, USA

Keywords
quantum theory, time, will, category theory, social theory

Mots-clés
Théorie quantique, temps, volonté, théorie quantique, théories sociales

Palabras clave
teoría cuántica, tiempo, voluntad, teoría de las categorías, teoría social

A key claim that Alexander Wendt makes in his book Quantum Mind and Social Science:
Unifying Physical and Social Ontology is that he is not using the ‘quantum’ as a meta-
phor. Nor is he drawing analogies either. He argues that he is constructing a quantum
theory of the human subject and social structures through a quantum-theoretic explana-
tion of consciousness undergirded by a panpsychist hypothesis of primitive proto-
consciousness. In this article I show how Wendt’s insistence that he is developing a liter-
ally-speaking quantum-theoretic approach presents him with a number of must-not-
ignore challenges that originate in quantum theory. I specifically discuss three
challenges:

1. the quantum-theoretic challenge to Wendt’s ‘Will’

2. the challenge of background-independence to Wendt’s ‘flat ontology’
3. a challenge posed by what philosophers of physics call ‘the problem of time’ to
Wendt’s notion of time emerging through symmetry breaking.

Corresponding author:
Badredine Arfi, University of Florida, Political Science, 234 Anderson Hall, POB 117325, Gainsville, FL
32611, USA.
Email: barfi@ufl.edu
100 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47(1)

Why these challenges? Because I consider these issues as essential elements in Wendt’s
project without which he cannot claim that he is truly developing a quantum theory of the
mind and society.
I then compare Wendt’s forays into quantum-theoretic social theory to Karen Barad’s
venture in her book Meeting the Universe Halfway to suggest that both have chartered
new territories that can be taken towards new frontiers. How? By delving alongside
mathematical physicists and philosophers of physics into the cutting-edge and revolu-
tionary contemporary approach to the foundations of quantum theory, namely, category-
theoretic relationality as an analytical and conceptual framework.
Let me make it clear at this point that I am very much in agreement with Wendt’s larger
goal, that is, we must break the confines of thinking à la classical physics (and I would add
classical/Aristotelian logic) and learn from the quantum revolutionary way of thinking
about life. I also hope that I will not be understood as if I am asking Wendt to write a book
about a grand theory of everything. To the contrary, in this article I limit my critique to
what I take to be some of the most creative and defining ideas in Wendt’s approach.

The Quantum-Theoretic Challenge to Wendt’s ‘Will’

In this section I briefly discuss the notions of ‘proto-consciousness’ and ‘will’ that Wendt
introduces as a way of explaining the collapse of wave functions. In developing this idea,
Wendt adopts panpsychism as a metaphysics. However, this metaphysics does not neces-
sarily connect with quantum theory of the brain; there is a jump to be made here as Wendt
does indeed submit. In order to bring the two together Wendt draws on two physicists,
Conway and Kochen, who demonstrate what they call a ‘free will theorem’, that is:

If the choice of directions in which to perform spin … experiments is not a function of the
information accessible to the experimenters, then the responses of the particles are equally not
functions of the information accessible to them.1

Elaborating, Conway and Kochen write that:

Why do we call this result the Free Will Theorem? It is usually tacitly assumed that experimenters
have sufficient free will to choose the settings of their apparatus in a way that is not determined
by past history. We make this assumption explicit precisely because our theorem deduces from
it the more surprising fact that the particles’ responses are also not determined by past history.2

Much later in the article, the two authors, however, make a startling admission as far as
Wendt’s project is concerned; they clearly state that:

our assertion that “the particles make a free decision” is merely a shorthand form of the more
precise statement that “the Universe makes this free decision in the neighbourhood of the

1. John H. Conway and Simon Kochen, ‘The Free Will Theorem’, Foundations of Physics 36,
no.10 (2006): 1441–73, 1444.
2. Ibid.
Arfi 101

particles.” It is only for convenience that we have used the traditional theoretical language of
particles and their spins.3

This is a much more acceptable physics statement – even from a quantum theory
perspective – than claiming rhetorically for the sake of convenience as they did at the
beginning of the article that:

if indeed there exist any experimenters with a modicum of free will, then elementary particles
must have their own share of this valuable commodity.4

This admission creates a serious challenge for Wendt’s adoption of the idea that particles
have free will, which he uses to speak of Will as causing the collapse of the wave func-
tion. It is a challenge because Wendt is not using ‘free will’ as a shorthand to state (like
Conway and Kochen do) that ‘the Universe makes this free decision in the neighbour-
hood of the particles’. Had Wendt done so he would not have been able to speak of the
inside of a wave function and subjectivity as he does.5 This thus undermines the claim of
an insider’s view of the wave function since Conway and Kochen are clear that it is the
universe that makes the free decision in the neighbourhood of the particle. And in more
operational terms, that is, in terms of what happens actually in experiments, they explain
that what happens is that ‘real macroscopic things such as the locations of certain spots
on screens are not functions of the past history of the Universe’.6 Although Conway and
Kochen subsequently presented a stronger version of ‘free will theorem’,7 it does remain
plagued with a poor conceptualisation of what a human free choice is, that is, as put by
Landsman,

The (Strong) Free Will Theorem (FWT) of Conway and Kochen (2009) on the one hand follows
from uncontroversial parts of modern physics and elementary mathematical and logical
reasoning, but on the other hand seems predicated on an undefined notion of free will (allowing
physicists to “freely choose” the settings of their experiments). This makes the theorem
philosophically vulnerable.8

Landsman, after reviewing a large body of work on the issue and engaging in quantum
theoretic calculations, concludes that:

3. Conway and Kochen, ‘The Free Will Theorem’, 1456, emphases added.
4. Ibid., 1441.
5. This reminds us of the problems of Husserl’s phenomenology in trying to isolate conscious-
ness through an epoché (bracketing of the outside); see for example, Derrida’s critique of
this aspect of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, that is, rejecting the idea of a pure
mental experience without reference to the ‘external’ universe. Jacques Derrida, Speech and
Phenomena (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
6. Conway and Kochen, ‘The Free Will Theorem’, 1456.
7. John H. Conway and Simon B. Kochen, ‘The Strong Free Will Theorem’, Notices of the
American Mathematical Society 56, no. 2 (2009): 226–32.
8. Klaas Landsman, ‘On the Notion of Free Will in the Free Will Theorem’, Studies in History
and Philosophy of Modern Physics 57 (2017): 98–103, 98. Emphasis added.
102 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47(1)

Although the intention of Conway and Kochen was to support unspecified versions of libertarian
free will through modern physics, our reformulation of their theorem … gives a more subtle
picture: the FWT (revisited) challenges one particular version of compatibilist free will.9 As
such, it only provides indirect support for libertarian free will, namely by weakening one of its
competitors.10

Such a ‘negative’ proof of the ‘free will’ is far away from Wendt’s claim that there is a
‘Will’ operating inside the ‘wave function’ to provoke its collapse. Alternatively, Wendt
could decide to argue that he is working through analogies or metaphors, which of course
would be very damaging to the nature of his project as he portrays it.

The Background-Independence Challenge to Wendt’s Flat

Ontology
Wendt’s speculative effort to construct an argument for a flat ontology that unifies physi-
cal and social ontologies overlooks a major challenge ensuing from a hard-to-ignore
issue that philosophers and physicists are dealing with today, that is, a unification of the
theory of general relativity and quantum theory – the two best physics theories that have
been both theoretically and experimentally vindicated over and over. Wendt does indeed
mention this issue and the problem of formulating a theory of quantum gravity but does
not bring it to bear in a sustained way on his discussions of ontology and time.11 This is
a serious challenge to Wendt’s work because unifying quantum theory and general rela-
tivity leads to the necessity of a so-called background-independent theorisation which
jettisons the positing of any role for ontology, or, more precisely, metaphysics, flat or
otherwise. In the language of philosophy, background-independence means there are no
presupposed metaphysical primitives (and in the language of social theory there is no
presupposed ‘ontology’).12 In the theory of general relativity this means that all that we
can formulate are local parametrisations of space and time and any other feature of the
universe that one might be interested in. Phrased using, for example, Stephen K. White’s
jargon, this would stand for local prefigurations, none of which has the status of meta-
physical primitives.13
This issue poses two philosophical/conceptual difficulties. First is the question of how
to conceptualise ‘background independence’ proper. That is, besides saying that there is

9. Compatibilism is the position that free will and determinism can be compatible.
10. Ibid., 103.
11. On the theory of general relativity and its philosophy, see: Øyvind Grøn and Sigbjørn Hervik,
Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (New York: Springer, 2007); Sean Carroll, Spacetime
and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity (New York: Addison & Wesley, 2004);
Tim Maudlin, Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2012); Roger B. Angel, Relativity: The Theory and its Philosophy (New York: Pergamon
Press, 1980).
12. Ontology, strictly speaking, means the ‘science of being’. However, in common social sci-
ences discourse it has come to mean metaphysical primitives.
13. Stephen K. White, Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political
Theory (New Haven: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Arfi 103

no metaphysical background or primitives whatsoever, what does this notion entail con-
ceptually speaking? Mathematically speaking this is effectuated through various mathe-
matical procedures and ideas such as the idea/operation of diffeomorphism. Simply put
this means that theories should not refer in any foundational way to any coordinate (para-
metrisation) system, including time defined in any way. Background independence thus
means that if we were to displace all dynamical objects existing in the universe, this is
not tantamount to generating a different state of the world. Rather, this should lead to an
equivalent representation of the same physical state. This is referred to as diffeomor-
phism invariance (also known as gauge symmetry).14 The question at hand here is: how
to incorporate this insight and deploy it in a conceptual framework that seeks to theorise
about the social world? And why is it so difficult anyway? Because we must translate
from the theory of general relativity, which is expressed in the complex and abstract
language of mathematical formalism of tensorial calculus, into a conceptual language
more amenable to philosophy’s and social theory’s jargon. And this requires creativity so
as not to fall into conceptual traps that would nullify the insights of general relativity. For
example, we must not resort to analogising and metaphorising when translating from
general relativity since doing so will be following the conceptual logic of pre-general
relativity conceptualisations within which our natural languages are wired. In other
words, our natural languages and discourses rarely offer us notions and ideas that are
suitable to explicating the subtleties of sophisticated mathematical theories that are not
wired in classical physics. Speaking, for example, of spacetime warping or quantum
entanglement simply defies any expression in terms of our everyday language except by
resorting to analogies and metaphors, which then gives the wrong presentation of the
‘weirdness’ of the issues at stake. And the idea of no background – that is, not even
empty space – is just impossible to portray in human natural language.
This is different from the perspective of the special theory of relativity wherein the
spacetime continuum is taken to be a background ‘container’ within which the universe
unfolds (just like in a Newtonian world), with the added feature that event simultaneity15
becomes relative to where one is located in space, which means that time is not uniformly
flowing anymore. However, time is still one-dimensional (1-d) linear and space is three-
dimensionally (3-d) isotropic (that is, the geometry of space is uniform in every spatial
direction at any point) space is three-dimensional (3-d) Euclidean. Indeed, the special
relativity notion of spacetime continuum – as a foliation of 1-d linear time and 3-d iso-
tropic space – is replaced in the theory of general relativity by the notion of a dynamical
curved pseudo-Riemannian manifold.16 General relativity presents spacetime geometry

14. On background independence, see Lee Smolin, ‘The Case for Background Independence’, in
The Structural Foundations of Quantum Gravity, eds. Dean Rickles, Steven French, and Juha
Saatsi (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 196–239.
15. Two things can happen at the same time in one frame of reference and at different times in
another frame of reference.
16. The manifold is only pseudo because the metric is positive definite. German mathematician
Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann (17 September 1826–20 July 1866) was a key founder of
this geometry as he developed it in 1854 in his Habilitationsschrift on the foundations of geom-
etry entitled ‘On the Hypotheses on which Geometry is based’. The new geometry consisted
of a generalisation of differential geometry of surfaces beyond the three-dimensional real
104 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47(1)

and gravity as one and the same thing – the spacetime continuum is but the gravitational
field (much like we speak of an electromagnetic field which we experience as electric and
magnetic forces). And because space and time are inseparable, time is much like space
also part of 4-dimensional geometry (and hence gravity). This dynamic spacetime geom-
etry, or, equivalently, gravitational field, is not contained in anything. Put differently: spa-
cetime does not exist against a background of any sort – there is no background! The
Newtonian idea of spacetime as the container of the universe is jettisoned. All what we
have are fields interacting with fields, such as, for example, the gravitational field inter-
acting with electroweak field (which combines weak and electromagnetic forces). It is
only at the local level that one can more or less still speak in the usual way of space and
time because the spacetime manifold is a pseudo-Riemannian manifold which is locally
homeomorphic (that is, there is a one to one smooth mapping) to a Euclidean 3-dimen-
sional flat space plus one dimension for time. Although the universe exists with all its
phenomena which we can observe both at the nano (and smaller) scale and at the scale of
billions of lightyears away, we cannot speak of a ‘global container’ anymore, and every-
thing is relativised17 beyond the local spacetime ‘neighbourhood’, including time.
Unifying the theory of general relativity with quantum theory to formulate a consist-
ent theory of quantum gravity has however proven to be a daunting challenge for dec-
ades. It is only within the last two or so decades that much progress has been made with
the advent of so-called loop quantum gravity,18 string theory, and a few other frame-
works.19 Not only are the difficulties technical, that is, requiring new, sophisticated and
highly complex mathematics, they also are conceptual and philosophical. All successful
quantum theories (called quantum field theories) of the fundamental interactions other
than gravity presuppose spacetime as a background, whereas general relativity is about

space. For a discussion of a Riemannian approach by a social theorist, see Arkady Plotnitsky,
‘Bernhard Riemann’s Conceptual Mathematics and the Idea of Space’, Configurations 17,
nos. 1–2 (2010): 105–30.
17. ‘Relativised’ here is not to be confused with the idea of ‘relativism’ in social theory. I am using
it in the sense of general relativity which by the way goes much beyond special relativity in
this respect. The latter posits the speed of light is constant and hence its meaning of ‘special
relativity’. However, in general relativity there is no ontological/metaphysical concept of time
as such. See next section for further discussion. I thank one reviewer for raising this issue.
18. Loop quantum gravity, which is a most promising candidate, shows, first, that there is no con-
cept of time at the quantum level if one is to preserve the condition of background-independ-
ence (time emerges in a certain ‘thermodynamic’ limit), and, second, that space is quantised
into discrete elements and hence discontinuous with a minimum value of volume which is
a lower limit to dividing space; this is much like, for example, energy is quantised into dis-
crete levels. See Carlo Rovelli, ‘Loop Quantum Gravity’, Physics World 16, no. 11 (2003):
1–5; Carlo Rovelli and Francesca Vidotto, Covariant Loop Quantum Gravity: An Elementary
Introduction to Quantum Gravity and Spinfoam Theory (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2014).
19. For a simplified discussion of various approaches to quantum gravity, see Lee Smolin, Three
Roads to Quantum Gravity (New York: Basic Books, 2001). For more sophisticated discus-
sions, see Daniele Oriti, Approaches to Quantum Gravity: Toward a New Understanding of
Space, Time and Matter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Arfi 105

spacetime itself, thought of as a dynamical geometric field, and the theory is background-
independent. Moreover, quantum theory assumes a notion of time which is pre-general
relativity. Relativistic quantum field theory – quantum theory plus special theory of rela-
tivity – incorporates the notion of spacetime as developed in the theory of special relativ-
ity only, and the latter still considers time and space as absolute ‘containers’, even though
they are relativised in the sense that there is no universal parametrisation thereof.
Therefore, in addition to the daunting problem of background independence we also
have a so-called problem of time (discussed in the next section).
To end this section, let me raise the following question: why should the requirement
of background-independence be an issue for Wendt’s project? Two quick answers. First:
the issue of background-independence is a major challenge to quantum theory and physi-
cists understand this, especially those who are interested in the foundations of physics.
Because general relativity is continually confirmed and reconfirmed the background-
independence requirement has become a ‘must’ for quantum theory at the level of foun-
dations of physics. And because Wendt’s project is at its roots about metaphysics and
ontology he cannot ignore this issue. Second: social theory and political theory as well as
IR theory have of late been seriously engaged in profound debates about what is termed
as the ‘turn to ontology’ and which Colin Wight terms as ‘ontology as politics’.20 Stephen
White describes the ontological turn of late modern times as ‘a growing propensity to
interrogate more carefully those “entities” presupposed by our typical ways of seeing
and doing in the modern world’.21 He suggests that we divide ontologies into two broad
categories: strong and weak ontologies. Strong ontologies are claims made on how the
world ‘truly’ is. In contrast, for weak ontologies all ontological conceptualisations are
contestable and yet such conceptualisations are necessary or unavoidable ‘for an ade-
quately reflective ethical and political life’.22 Wendt’s proposal will then be a strong
ontology in White’s sense. These two points together – and the spirit of Wendt’s project
seeking to unify social and physical theory behoves us to take them together – are mutu-
ally reinforcing in solidifying the requirement of background independence.23 And this
poses an existential challenge to Wendt’s project of a realist flat ontology.

The ‘Problem of Time’ Challenge to Wendt’s ‘Time’

In the context of developing his understanding of ‘experience’ as part of his model of the
quantum man, Wendt presents a discussion of what he terms as ‘non-local experience in

20. Colin Wight, Agents, Structures and International Relations: Politics as Ontology (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006).
21. White, Sustaining Affirmation, 4.
22. Ibid., 8.
23. Note that this article is for the most part what might be termed as an ‘internal’ sympathetic
critique of Wendt’s project, which implies, for example, that I refrain from bringing into the
discussion many recent bodies of literature dealing with issues of ontology such as what
is usually referred to as post-structuralism, post-modernism and post-foundationalism, post-
Husserlian phenomenology, etc. This choice is dictated by the limit of available space in an
article of this size.
106 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47(1)

time’. The entry point for this discussion is the debate over whether we can change the
past (which he terms ontological view) or just interpretations thereof (which he terms the
epistemological view). Based on a limited set of readings from quantum theory, Wendt
opts for an ‘ontological interpretation of changing the past’,24 thereby arguing that ‘expe-
rience is temporally non-local’. Temporal non-locality specifically stands for the idea
that we can change the constitutive (not the causal) nature of the past.
However, Wendt’s speculative enterprise on time, which is anchored in the Copenhagen
version of quantum theory, runs into serious difficulties when considered in tandem with
what physicists call ‘the problem of time’. Not only does this problem go against the
notion of temporal non-locality that Wendt espouses, it also goes against the whole dis-
cussion about time symmetry breaking which, Wendt posits, is effectuated by the Will.
The problem of time is indeed a serious challenge to any quantum theory based on the
Schrödinger formalism (and hence the notion of wave function) when seeking to unify it
with general relativity. In the former the time variable is considered as linear and sym-
metric (between past and future) whereas general relativity makes time meaningful at the
local level only, that is, within a small neighbourhood of the spacetime point (termed as
event) under consideration. In other words, quantum theory à la Schrödinger is based on
a smooth, continuous and one-dimensional topology of time (represented by the line of
positive real numbers) whereas general relativity requires a much richer topology with
the added feature that time as such (as we are used to it) exists only within the spacetime
manifold which is definitely neither an absolute nor a universal container.
We know now, more than ever before, and with stronger scientific certainty and accu-
racy, that spacetime, that is, the very texture and fabric of the universe, is dynamic.25 The
universe is not a flat Euclidean space but rather a pseudo-Riemannian manifold, that is,
we have a spacetime manifold with a curved dynamic geometry where the universal field
of gravity is nothing but the dynamic geometry of the spacetime manifold. This is a radi-
cal departure from the ‘comfort zone’ of Newtonian thinking of time as a universal,
uniform ‘container’ within which everything that exists unfolds. We can therefore find
different topological configurations of spacetime and going from one configuration to
another can happen not only smoothly but also abruptly, hence not smoothly.
Let me briefly digress here to introduce some necessary notions of topology. Topo
comes from the Greek τόπος or place, and logy comes from the Greek λόγος or study.
Topology is commonly taken to be the study of the properties of space as the latter under-
goes continuous deformations that can stretch or bend space without tearing any regions
of space apart or gluing regions together. Speaking of topology means paying attention
to continuities, connections, disruptions, breaking points, jumps, and singularities in the

24. Alexander Wendt, Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 191.
25. That is, in the aftermath of the amazing 14 September 2015 results of the LIGO Scientific
Collaboration’s experiments which captured and measured the passing through earth of gravita-
tional waves that resulted from the merging of two black holes far away in space and time – some
1.3 billion light-years away. Such waves have since then been observed two more times with
the latest being in June 2017. See the LIGO website (http://www.ligo.org/) for many interesting
aspects of the experiments.
Arfi 107

fabric of spacetime, which make the topography not smooth or continuous. Speaking of,
and experiencing, such an unhingedness of spacetime fabric is as real an experience as
any other experience of reality can be. A topologically invariant topography is one
wherein distortions can occur but in continuous and smooth ways. You could for exam-
ple shrink, elongate and bend surfaces and curves and thus transform them into other
surfaces and curves in a continuous way, that is, without ever breaking them, like much
of what you can do with a rubber band without breaking it. From a topological perspec-
tive, a doughnut is not different from a coffee mug in the sense that you can continuously,
smoothly deform the coffee mug to obtain a doughnut (torus), and vice versa. In topol-
ogy there is no notion of length or distance, nor is there a notion of angle either.26
Moreover, today’s far-reaching achievements in many branches of mathematics such
as differential geometry, general topology, and algebraic topology make it easier to con-
cisely and systematically conceptualise distorted and warped geometries, spaces, and
manifolds. Thinkers, who are not necessarily mathematicians by training or profession,
speak of Möbius strip and torus geometries in analysing many aspects of human life.
Lacanian psychoanalysis comes to mind where we find it speaking of the Möbius strip
and other geometrical objects, the topologies of which defy our common-sense experi-
ence. That, for example, Hamlet would speak of a ‘time out of joint’ is hence not that
surprising since spacetime has a dynamic topology which can display disjointedness. We
can also speak, as Derrida put it, of spacing of time – espacement du temps – which can-
not be escaped and should not be ignored any more in analysing human and social phe-
nomena. In Derrida’s words:

An interval must separate the present from what it is in order for the present to be itself, but this
interval that constitutes it as present must, by the same token, divide the present in and of itself,
thereby also dividing, along with the present, everything that is thought on the basis of the
present … In constituting itself, in dividing itself dynamically, this interval is what might be
called spacing, the becoming-space of time or the becoming-time of space.27

According to the theory of general relativity, there is no unique way or physical sense for
defining a notion of universal time any more. Basic physics is explainable and describ-
able without having resort to any notion of time (at least not in the traditional sense of the
term, that is, Newtonian or even in the sense of the theory of special relativity). Einstein’s
equations of general relativity admit many solutions, one of which (formulated by Kurt
Gödel in 1949) allows for the possibility for a notion of closed time-like curves through
every event of the spacetime. This implies that time travel is possible in such a universe,

26. For some introduction to topology, see Colin Adams and Robert Franzosa, Introduction to
Topology: Pure and Applied (New York: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009); Jeffrey R. Weeks, The
Shape of Space, Second Edition (New York: Marcel Dekker, Inc., 2002). For very interesting
discussions on time, spacetime geometry and topology, which does not require mathematical
sophistication, see Tim Maudlin, ‘Time and the Geometry of the Universe’, in The Future of
the Philosophy of Time, ed. Adrian Bardon (New York: Routledge, 2012), 188–216; Maudlin,
Philosophy of Physics.
27. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 13.
108 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47(1)

and where, as pointed in Einstein’s comment on Gödel’s solution, there will not be any
good physical way to discern whether a given event has happened earlier or later than
any other event on the curve. Physicists usually discount such solutions as physically
undesirable in the sense that they defy conventionally agreed upon notions of time as
unidirectional. However, this is no more than a common-sense-type of argument which
is not theoretically justified within the theory of general relativity.
Generally speaking, any number of (more or less arbitrary) notions of time can be
defined and used in a consistent way with the theory of general relativity; the following
three stand out: clock time, coordinate time, and proper time. Bear in mind however that
none of these has an ontological/metaphysical status as such. Clock time is defined by
conveniently choosing certain physical variables as benchmarks (e.g. periods of a pendu-
lum or vibrations of a cesium atom). These are then used as locally (and very approxi-
mately only) independent and objective measures of time. Coordinate time is a choice of
a variable coordinate in an arbitrary way as part of a four-dimensional frame of refer-
ence, just like we can arbitrarily choose x, y, and z spatial coordinates in the three-dimen-
sional space. Proper time is defined along what is called a world-line, which is
the trajectory tracing the history of an object’s location in space at each instant in time in
four-dimensional spacetime.
Although proper time resembles our usual notion of temporality it differs from one
world-line to another and is therefore far from being uniform in the universe. Most
importantly, proper time depends on the local gravitational field and the latter’s interac-
tions with matter and energy. This feature makes proper time problematic if used in try-
ing to formulate a theory of quantum gravity because a quantisation – transformation
from classical to quantum theory – of the metric (just like we quantise, say, position and
momentum of a particle in going from classical to quantum mechanics) would lead to a
quantum superposition of different metric structures, thereby making it hard to define a
notion of time (proper time) at the quantum level. Nor would using clock time be more
helpful since the ‘clocks’ would be subject to quantum fluctuations, which would make
them not that useful in defining a notion of time as we are used to it.
Therefore, preserving background independence when going into the quantum realm
makes time ill-defined, if defined at all. In fact, the most prominent approaches to quan-
tum gravity show that the notion of time drops out from all considerations.28 Applying
both quantum theory and the theory of general relativity at very small length and/or very
high energies forces us to abandon the notion of spacetime continuum and hence its (very
vague and imprecise) sense of temporality (or temporalities). This then raises the ques-
tion of how to conceptualise the dynamical behaviour of physical phenomena.
This question can be expressed in terms of the debates between relationalism and
substantivalism unfolding in the philosophy of physics.29 Whereas substantivalism

28. Rovelli and Francesca, Covariant Loop Quantum Gravity; Smolin, Three Roads to Quantum
Gravity.
29. John Earman, World Enough and Space-Time: Absolute versus Relational Theories of Space
and Time (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989); Michael J. Futch, Leibniz’s Metaphysics
of Time and Space (New York: Springer, 2008); Michael Epperson and Elias Zafiris,
Foundations of Relational Realism: A Topological Approach to Quantum Mechanics and the
Arfi 109

considers the spacetime continuum as a background stage, relationalism argues that we

must think of reality in terms of relations between observable phenomena with no back-
ground stage. The world would then consist of interactions between fields and matter/
energy, including the spacetime geometry or gravitational field. The four-dimensional
dynamics are not an evolution in time but rather defined by the relative ‘locations’ and
displacement of whatever exists in the ‘universe’. Relationalism thus requires that physi-
cal theories should be independent of any spacetime geometry and the values of any
matter/energy fields interacting with the spacetime manifold.
Going back to Wendt, I do not see how one can forget about all these complexities and
hard-to-resolve issues in theoretical physics and then assert with Wendt, for example,
that:

my idea for how the past can be changed begins by interpreting memory recall as a process of
delayed choice.30

What this shows is that wave functions are nonlocal not only in space but in time, such that
“there is a collapse of the wave function on all the temporal duration bounded by the moment
the photon has been emitted by the source and the moment it has been detected”.31

Note that the retroactivity that Wendt speaks of when he discusses his notion of time is
nothing new in social theory and humanities. Suffice it to say that Jacques Lacan’s major
contribution to psychoanalytical theory through what he calls the logic of the signifier is
precisely an explication of the concept of retroactivity, and, of course, Slavoj Žižek has
put to work this idea in a large number of his writings as well as public lectures. Likewise,
Derrida’s idea of originary performativity is also constructed around the notion of retro-
activity as a coup de force (see for example, his ‘Force of Law’).32
The gist of Wendt’s argument starts by accepting Wheeler’s delayed-choice experi-
ment, which according to Wheeler detects non-local temporal effects.33 As Wendt puts it,
‘measurement creates a particular past that was indeterminate or “open” until that
moment’34. Wendt is claiming too much for this experiment (partly due to a selective/
limited reading of the physics literature on the issue), which is far from being accepted
by physicists.35 In addition, Wendt’s line of drawing conclusions in this discussion is

Philosophy of Nature (New York: Lexington Books, 2013); Antonio Vassallo and Michael
Esfeld, ‘Leibnizian Relationalism for General Relativistic Physics’, Studies in History and
Philosophy of Modern Physics 55 (2016): 101–7.
30. Wendt, Quantum Mind and Social Science, 201.
31. Ibid., 202.
32. Jacques Derrida, ‘Force de loi: Le “fondement mystique de l’autorité”’, Cardozo Law Review
11 (1990): 919–1045. Jacques Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966).
33. John A. Wheeler, ‘The “Past” and the “Delayed-choice” Double-slit Experiment’, in A.R.
Marlow, ed., Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Theory (New York: Academic Press,
1978), 9–48.
34. Wendt, Quantum Mind and Social Science, 202.
35. See for example, David Ellerman, ‘Why Delayed Choice Experiments Do Not Imply
Retrocausality’, Quantum Studies: Mathematics and Foundations 2, no. 2 (2015): 183–99.
110 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47(1)

analogical (in phrases such as ‘just as the past of a photon’)36 and he does not explicate
the criteria that might convince the reader that making such an analogy is justified in the
first place. As creative as these speculations on changing the past might be, they unfor-
tunately fall short when put into the context of the general discussions about the problem
of time that theoretical physics and philosophers of physics are enthralled by today.

Wendt and Other Advocates of Quantum-Theoretic Social

Theory
Wendt’s is undoubtedly an ambitious agenda. He is not, however, alone on this path.
There are others who also endeavour to formulate quantum-theoretic approaches that are
not merely metaphors-based, analogies-driven or undergirded through conceptual trans-
lations. Karen Barad’s book, Meeting the Universe Halfway, is such an effort; in her
words:

In this book I offer a rigorous examination and elaboration of the implications of Bohr’s
philosophy-physics (physics and philosophy were one practice for him, not two). I avoid using
an analogical methodology.37

Her argument is built around the thesis that ‘the primary ontological unit is not independ-
ent objects with independently determinate boundaries and properties but rather what
Bohr terms “phenomena”’, where phenomena, in her formulation of what she terms as
‘agential realist’ framework, ‘do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of
observer and observed, or the results of measurements; rather, phenomena are the onto-
logical inseparability of agentially intra-acting components’.38 Barad characterises the
gist of her approach as reflected in the notion of intra-action. She explains that ‘The neolo-
gism “intra-action” signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies. That is… the
notion of intra-action recognises that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge
through, their intra-action’, with the proviso that the ‘“distinct” agencies are only distinct
in a relational, not an absolute, sense, that is, agencies are only distinct in relation to their
mutual entanglement; they don’t exist as individual elements’.39 … ‘phenomena are onto-
logically primitive relations – relations without preexisting relata’.40 She explains that:

the primary ontological units are not “things” but phenomena – dynamic topological
reconfigurings/entanglements/relationalities/(re)articulations of the world … the primary
semantic units are not “words” but material-discursive practices through which (ontic and
semantic) boundaries are constituted. This dynamism is agency. Agency is not an attribute but
the ongoing reconfigurings of the world. The universe is agential intra-activity in its becoming.41

36. Wendt, Quantum Mind and Social Science, 202.

37. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of
Matter and Meaning (London: Duke University Press, 2007), 24.
38. Ibid., 33.
39. Ibid., 33.
40. Ibid.,139.
41. Ibid., 141.
Arfi 111

This means that ‘relata-within-phenomena emerge through specific intra-actions’.42

Barad explains that her methodological approach consists in not using ‘the notion of
complementarity as a springboard’. It rather ‘directly interrogate[s] particular philosoph-
ical background assumptions that underlie specific concerns’.43 She specifically focuses
‘on the development of widely applicable epistemological and ontological issues that can
be usefully investigated by a rigorous examination of implicit background assumptions
in specific fields’.44 She describes her methodology as being diffractive ‘in analogy with
the physical phenomenon of diffraction’ without implying ‘that the method itself is ana-
logical’. She indeed aims ‘to disrupt the widespread reliance on an existing optical meta-
phor – namely, reflection – that is set up to look for homologies and analogies between
separate entities. By contrast, diffraction … does not concern homologies but attends to
specific material entanglements’.45
Wendt and Barad have much in common, especially in critiquing the dominant classi-
cal-physics based approaches to epistemology and ontology in social theory (and IR).
For example, they both attribute a key constitutive role to the notions of entanglement
and superposition. However, there is a key difference between the two: whereas Barad’s
project remains at the level of the concepts of quantum mechanics (if diffracted through
what she calls agential realism), Wendt does adopt one specific mathematical formula-
tion of quantum theory, that is, the Copenhagen/Schrödinger formulation of quantum
mechanics, through which he seeks to recast social. Wendt seeks strictu sensu to mould
social life and consciousness into Copenhagen’s exact quantum theoretical formalism,
hence his claim that he is suggesting a flat ontology that unifies both physical and social
ontologies. Barad’s project is not just about presenting a framework for social theory; she
contends that she is offering a new approach to quantum mechanics anchored in ‘the
possibility that the agential realist account provides the basis for a more coherent and
robust interpretation of quantum theory’.46
Whereas one must salute Barad for her ambition, I think that her project falls short in
an important way. Indeed, why specifically follow (even if in a diffracted way as she puts
it) Niels Bohr’s approach to the epistemology/philosophy and ontology of quantum the-
ory? While Barad does bring into the discussion many more recent attempts that seek to
address many lingering foundational issues of quantum theory (such as the problem of
quantum gravity), she stops short from advancing our understanding of quantum theory.
Why? Because theorists and philosophers of physics have advanced so far in their quests
that one cannot simply claim to be providing a new understanding of quantum theory and
social theory without giving them due attention. Wendt’s project similarly stops short.
The question that essentially challenges both projects is as follows: why deploy the
quantum theory of the first few decades of the 20th century (as a mathematical formalism
as Wendt does or as an interpretation of Bohr’s philosophy as Barad does) in the 21st

42. Ibid., 334.

43. Ibid., 70.
44. Ibid., 70.
45. Ibid., 88.
46. Ibid., 332.
112 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47(1)

century when the physics and mathematics communities, who are interested in the foun-
dational issues of quantum theory, have developed radically new ways that clearly dem-
onstrate the short-sightedness of the early 20th century quantum theories and their
philosophies? Both Wendt and Barad critique, and rightly so, much of social theory for
still navigating a realm where much of its logic and conceptual frames are constituted by
the spirit of classical physics and I would add classical logic. However, I fear that they
are also falling into a similar trap by navigating their ambitious projects within the realm
of early 20th century quantum mechanics. What then?
I suggest a strategy that first, will enable us to avoid moulding the ‘social’ into a given
version of quantum theory and that, second, by the same token examines rigorously what
is foundationally essential (which is not to say ontological or metaphysical) in the ‘quan-
tum’ as such.47 Nowadays, a revolution is radically reshaping the worlds of mathematics
and theoretical physics, a revolution which is anchored in the application of so-called
category theory to both.48 Category theory begins with categories, that is, collections (not
necessarily sets) of objects and the directed relations (called arrows or morphisms) link-
ing these objects.49 We can also form categories of categories and the relations among
these categories – called functors. Functors relate objects in one category to objects in
another category and arrows in one category to arrows in the other category while pre-
serving the structures of the categories being related. One can then define sets of functors
and relations among functors called natural transformations. Relations between objects,
morphisms, categories, functors and natural transformations are the ‘tools’ used to rela-
tionally theorise (so to speak), and everything is expressed in terms of directed relations
(as morphisms, functors, or natural transformations). This is essentially very much in
tandem with Alfred North Whitehead’s process-based approach to philosophy and sci-
ence.50 Category theory provides nowadays the foundations for all branches of mathe-
matics and logic, and much of theoretical physics, including quantum theory.51
Some may wonder: why do we need to resort to category theory (a highly abstract
mathematical approach)? Let me address this by asking first: what does actually consti-
tute a ‘quantum theory’ as such? More precisely: how do physicists construct a quantum
theory? It is undisputable that they do it through a mathematical formalism first and then
experimental verification, and sometimes the other way around. However, in all cases
quantum theories are mathematical in nature, through and through. The language and
tools of mathematics are essential to the quantum. Obviously, Wendt does not do that.

47. This is a current project of mine.

48. For an introduction to category theory, see Steven Roman, An Introduction to the Language
of Category Theory (London: Springer International Publishing, 2017). See also David I.
Spivak, Category Theory for the Sciences (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2014).
49. A collection of objects qualifies as a set if it is closed under the operations of inclusion, union
and intersection. Category theory does not require these constraints.
50. See Epperson and Zafiris, Foundations of Relational Realism, for a discussion of quantum
mechanics from a process-based perspective. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality
(New York: The Free Press, 1978).
51. Category theory also provides a foundation for sets theory which for decades was believed to
be the foundation of all sciences.
Arfi 113

What he does instead is to adopt a number of quantum-theoretic ideas and concepts in

combination with results developed by both physicists and non-physics disciplines (such
as, for example, quantum biology). His work is definitely not mathematical in nature,
depth or scope, but rather conceptual in a speculative way developed for the most part
through analogising and metaphorising, his claim to the contrary notwithstanding.
However, the ‘quantum conceptual’ is necessarily defined and developed through the
quantum mathematical. Short of this, the situation would be much like somebody who
claims to be doing statistical analysis by inscribing statistical concepts in a narrative
without actually engaging in a statistical analysis proper using a statistical model and
tools thereof, and so on.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.