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Received: 14 February 2018 Accepted: 25 February 2018 DOI: 10.1111/jtsb.12170

COMMENTARY

Materialism, emergentism, and social structure: A response to Wendt's Quantum

Douglas V. Porpora

Department of Anthropology, Drexel Abstract University, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA This paper is a response to the new book by Alexander Correspondence Wendt (2015) entitled Quantum Mind. The paper Douglas V. Porpora, Department of ' Anthropology, Drexel University, commends Wendt on the book s contribution to our Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. , particularly of quantum mechanics, Email: [email protected] , and in the of mind. At the same time, it takes issue with Wendt's overall thesis, particularly as it relates to , emergentism, and social structure.

KEYWORDS of the physical, , materialism, social structure

Materialism, Emergentism, and Social Structure I served Cambridge as one of the reviewers for Quantum Mind, and inside the book, there is a very positive blurb from me that ends with “Whatever one thinks of the final thesis, the journey here is definitely worth the ride.” I stand by that statement. I had actually come across an early version of the book while surfing the web. As I read through what I thought was fascinating reading, I began to wonder who had written this thing. When I looked back and saw it was Alex, I smiled. Alex Wendt is one of the very few social scientists to walk these arcane paths, to take us where should but rarely does connect. Of course it was Wendt who would take the time to become conversant simultaneously with quantum mechanics, panpsychism, and such latest developments in the as externalism. It is not only, however, that Wendt has made himself conversant with these matters. As I also say in my blurb – and continue to stand by, Wendt's exposition of quantum mechanics in partic- ular is the best lay discussion I have encountered. So Wendt has done us a real service in taking us through all this material. I write now, though, about Wendt's final thesis – or at least a portion of it. There is so much to say, and I have only brief space. I concentrate therefore on Wendt's thirteenth chapter, the penultimate before his conclusion. It comes under Wendt's final part, entitled “The Agent‐ Structure Problem Redux,” and is itself titled “An Emergent, Holistic but Flat .”

J Theory Soc Behav. 2018;48:183–187.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jtsb © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 183 184 PORPORA

I begin with the question of materialism. Wendt is famous as one of the originators of social constructivism in International Relations (IR), an approach that opposes itself to a certain form of materialism. I in contrast identify myself with historical materialism. Is there a conflict here? Yes, but it cuts across unexpected lines. In one sense, Wendt actually is more materialist than I. It all depends on what one means by materialism. In analytical philosophy, to identify as a materialist means one is a physicalist, which minimally means one thinks all that is real is physical. It coincides with what is called the Causal Closure of the Physical (CCP), according to which every event has a purely physical cause. Asked what is meant by a physical cause, the CCP may transform from the Causal Closure of the Phys- ical to the Causal Closure of , which generally means that insofar as everything is com- posed of the entities studied by physics, everything is governed by the laws that physics studies. Wendt does not speak of all this in an entirely consistent manner. On p. 8 of Quantum Mind, he argues that “The other thing that the CCP does not commit us to is the philosophical doctrine of , according to which everything in the world is ultimately physical.” But on p. 257, he says the opposite: “The CCP tells us that everything in the world, including individuals and society, is physical.” Part of the issue here is, I think, some inconsistency in what Wendt means by CCP. Again, in the beginning, Wendt says of CCP that “all we have to accept is that everything that exists and occurs in nature, including social life, is constrained by the laws of physics” (p. 10), which, as Wendt says, “seems hard to disagree with.” But that weaker formulation of CCP does not get us to Wendt's stronger, physicalist claim above that “everything in the world, including individ- uals and society, is physical.” I think, in conformity with that stronger claim, Wendt is a physicalist. The apparent contra- diction arises because Wendt is a physicalist with a . In contrast with standard physi- calists, Wendt is a panpsychist, meaning that Wendt thinks that mind and are incipient in all physical , so that a physicalist in Wendt's sense does not preclude the reality of consciousness. I think it is precisely because Wendt is a physicalist that he stakes so much on quantum reality and panpsychism. They are what allow the entrance of mind and full consciousness. But if physicalism is the contemporary form of philosophical materialism, then, in his com- mitment to physicalism, Wendt is more materialist than I. I am not a physicalist. I do not think that hermeneutical meaning or anything that derives from it are in any way physical. So I do not think the constitutive rules that govern the legitimate moves in chess are physical. Nor do I think that if someone yells “fire” in a crowded movie theater that the ensuing exodus originates in the physical effects of that sound. Not being a physicalist, I do not have Wendt's need to rely on panpsychism or macro‐quantum entanglement to introduce mind. On a second construal, I accept some of the anti‐materialism of Wendt's social constructiv- ism. Back in one of his seminal articles, “Anarchy is What States Make of It,” Wendt (1992) argued provocatively against political realism that no national interest ensues objectively from the structural anarchy in which nation‐states are embedded. Instead, situating himself squarely within sociology's Symbolic Interactionism and the social constructionism of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, Wendt argued that states exist within a network of antagonistic relations only if in their interaction, they interpret their situation thus and thereby construct so it. I think that Wendt's anti‐materialist thesis here is partly right but that he also has a tendency to elide interpretation and construction in a way that is unhelpful. On the contrary, what we construct socially may be independent of our interpretation. Take, for example, what in Quan- tum Mind Wendt himself calls “demographic structure” (p. 258). Wendt goes on to argue that, PORPORA 185

“While demographic patterns are ‘structural’ in the sense that they constrain human , they are not particularly ‘social,’ given that as distributions of objective attributes they would exist even if people were completely unaware of them.” Certainly, current demographic structure is a social construction of past behavior. We might think of demographic structure as what Margaret Archer (e.g., 1995) would call the outcome of a previous morphogenetic cycle. But, as I find myself repeating over and over (see, e.g., Porpora, 2015, p. 128), outcomes too have outcomes, and in this case, even Wendt calls the outcome a structure. I actually do not know how Wendt can term it such as he claims to follow Giddens, for whom structure refers to rules and resources. Demographic structure is neither. Nor, as Wendt does, would I call demographic structure merely a pattern as if it were an epiphenomenal abstraction. And, finally, I would not say what makes demographic structure a structure is, as Wendt's formulation implies, that it constrains agency. Not everything that constrains agency is a structure. Norms constrain agency too, but in contrast with Giddens, I would not conflate semantic content and organizational form by referring to norms as structures. What demo- graphic structure is, as Wendt does correctly describe it, is a distribution, which is a relation. I say above that I do not know how Wendt can call demographic structure a structure as demographic structure does not conform to the rules and resources that Giddens equates with social structure, but maybe I do know. Wendt's formulation above employs a monster‐barring maneuver that may explain the apparent discrepancy. Demographic structures may be struc- tures, but Wendt describes them as “not particularly social.” It is a peculiar remark. As I have conceded, demographic structures are social constructions. And as Wendt concedes, they are social constructions that are socially consequential. In fact, demographic structures may not just constrain our social agency as Wendt suggests but as in the case of the differential between young and old that many societies now face, demographic structures may cause economic turmoil, an effect more profound than a constraint. So if demographic structures are socially created by and in turn go on to affect society, how can they be “not particularly social”? Here, being an historical materialist, I am more materialist than Wendt. Wendt wants to exclude demographic structures from the social because in the precise sense that historical materialism employs the word, demographic structures are material, i.e., ontologically objective in the sense of being independent of any individual – or even collective — awareness. In a word, demographic structures are extra‐discursive. Demographic structures are extra‐discursive despite being not natural but socially constructed. Which tells us that social constructions too can be ontologically extra‐discursive or what I have elsewhere called emergently material. But being extra‐discursive, such ontologically objective or emergently material relations are beyond the ken of Symbolic Interactionism and social constructionism. Extra‐discursive social relations need not similarly be beyond Wendt's own social construc- tivism because extra‐discursive relations like demographic structures are indeed constructions. But Wendt remains reluctant to extend his constructivism that far. Terry Eagleton (2012) notwithstanding, the extra‐discursive remains beyond the temper of the times, which continues to favor idealist . Decrying it in the social sciences, I remain a voice crying out in the wilderness. The socially extra‐discursive likewise lies beyond Wendt's new quantum social theory. Therefore in a second monster‐barring maneuver, Wendt excludes it from consideration: “Since I do not need quantum theory to understand demography, I shall set this first kind of social structure aside” (p. 258). What Wendt chooses to focus on instead are “norms, rules, culture, institutions, and so on,” which are “mind‐dependent or intentional objects.” 186 PORPORA

So in scope at least, Wendt's new quantum social theory not encompass more than sym- bolic interactionism, social constructionism or his own currently restricted social constructivism. Wendt's quantum social theory will therefore continue to leave out – or smuggle in — much that, although constructed, is extra‐discursive: inequality, power, conflicts of interest, competi- tion, and the like. But enough now on materialism and social structure. Let me turn to emergentism. Wendt in emergentism, the sine qua non of which, he suggests, is the of wholes on the lower level elements that comprise them. Here, I am aligned with Wendt on both counts: I uphold emergentism, and I agree it presupposes downward causation. Wendt seems to think that at all levels, quantum entanglement is the key to emergence. The reason he says is that “the literature on downward causation, both pro and con, has almost without exception assumed a classical CCP” (p. 262), and classical CCP precludes downward from being anything other than illusory. I only partially agree here because of the ambiguity in what Wendt means by CCP. Sure, given Wendt's weaker view of CCP, everyone agrees: Almost no one believes that emergence involves the violation of physical laws. But there is a stronger version of CCP that some emergentists like Nancy Cartwright (1983, 1999) and most of us critical realists reject. According to the stronger version, physics is a closed of invariant laws (deterministic or stochastic) that determine all else. If physics truly is such a closed system of laws, then there is no room for any outside cause to intervene or change things. Any putative downward – or even higher lateral — causation must be illusory. But Cartwright and critical realism alike break with the understanding of causality as nomo- thetic laws that underlies this stronger picture of CCP. Instead of a closed system of laws, Cartwright and critical realists see physics as a causally open domain of certain kinds of mechanisms and causal powers, ever susceptible to effects from other kinds of mechanisms or powers originating above. In which case, although I agree with Wendt that quantum entangle- ment is also a form of emergence, we can still have emergence and downward causation even apart from it. In the social domain, Wendt defends what, following Deleuze and Latour, he calls a “flat ontology,” by which he means an ontology in which social structures are “nothing over and above the properties and interactions of agents” (p. 244). Instead, human agents and their interactions are the only reality. Wendt says that critical realists tend to oppose such a flat ontology, and I believe he is correct. Critical realists generally uphold all kinds of emergence in the social domain. In this regard, among critical realists, I happen to be more restrained, more open to a flatter ontology. While I would acknowledge the emergence of such relations as considered by Margaret Archer and Pierpaolo Donati (2015) in The Relational Subject, I generally would also say with Wendt that structural relations are nothing over and above the heads of individual actors but rather something, that, like the Kingdom of God, is in their midst, connecting them – or at least their social positions — one to another. At the same time, I would oppose what Bourdieu (2005) calls the “interactionist fallacy” of symbolic interactionism, which recognizes as real only individuals and their interactions. Relations such as inequality, power or mutual threat are also real but are not interactions. They are rather relational conditions that shape interactions. Precisely because I affirm the ontological reality of such relations and their social consequentiality, I am not an individual- ist either. If I understand him, Wendt does not consider such relations real. It is, however, not entirely clear what Wendt means by real as he also denies reality to quantum waves. PORPORA 187

For Wendt, seems to be equated with the observable, a vestige perhaps of ? As I am approaching my space limit, I will end with that issue of reality and just say again how much I enjoyed Wendt's book and how much, more generally, I value his distinct contribu- tion to social science.

ORCID Douglas V. Porpora http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9449-910X

REFERENCES Archer, M. (1995). Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach. New York: Cambridge University Press. Archer, M., & Donati, P. (2015). The Relational Subject. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (2005). The Principles of Economic Anthropology. In N. J. Smelser, & R. Swedberg (Eds.), The Handbook of Economic Sociology (pp. 75–89). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cartwright, N. (1983). How the Laws of Physics Lie. New York: Oxford University Press. Cartwright, N. (1999). The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science. New York: Cambridge University Press. Eagleton, T. (2012). Why Marx Was Right. New Haven: Yale. Porpora, D. (2015). Reconstructing Sociology: The Critical Realist Approach. Cambridge: New York. Wendt, A. (1992). Anarchy is What States Make of it: The Social Construction of Power Politics. International Organization, 46(2), 391–425.

How to cite this article: Porpora DV. Materialism, emergentism, and social structure: A response to Wendt's Quantum Mind. J Theory Soc Behav. 2018;48:183–187. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/jtsb.12170