Enfolding wholes in parts: quantum holography and International Relations
| Author | Chengxin Pan |
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1354066120938844 |
| Subject Matter | 25th Anniversary Special Issue |
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JR
I
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066120938844
European Journal of
International Relations
2020, Vol. 26(S1) 14 –38
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066120938844
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Enfolding wholes in parts:
quantum holography and
International Relations
Chengxin Pan
Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, Australia
Abstract
This article stands at the intersection between the relational turn in International
Relations (IR) and the quantum turn in the social sciences (and more recently in IR as
well). The relational turn draws much-needed attention to the centrality of relations in
global politics, yet its imprecise conceptualization of whole-part relations casts shadow
over its relational ontological foundation. The quantum turn, meanwhile, challenges the
observed–observer dichotomy as well as the classical views about causality, determinacy,
and measurement. Yet, despite their common stance against the Newtonian ontology,
the relational and quantum turns have largely neglected each other at least in the IR
context. This article aims to bridge this gap by introducing a quantum holographic approach
to relationality. Drawing on theoretical physicist David Bohm’s work on quantum theory
and his key concepts about wholeness and the implicate order, the article argues that the
world is being holographically (trans)formed: its parts are not only parts of the whole, but
also enfold the whole, like in a hologram. This quantum holographic ontology contributes
to both a clearer differentiation between internal/implicate relations and external/
explicate relations and a renewed emphasis on wholeness and whole-part duality. In doing
so, it not only provides new conceptual tools to rethink IR as holographic relations which
involve the dynamic processes and mechanisms of enfoldment and unfoldment, but also
has important policy and ethical implications for the conduct of “foreign” relations and
for transforming the way we think about identity, survival, relationship, and responsibility.
Keywords
Relationalism, quantum holographic ontology, David Bohm, the state, whole-part
duality, International Relations theory
Corresponding author:
Chengxin Pan, Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, 75 Pigdons Road, Waurn Ponds, Victoria
3216, Australia.
Email: chengxin.pan@deakin.edu.au
938844EJT0010.1177/1354066120938844European Journal of International RelationsPan
research-article2020
25th Anniversary Special Issue
Pan 15
You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a drop.
Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī
Introduction
Despite its name, International Relations (IR) has long been predicated on a Newtonian
substantialist ontology of things, rather than an ontology of relations, which are “the
important missing dimension in most theories of IR” (Wight, 2006: 296). In recent years,
IR’s “deep Newtonian slumber” (Ruggie, 1998: 194) has been disturbed by a “relational
turn” (Bousquet and Curtis, 2011; Jackson and Nexon, 1999; Kavalski, 2018; McClurg
and Young, 2011; Neumann, 2013; Nexon, 2010; Nordin et al., 2019; Nordin and Smith,
2018; Qin, 2018; Shih, 2016; Trownsell et al., 2019). Challenging two versions of
Newtonian substantialism: atomism (individualism) and structuralism (structuralist-
substantialism) (Zanotti, 2017; see also Wendt, 1999: 26), the gist of this turn is that the
fundamental reality is not independent things, but relations. Focusing on “a relation
between entities” (Jackson and Nexon, 2019: 584–585, emphases in original), the rela-
tional scholarship also departs from the agent-structure and level-of-analysis debates.
Yet, despite this significant and welcome development, IR’s relational turn suffers sev-
eral drawbacks. First, it lacks a clear conception of relations/relationality beyond often
tautological definitions. Second, insisting on the temporal priority of relations over entities,
much of the literature sidesteps an implicit “chicken-egg” dilemma between entities and
relations. Further and more importantly, the relational turn has not yet seriously engaged
with another important development in the social sciences in general and IR in particular,
namely, the “quantum turn” (Keeley, 2007; Wendt, 2015), or according to Der Derian and
Wendt (2020), a permanent quantum revolution. This neglect is both surprising and lamen-
table. Both turns share an anti-Newtonian stand, and as a “momentous shift in metaphysi-
cal outlook” (Seager, 2018: 5), quantum mechanics espouses a doctrine of relational holism
“in an all pervasive way” (Teller, 1986: 71), which would make quantum theory a valuable
source in IR’s relational quest. To be fair, at least in the IR context the neglect seems
mutual. With few exceptions and some general references to relational ontology (e.g.
Wendt, 2015; Fierke, 2017; Zanotti, 2017), the burgeoning quantum turn literature in IR
has not focused extensively on relations either. Wendt’s pioneering work on quantum the-
ory, for example, is driven primarily by the need to “reconcile consciousness and meaning
with the material world” (Wendt, 2006: 218), though he acknowledges that quantum
mechanics’ holistic and relational contribution is “a thematic that needs to be developed
down the road” (Wendt, 2015: 35).
Therefore, the gap between these two turns in IR calls for an explicit quantum rela-
tional perspective. This is what this article sets out to do, by offering, more specifically,
a quantum holographic approach. The basic notion of holography is that an “object” is
“part of the whole while it simultaneously contains the whole” (Van Daele, 2018: 651,
emphases added).1 In quantum theory, the holographic principle promises a solution to
the well-known tensions between atomic-level quantum physics and Albert Einstein’s
planet-level theory of gravity by suggesting that the universe is a holographic projection:
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