Ontological Insecurity, Cultures of Anarchy and the Unconscious John D. Cash

31 Pages·2016·0.21 MB·English

by  John Cash

Ontological Insecurity, Cultures of Anarchy and the
Unconscious

John D. Cash: University of Melbourne

Paper prepared for the International Studies Association,
Asia-Pacific Conference: Hong Kong, June 25-27th 2016.

Please do not quote without permission.

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E-mail: [email protected]
Ontological Insecurity, Cultures of Anarchy and the Unconscious

In the past several years the concept of ontological security has found its way
into International Relations theory, where it has provided a valuable means of
expanding understandings of what is engaged and what is at stake in the achievement
or maintenance of security within and between States. Anthony Giddens’ depiction of
ontological security has formed the basis of this development in IR theory (Giddens
1984 & 1991). In particular, Giddens’ account of how chaos haunts the ontological
security of individuals has subsequently been extended to the analysis of international
relations between states, particularly in the ground-breaking work of Mitzen (2006)
and Steele (2005 & 2008). For both, the resilience or stickiness of a State’s or
institution’s adherence to its role-identity can be best understood as the effect of the
anticipated and feared chaos and radical disruption that stepping out of that role-
identity and its self-affirming routines would generate. It is on this basis that
attachments to established role-identities and routines are formed and, thereafter,
deepened over time and in relation to the reciprocal practices and role-identities of
other interacting States.

In this account, in order to maintain a coherent identity and a set of routines that
reaffirms that identity – that is, in order to maintain ontological security – State
institutions develop a tendency to relate to other States and other groups and
institutions in a quite specific way, organized by a quite specific culture of anarchy
with particular qualitative characteristics that, in turn, organize the reciprocal
construction of self and other and the norms of legitimacy for the exercise of power,
authority and violence. Following Wendt (1999), we could say that they adhere to
either Hobbesian, Lockean or Kantian modes of interaction and over time these
modes of interaction become more deeply internalized, thereby both organizing and
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constraining that relationship more thoroughly and, also, profoundly affecting the
self-understanding and identity of the States in interaction and their institutions and
agents. A major pay-off from this account is the recognition that a State’s need and
desire to maintain its ontological security may trump the need and desire to maintain
physical, economic or strategic security, with significant effects both internally and in
the relations between States. As Mitzen puts it with regard to conflict that maintains
the ontological security of States as they interact: “conflict may benefit a state’s
identity even as it threatens its body” (Mitzen 2006b, 365).

While I agree with many aspects of this approach, I argue that it relies unduly
on Giddens’ account of ontological security and his partial and limiting incorporation
of unconscious processes into this account. By regarding chaos as the sole alternative
to the maintenance of the practices that support an established role-identity, this
approach fails to adequately capture both the variety of ways in which psychic
integrity can be maintained and the variety of ways in which the available cultural
repertoire can support ontological security when it is challenged. For social
institutions such as nation-states participating in the international system, another,
more common option when ontological security is threatened, is to activate or
reactivate an eclipsed or repressed cultural form with its attendant political discourses,
along with the alternative routine practices it organizes. In what follows I will argue
that this shift to an alternative cultural form that is available within the cultural field,
even if previously repressed and delegitimized, is a common move for corporate
institutions such as States and other corporate agents faced with threats to their
ontological security. Ontological security is re-established, prior to collapse into
chaos, as the newly legitimated cultural form – either already available within the
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cultural repertoire of the nation-state or present within its broader cultural field but
not as yet incorporated into its repertoire - displaces the old. Of course, and this is a
crucial point, to re-establish ontological security by shifting to and validating a
qualitatively different cultural form and its attendant political discourses is also to
reconfigure the qualitative characteristics of the State’s role-identity and its relations
to some salient other States and institutions. This follows from the fact that each
cultural form within the cultural field encodes specific ways of thinking, feeling and
relating to self and other (including collective selves and others) and to issues of
power, authority and violence. Each cultural form thereby promotes a proper way of
being, thinking, feeling and relating and competes with other cultural forms to
establish its propriety and hegemony. Moreover, as I will develop below, rather than
the simple shift from one culture of anarchy (say Lockean) to another (say
Hobbesian), such qualitative shifts may involve the reconfiguration and re-
amalgamation, as it were, of a cultural repertoire that already incorporates more than
one culture of anarchy. For instance, a previously repressed and marginalized
Hobbesian culture of anarchy may be revalorized and achieve broader scope in the
organization of the relations between states.1

1 To explain my usage, a cultural field is the full set of cultural forms and attendant
political discourses present within any field of interaction and communication. In the
international relations setting, a cultural form is a particular qualitatively distinct
culture (of anarchy), present within the cultural field: one that is drawn upon in the
constitution of a role identity performed within a relationship between States.
Wendt’s Hobbesian, Lockean and Kantian cultures of anarchy are pertinent ways of
characterizing different cultural forms in the IR context. A cultural repertoire is the
particular set of cultural forms that are already available to corporate agents, such as
States. They have already been incorporated into the amalgam of cultural forms that
States draw upon in organizing their identity and defending against ontological
insecurity. Some of these forms may, at certain times, be repressed or delegitimated.
Yet, they remain available within the repertoire and may be drawn into the
performance of a State’s role identity, while also supporting that State’s ontological
security. Such reconfigurations of the cultural repertoire are most likely to occur when
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To develop these arguments I will draw upon psychoanalytic theory in a
manner that integrates it into social and political theory. This is an approach that I
first developed with reference to “identity, ideology and conflict” in Northern Ireland
and that deploys psychoanalytic theory to address the qualitative characteristics of
competing political discourses and their implications for social and political relations
(Cash 1996). Cynthia Burack terms this approach “psychoanalytic political theory”
and usefully summarizes its principal features as follows:
“Group psychoanalysis – (as developed by “psychoanalytic political theorists”)
– provides a method of theorizing discourse as expressing defenses, emotions
(such as fear, anxiety, guilt, love, and rage) and interpersonal issues (such as
dependence, trust, trauma, vulnerability, mourning, conflict and relations to
authority) that are inscribed in group discourses” (Burack 2004).
As this summary highlights, a particular virtue of psychoanalysis is its concern with
emotions as well as cognitions and with psychic defense mechanisms that organize
both thoughts and emotions in ways that defend against anxiety and the loss of
ontological security. The great strength of psychoanalysis is that it provides an
account of human subjects as passionate subjects capable of reasoning, but always
subject to the distortions of rationalization. A further step in my argument is to
recognize that the psychic processes that generate such reasoning and rationalizing,
along with their emotional intensities and their defenses against anxiety and
ontological insecurity, are deeply embedded in cultural forms and manifest as
political or bureaucratic discourses of one kind or another.

a State’s responses to pressing contingencies arising within the relationship leads it to
bring previously repressed or marginalized forms into fuller operation.
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In what follows I will draw out some of the implications of the above
observations; in particular with regard to this process of revalorising an alternative
cultural form available within the broader cultural repertoire, rather than falling into
chaos. I take as one of my starting points Alexander Wendt’s opinion that “the role
that unconscious processes play in international politics is something that needs to be
considered more systematically, not dismissed out of hand” (1999, 278). I also note
that Wendt’s subsequent turn to quantum theory has involved certain shifts in his own
position that interestingly overlap with some major aspects of psychoanalytic theory.
In particular, via quantum theory Wendt (2006) has posited a collective unconscious
marked by an entanglement between culture and identity.2 In a significant
modification of his earlier argument, cultures themselves are understood as less
deterministic even though “the radical indeterminacy of a quantum world does not
change the fundamental point that anarchy is what states make of it” (2006, 212). This
conclusion builds on the recognition that “although cultures make some outcomes
more likely than others”, “uncertainty cannot be reduced beyond a certain point, no
matter how much learning states do” (2006, 212; emphasis mine). My own way of
making a similar point is to emphasize the dynamic capacity of unconscious processes
to reconfigure the internal organization of the cultural repertoire that a State draws
upon in performing its relationship with another State or States.

I mention Wendt’s alternate route to collective unconscious processes and
entanglement via quantum theory for two reasons. First, despite his later reservations
about the psychoanalytic account of unconscious processes as against the claimed
strengths of quantum theory, this quantum shift implicitly aligns with psychoanalytic

2 See Wendt (2015) for a detailed development of his general argument regarding
“quantum mind and social science”.
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theory in addressing the multi-layered complexity of intergroup and international
relations, including unconscious aspects of subjectivity and culture that are typically
unobserved. The second, more immediate, reason is that, on my reading at least,
Wendt’s three cultures of anarchy – Hobbesian, Lockean and Kantian – and their
three degrees of internalization are at least implicitly invoked or presumed in the more
recent literature on ontological security and international relations.3

Ontological Insecurity

In order to fend off ontological insecurity, human subjects lean on and draw
upon the cultural forms and routine practices that are available to them within the
cultural field they inhabit. They rely upon these cultures and routines in order to
organize and perform their identities. Consequently, when these identity-affirming
cultures and routines are radically challenged, their ontological security is threatened.
The proper ordering of their world is thrown into disarray. What comes next?

What comes next? That is the central question I wish to address as it opens
onto a more complex understanding of how ontological security is maintained, or re-
established, when alternative cultural supports are available. For individuals, what
comes next depends on both the psychological resilience of the individual, of course,
but also the cultural supports they can draw upon. When these cultural supports are
minimal or exhausted, the individual will typically struggle to improvise new ones, or
recycle old ones; even if these are rudimentary and brittle. Sometimes such attempts
to establish and maintain ontological security fail, with disastrous consequences for

3 See Wendt 1999, chapter 6.
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the individual. Giddens explains this well when he argues that, “(o)n the other side of
what might appear to be quite trivial aspects of day-to-day action and discourse, chaos
lurks. And this chaos is not just disorganization, but a loss of the sense of the very
reality of things and of other persons”. Giddens continues by arguing that what is at
stake is the maintenance or collapse of “time, space, continuity and identity” and “the
prospect of being overwhelmed by anxieties that reach to the very roots of our
coherent sense of being in the world” (Giddens 1991, 36 & 37).4 This account echoes
Laing’s similar and foundational account of ontological security: “a basically
ontologically secure person will encounter all the hazards of life, social, ethical,
spiritual, biological from a centrally firm sense of his own and other people’s reality
and identity” (Laing 39). Both provide a strong account of what is at stake in avoiding
the loss of ontological security and they highlight the intense anxiety about
disintegration that motivates human subjects to defend against that loss.

These same motivations apply to State actors. They, too, are motivated to
maintain a coherent sense of the nation-state as an actor within the international field.
Typically, they have available to them a complex cultural repertoire to draw upon in
order to achieve this coherent sense of themselves and to maintain the national
identity by reconfiguring the particular form it takes. What follows next, then, when
the established routine practices and role-identity are radically challenged by
circumstances is, typically, the shift to a different cultural form, or the revalorization
of a different cultural form, that achieves a sense of coherence by defending against

4 Samuel Beckett’s play, “Waiting for Godot”, presents a powerful rendition of
collapse into ontological insecurity, but also of momentary revival as the principal
characters, Didi and Gogo, struggle to maintain their ontological security within a
thoroughly exhausted cultural field. See Cash, 2009b.

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anxiety through different unconscious mechanisms. Another way of putting this is to
say that the cultural repertoire constructed by and available to the interacting States is
reconfigured, such that a previously repressed or marginalized cultural form, along
with the unconscious mechanisms it promotes as the proper way to defend against
anxiety and thereby maintain ontological security, gains a greater presence in the
interactions between states.

Repressing the unconscious

Anthony Giddens’ account of ontological security warrants close attention, as
this is the account that is followed by Mitzen, Steele and many others working on
ontological security in the international relations context. The first point to make is
that Giddens draws directly on psychoanalytic theory, but he does so in a way that
fails to take due account of the presence of unconscious processes within the
structuration process itself. For Giddens the unconscious serves as the fundamental
support of the structuration process without itself having any dynamic role in
organising the repertoire of rules and resources that both enable and constrain that
process. Rather, it has a prior role in establishing, or failing to establish, the psychic
capacity for ontological security of the individual actor; a capacity that enables that
actor to participate successfully and creatively in the routines of everyday life. It does
so by grounding, or, alternatively, failing to establish, the actor’s capacities for trust,
autonomy and initiative. For Giddens, the unconscious is present within the social as
the mere pre-history of the competent actor.

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In my opinion this is a very unsatisfactory account of the relationship between
the unconscious and the social. We can see this if we consider the manner in which
Giddens handles a distinction he draws between routine situations and critical
situations. Routine situations are organised by the specific sets of rules and resources
that are embedded in particular institutional and social settings. These routine
situations constitute the field of structuration and rely upon the knowledge of
individuals at the levels of practical and discursive consciousness. Unconscious
processes are not present within these routines. Critical situations, on the other hand,
occur “in circumstances of radical disjuncture of an unpredictable kind which affect
substantial numbers of individuals, situations that threaten or destroy the certitudes of
institutionalised routines” (1984, 61). When faced with such an overwhelming threat
to their ontological security individuals may be said to have fallen out of culture and
into nature. That is they fall into, or regress into, a culturally unmediated
psychological state in which primitive psychic defence mechanisms predominate. It is
worth reiterating that these primitive defence mechanisms are understood as having
only an individual location; they have no place within the structuration process itself.
Critically, they do not have any place in the organisation of a set of institutionally, or
socially, located rules for the structuration of social communication and interaction at
moments of crisis. For instance, there is nothing akin to Habermas’ account of
ideology as systematically distorted communication in which unconscious processes
shape and distort intersubjective communication (Habermas, 1971). For Habermas,
drawing directly, if critically, on Freudian theory, the culture of an institution, a
society or, by extension, an inter-State relationship, is itself understood as a
compromise formation in which some unconscious desires and aggressivities are
excommunicated from the participants’ consciousness – yet, produce distorting
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