Quantum Intra‐Active Rituals: Reinterpreting Randall Collins' Social Theory

ABSTRACT This paper reinterprets Randall Collins' theory of Interaction Rituals with a quantum social ontology. While Collins' theory has broad explanatory powers, its ontological foundations are incoherent. Quantising Interaction Rituals yields Quantum Intra‐active Rituals, a set of processes that synchronically instantiates the agent and social structure into a ‘flat’ and monadological collective mind or superorganism. Rituals facilitate emotional entrainment between subjects and can escalate into moments of collective effervescence, which, I suggest, is the collective mind or superorganism powerfully (re)embedding itself into the human being. The result of this process is not Emotional Energy as Collins posits, but the emergence of Personal Teleology or Personal Narrative—that is, collective effervescence transforms human beings into persons that embody and enfold the teleology of the collective mind or superorganism. Instead of a deterministic world with networks of separate individuals engaging in mechanistic and utility‐maximising behaviour as Collins suggests, Quantum Intra‐Active Rituals posits an indeterminate world of inseparable persons engaging in super‐organismic and teleological behaviour. It is, ironically, a metaphysical picture more consistent with Emile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life than Collins' own neo‐Durkheimian theory. Quantum Intra‐active Rituals suggests social structures are actually living entities energised by the collective emotions generated through collective rituals.