This is not an argument, a discourse, a disquisition, or advice; collected here are various efforts to give voice to the process of reading, to 'take thinking for a walk', to charter coordinates for future study by regarding developing socio-political technologies as crucial interlocutors in philosophical debates—without guarantee of those efforts' yield or termination, cohesion or completeness.
Caveat discipulus, therefore: because the effort is to be rigorous without a guarantee of merchandisability, the appearance of solidity or consistency could well be regarded as a feint, a strategic or aesthetic maneuver to spotlight particular kinds of discord and disorder (or, if you like, slips and faints) in the inchoate-but-emerging world(s) of Web 3.0, rather than strategic axioms or inviolate principles of engagement.
Likewise, in the spirit of rejecting top-down organizational economies shared by both blockchain technology and psychoanalysis, reflections here are primarily bottom-up 'local skirmishes' occasioned by particular texts or events, i.e., interventions in site- (or, sometimes, chain-)specific contexts, with the thoroughly casuistic insistence that it is only in the varied melée of immovable concrete instances that the supple mobility of abstract concepts can be tested for their ordnance of truth.1
So, why is blockchain the occasion for these reflections? or, rather, in what 'local skirmish' does blockchain technology intervene that could be of interest to an allegedly 'post-'Lacanian philosopher of human nature? What can one schooled—however miserably, however maladroitly—in the Freudian concepts of sex, subjectivity, and the unconscious have to offer the heady mixtures of governance structures, monetary theories, political theologies, and technological developments that are driving Web 3.0's renewed concepts of sovereignty for the digital age?
Indeed, psychoanalysis—with its focus on ambivalence, disagreement, fantasy, and the unconscious—may seem quite remote to those technologists and engineers who spend their days contemplating immutability, consensus protocols, the elimination of informational ambiguity, and rendering explicit the design of lawful systems. It should not be understood by this contrast that one of these is a mirror image or photographic negative of the other...psychoanalysis is not a 'corrective' or 'complement' to technology, nor do these technologies promise an escape from (or cure to—but one may wonder about the difference between escaping and curing) the cross state of human subjectivity.
Where they converge, however, is a shared critical interest in the (dis)contents of institutional life—psychoanalysis and blockchain are not correctives or complements to one another, but companions on modernity's counter-paths, fellow travelers on a voyage to unknown shores. Just as a public blockchain like Bitcoin (at least allegedly) provides a means for individuals to articulate (the limits of) their financial sovereignty outside collective States, so the Freudian clinic (at least allegedly) provides a means for individuals to articulate (the limits of) their psychic sovereignty outside the collective structures of social and familial life.
Because both Bitcoin and psychoanalysis decline to prescribe specific end-goals to their practice—i.e., BTC makes States 'inexist' through its insistence on labor power's sovereignty and freedom of association, while the psychoanalyst likewise makes the Big Other 'inexist' through the clinical insistence that the analysand completely free-associate, without regard for logical, social, or moral objections—they are therefore obliged to employ casuistic, block-by-block, case-by-case constructions regarding their theory and practice.
These constructions are refractory to the logics of certain institutions that have degenerated from utilitarian to quasi-artistocratic functionaries, which see only in these phenomena maddening swarms of unchecked, undisciplined activity. What those institutions fail to recognize is that this mad, 'democratic,' even 'anarchic' swarm is not their antithesis but their ground.2
(to be continued 15 June)
Footnotes
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Philosophically-inclined readers may observe that "truth" is here allied to plasticity in its broad semantic range: as moldable vs rigid or shapeless, as explosive dissensus rather than congealing homogeneity, as unstable re-cycle between credit and commodity—though this is not to say truth is 'socially constructed,' as the invocation of dissensus hopefully suggests. ↩
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See Jacques Ranciere's Hatred of Democracy for an elaboration of this insight. ↩