Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine

by Anna Greenspan

This thesis seeks to establish a connection between abstract thought and material practice. It does so by focusing on the relation between the transcendental philosophy of time and the socio-technics of timekeeping practices.
The thesis begins with a discussion of Kant's philosophy of time as outlined in the Critique of Pure Reason . It argues that Kant's discovery of the transcendental coincides with the development of an entirely new conception of time. This new conception overturns classical thought by making a distinction between the abstract form of time and the empirical phenomena of movement and change.
The second chapter maps the transcendental philosophy of time on to the history of capitalist timekeeping. This history includes the invention and development of the mechanical clock, temporal standardization, and the increasing importance of the equation 'time = money.' The aim in bringing these two spheres together is to show both that Kant's philosophy of time owes much to his empirical surroundings, and also that capitalist time can only be understood through the temporal abstraction of transcendental thought. This link between Kant and capitalism is blocked, however, by a dividing line which separates the philosophical nature of time from the empirical changes of history.  In order to surpass this problem, the thesis turns to the work of Deleuze and Guattari whose 'transcendental materialism' connects the abstract production of time with empirical innovations. This is accomplished by replacing the classical conception of a transcendent eternity with the immanent materiality of an exterior plane. This plane-which they call Aeon and is composed of thresholds, or singular events-makes no distinction between time and that which occurs in time. The final chapter explores the dawn of the third millennium-or Y2K-as constituting one such Aeonic event

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Economics

283 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want a gist of the whole text just read the conclusion.
Otherwise, it's an extremely lucid exposition of how Y2k, a non-event (because it was so anti climatic) can be understood as a synthesis of abstract thought (kant's apriori synthesis and the pure numerical "I" devoid of any content, logical or otherwise) and material practice (cyberspace time which is at once different from both calender time and clock time). In other words, Y2k, though never decisively actualized in empirical history, nonetheless intervened in empirical history as a pure potentialy from below, provoking collective cultural panic and costing governments around the world billions.
However, one might wonder if Bohm-Bawerk's critique of the marxian ltv as incapable of grasping the full productive extent of constant capital (machinery) is not as decisive as the author makes it out to be.

[Alice Nilsson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good study of philosophies of time in Kant, Marx, von Bawerk + D+G.

[Hagar · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most concise rendering of the CCRU/Nick Land's conception of time. And in general, one of the best treatises on time I've read. Illuminating.

[Tvrtko Balić · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really interesting book and it is mostly about Kant. The first chapter presents Kant's philosophical system pointing out his philosophy of time as central and explaining why it is so revolutionary. The second chapter is focused on the development of time keeping technologies and the transformation of our understanding of time in modernity, bringing Kant in relation to the historical context in which he lived in. The third chapter deals with Deleuze who is presented as a transcendental materialist, someone taking critical thought in a direction even more radical than Kant. The fourth and final chapter examines Y2K, talks about the production of time under capitalism and speculates about what the development of digital technology means for it. It is interesting, it is well written, it is a good book on Kant, but I'm not exactly sold on everything in it, in this respect Greenspan's criticism of Marx seems like the weekest link by far, the second half of the book is confusing and I didn't really understand it (this might be a problem with myself, but it still effects what I thought of the book) and I'm surprised that in the second part some things weren't mentioned like Baudrillard, Einstein, disappearing of boundaries in modernity, the relations of digital and analog clocks... Because of all of this I have to take off one star. But if anything, the book changed the way I understand Kant. I hope for the better.

[Frobisher Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a challenging but really engrossing and utterly fascinating book on the philosophy of time and the "production of time" within capitalism. Here, the author describes how the transcendental subjectivation of time is necessarily tied up with the development of capitalism and the modern world, that the invention of the precision mechanical clock revolutionized not only industry, but likely made Kant's conceptualization of time possible in the first place. And from there, the further mutation of our understanding of time is also mediated by technology and capitalism, with Greenspan bringing in the Deleuzean understanding of Aeon and Chronos to discuss the Y2K bug as an Aeonic mutation point signifying an evolution of globally standardized clock-time to a post-global, increasingly decentralized, fully machinic "cyberspace time."

The introduction from the Miskatonic Virtual University team expands this last point even further, showing how the appearance of Bitcoin's decentralized use of timestamp server networks is proof that cyberspace has mutated the production of time, including the fact that the timestamped blockchain acts as a kind of "timechain," a purely quantified calendar of sequentially numbered blocks, whose ebbs and flows are determined by a difficulty-adjustment algorithm and totally divorced from cosmic motion and cultural seasonality. Instead, the intensity of mining operations on the bitcoin network is the primary variable for the algorithm: economic activity is the very pulse of the cybernetic calendar (time = money). If you are able to read the whole book without your mind getting blown even once, I'd suggest you didn't understand the contents.

[vr reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

skeleton key to some ccru + land writing. I should have read this months ago for the discussion of Kant and saved myself a lot of confusion. an elegant pairing with Flatline Constructs