Capitalism’s Transcendental Time Machine

Description

For the first time in print——and with a foreword by Wassim Z. Alsindi, Max Hampshire, and Paul Seidler——Anna Greenspan’s doctoral dissertation, Capitalism’s Transcendental Time Machine is available. In the dissertation, Greenspan seeks to establish a connection between abstract thought and material practice by simultaneously melding Kant’s transcendental philosophy of time——as outlined in the First Critique——with historical timekeeping practices and an eye to the ever-increasing importance of the equation ‘time=money.’ By attempting to locate within Kant’s transcendental philosophy resonances with empirical, capitalist time, Greenspan draws upon contemporary works of philosophy to examine different modalities of temporality in an attempt to cross the gulf between the philosophical nature of time and the empirical changes of history. Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari, Greenspan places the concepts of Aeonic and Chronic time in direct conversation with Kant, ultimately noting that one can look at a world-historical event that ‘occurred’ at the time of her writing the dissertation, Y2K, as an Aeonic (non)event that ruptured traditional understandings of temporality. It is our hope that by making Anna Greenspan’s dissertation more widely available and with a novel introductory essay linking her past work through to current régimes of blockchain/timechain temporalization, the publication of Capitalism’s Transcendental Time Machine will (re)invigorate investigations into, among other things, non-standard conceptions of temporality in an increasingly digital world. Capitalism’s Transcendental Time Machine Acknowledgements Editor’s Introduction Foreword: Twenty-Two Years of Transcendental Time Machines Kantian Chronosis Plateaunic Thinking Let Them Eat Y2Cake Mnemotechnics: An Aside on the Production of Digital Timekeeping Chronaissance: The Rise of Networked Temporal Regimes Bitcoin: Capitalism’s Transcendental Timechain Machine? Conclusion: The Time Is Out of Joint Summary 0 — Introduction 1 — Philosophy’s Copernican Revolution 1.0 — The Discovery of Transcendental Time 1.1 — The Transcendental Aesthetic: Time as the Form of Inner Sense 1.2 — The Transcendental Deduction: Time and the ‘IThink’ 1.3 — The Schematism: Time and Abstraction 2 — Time in Modern Capitalism 2.0 — Time in Kant and Capitalism 2.1 — Clock Time 2.2 — The Synthetic Culture of Clock Time or: Time = Money —History of the Clock— —Time is Money— Part 1: Weber and the Spirit of Capitalism Part 2: Karl Marx and the Labour Theory of Value Part 3: Böhm-Bawerk and the Positive Theory of Capital 2.3 — History and the Transcendental 3 — The Materialist Revolution: Time in Capitalism and Schizophrenia 3.0 — Aeon or: The Plane of Consistency 3.1 — Transcendental Materialism: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’s Critique of Kant 3.2 — From Eternity to Aeon —1: Extensive versus Intensive Time— —2: The Unity of Eternity versus the Multiplicity of Aeon— —3: Aeon, or Time as Thing-in-Itself— 4 — The Aeonic Occurrence 4.0 — Anticlimax 4.1 — Time-Mutations 4.2 — Dates and the Semiotic of Aeon 5 — Conclusion 6 — Notes 7 — Bibliography 8 — Index of Names 9 — Index of Subjects