Ebook: Capitalism’s Transcendental Time Machine

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.