Text page
Anna Greenspan-Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine-University of Warwick (2000)
Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine
A Warwick dissertation that treats capitalist temporality as a philosophical problem, linking Kantian time, clock discipline, and Y2K chronopolitics.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
Greenspan argues that modern time is not just measured by capitalism but materially organized by it. The thesis treats transcendental philosophy and time-keeping infrastructure as mutually implicated rather than cleanly separable domains.
Its central move is to read Kant's account of time alongside clocks, standardization, and late twentieth-century calendric systems. That lets the argument move from abstract temporal form to concrete socio-technical scheduling without abandoning philosophy.
This matters for the Warwick section because it shows how a departmental dissertation could already be thinking in terms that brush right up against CCRU chronopolitics. Y2K appears here not as media trivia but as a stress test for how time is coded, administered, and lived.
How to read this text
Start with the summary and the chapter headings, then move straight to the Y2K chapter and the sections on clock time. The strongest route through the text is temporal standardization first, transcendental argument second.
Ignore the repository wrapper and front matter. The key thread to track is how the thesis turns time from neutral background into an active technical and historical problem.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 77
For Marx the a priori are not eternal but subject to change and transformation. Transcendental time is thus determined by historical time. Though Marx gives an account of how Kant's philosophy of time might relate to capitalism, the Marxist analysis will be shown to be ultimately inadequate.
Definition · paragraph 77
Transcendental time is thus determined by historical time. Though Marx gives an account of how Kant's philosophy of time might relate to capitalism, the Marxist analysis will be shown to be ultimately inadequate. For Marx's insistence on the productive forces of history leaves no room for a theory of transcendental production.
Definition · paragraph 76
How, then, could capitalism, a socio-economic event which occurs in time, be associated with the transcendental? What is the relationship between the empirical change in time that occurred at the onset of capitalism and the revolution in the theory of time that occurred in transcendental philosophy? This is the problem which the final section of this chapter seeks to address.
Definition · paragraph 12
16 Yet, despite the fact that the critical understanding of temporality finds its parallel in the culture and technics of capitalism there is an adamant insistence, on both sides, that a fundamental distinction be maintained between the philosophy of time and its socio-economic and cultural manifestations. This distinction rests, as we will see, on the apparent divergence between transcendental and historical production.
History · paragraph 1
Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine Anna Greenspan PhD Thesis Philosophy Department University of Warwick September, 2000
Appears in sections
Warwick and Formation Primary section
How the CCRU emerged around Warwick, Sadie Plant, Nick Land, and an unstable collaborative scene.