Broadcast Edition 22 Years of Transcendental Time Machines

Keep an eye on the people coming in. I think a few more will join us. But yeah, let's get started. So yeah, hello everybody. Welcome to Xero Exelon Discussion, broadcast edition. So the idea is we're going to have conversation as free flowing and lightly moderated as possible for up to two hours or so. And then we're going to put that online later so just bear that in mind and the usual format of the salon is we have these kind of closed discussions under Chatham House this is a bit different and there's a reason why it's different which we'll get to yeah pretty soon so yeah hey I'm Wasim and we've been doing these

conversations for just under three years now for salon events I think we've done about 35 now and And I'm gonna say a bit more about what we do in a minute, but I just want to pass it over to Peter Heft from the Miskatonic Virtual University Press to say a little bit about why we're all here today. And I'll hand it over to you, Peter. And if you want me to share screen to put the book cover up, just give me a shout. I think we're probably good. Hi, I'm Peter. So I think one of many reasons I suppose we're here because after two and a half years, finally, I've now completed compiling

Anna Greenspan's Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine into a proper book with quote unquote proper book with quote unquote proper citations and a forward by the time chain team. And I think it's revisiting the book and revisiting the thesis is obviously something that I think is relevant in the wake of blockchain temporalities and something that we would probably want to do. And the book will be available for purchase on Amazon and other sites shortly, just finalizing Canadian ISBN stuff.

But almost done. Yeah. I saw pre-order on the German Amazon. Okay, good. So it's already beginning to populate. That's good. And what more appropriate place to list capitalism's transcendental time machine down Amazon dot whatever. So yeah, poetic injustice there, I guess. So yeah, thanks so much, Peter and everyone else at Miss Catonic Poetry University Press for going out their way. out their way, it's been a great deal of effort to update the text, look for more legible sources to a lot of the material that Anna wrote about in her thesis, and try and put it together with context for the present day.

So that's great. Yeah. Big props. And yeah, I'm sure we'll let you all know when the thing is kind of ready to be out in the wild. You can read the, can people read the body of the text already, Peter, online? I can make that available, actually, yeah. So, I'll do that. Yeah, full word's already online, and then shortly, I guess, the updated, you know, main text will also be online. That's great. Yeah, spread it around. Okay, so maybe I'll share the screen, and I'll just, like, do a little bit of advertising while we wait for the last few strikers to arrive.

and share screen. Okay, hopefully, looks good. Okay, and yeah, so this is the, wow, I look brick bed now cool um this is the cover of the book um designed by critrip uh very cool and um yeah uh so it's coming out very soon um peter do you want to say something about the miscatonic virtual university because not everybody might be aware of that reference uh yeah sure um so it's It's a reference to the CCRU's writings.

And it's just kind of a not-for-profit publishing house that I guess I quote-unquote took over, I suppose is a word, in 2019. and we've been publishing a journal every year, the Plutonics Journal, and working on getting into actual publishing books as well. So I have a few more projects lined up that will be announced shortly. But yeah, still in its infancy, I suppose. Nice, cheers. And I believe the Plutonics Journal is open for submissions.

at the moment, if anyone has weird texts. Nice. So yeah, I'll just say something about the Xero Exelon now. And so yeah, it's like a kind of community organization, artist-run organization or something. I haven't really figured out exactly what it is yet, but it seems to do things like hold events, write theory, produce art, and things in between that. And yeah, so we've just been gathering at a workspace called Trust in Berlin for almost three years, half that time been online because of the pandemic and talk about weird topics. Those are some of the topics we discuss. Quite a lot of them are to do with, I guess, digital culture and where technology meets humans and society and stuff.

And we tried not to make it like, so a lot of us around trust and around circles we move in, as well as having whatever artistic philosophical interests, we also might be quite engaged in like, you know, practice related to cryptocurrencies or blockchains or applied cryptography. And so we were kind of not really trying to lean into that, we're trying to kind of lean away from it. And the thing about all of those technologies is they kind of give you quite cute little models of toy universities that you could use to exemplify your crazy theories. And we'll be getting onto that a bit later. and so yeah we've been writing like weird poetry I guess scripture stuff like that games it's a card game we made and made an improvised radio play about like algorithmic

governance this is all on the zero excellent website and we made a choose your own adventure game about bitcoin boiling the oceans which just come off an exhibition I'm going to hopefully do and performances with that in the future. And we wrote a play, a satirical literary work about Bitcoin, which premiered in the theatre in Denmark last summer. So all that is somehow inevitably related to what we're talking about today. And maybe it can be rendered a bit more explicit if I introduce you to Hashi. So we all know about Cribi, the annoying Microsoft Office anthropomorphised paperclip, But what about an anthropomorphised Bitcoin mining machine called Hashi? Well, it is a key character in the play and the game that we made.

And you might even notice Hashi on some of the merchandise or the reliquary in the background of the room we're in. So, yeah, Hashi is a virtual influencer, kind of gaslighting the planet. so as the environment collapses uh how she's being funded by a kind of cartel of femoral capitalists to like sway public opinion so you can imagine that is going to be kind of like quite a weird and you know uh dark thing um but we're trying to make it fun so uh with all that said i suppose we should probably get into the into the nitty-gritty um like should we like say hi like, you know, I've said hi already. So maybe the two people say, we should say hi. And

then yeah, go from there. Cool. Okay. So everyone, I'm Max. And aside from writing the foreword to this book, with Waseem and Paul, then between all of us, we've kind of been, we've been working around the topics that we present in kind of towards the end of the forward so looking at the uh these these novel kind of um blockchain based temporalities that we're kind of theorizing about in other works so in work that paul and i were doing as nascent um so some we have done a salon before um which was hosted by project at all and shum and a kind of a series of artworks

as well as a source book surrounding this kind of area which led up to this publication. So there's quite a lot for us to kind of dig into as ephemera surrounding this. Yeah, we did also kind of a series of sculptures which is still sort of like exhibited at various places which is called temporal successionism and we worked there also together with Amy who's also here, who wrote some text for it and this sort of became this weird kind of like artistic meta reference to this book somehow and yeah it got like sort of interwired and I think led also to us discussing this book. Yeah and all of this actually that piece actually

came out of a reading group we did on Urbit of this thesis about three years ago. So yeah, spirals within spirals. Yeah, I think that is either how I heard of the book or how I had the thesis or what prompted me to read it in the first place. Yeah, so it's all connected. Yeah. Okay, so So where should we start? I guess like... Could we give like an overview of, I suppose, the structure we're going to take? Yeah. In the salon, maybe? Yeah. So like, well, this is the contents page of the book edition itself. And like, we thought we would kind of structure the conversation, like, well, if it needs

structure, we can like use this as a bit of a backbone. So like we'll just move it around a little bit. So in the main text, the main body of the text is four chapters. First is on really the philosophy of time. Second is relating time to capitalism. The third one is the kind of the Lerzeghitarian move. And then the fourth one is the Aeonic occurrence and Y2K. And then I suppose what we could then append our forward, like, you know, the two decades later retrospective at the at the end of at the end of that um so i guess we would start at the at the start with like time and eternity and things like that yeah i mean i think maybe before

we jump in we can also kind of ground why like what i suppose what we wrote in the forward and why we wrote it as well and i think the the maybe maybe the the overarching kind of idea that maybe like before it sprung from was that the the conception of i suppose time production to put it in like in a in a condensed way right that really is the focus of this thesis both and you know and obviously the thesis also has this aim of marrying the basically you know combining the the the kind of transcendental move that's taken in the in the philosophy that's discussed in time and the materialist history of these timekeeping practices.

And that to us then, because all of us really have worked in some capacity professionally and artistically, really looking at blockchains, distributed ledger tech, peer-to-peer kind of consensus systems, this then really struck a chord with us in terms of how an instance maybe of this being, not necessarily enacted but you know this thesis from pre-Y2K actually gave us a brilliant lens to actually then look at what these consensus systems were then maybe doing and a way of conceptualizing them as more than just you know distributed networks of kind of like value and

information retention. So that's the overall kind of maybe theoretical position that then we were writing this forward from as well, which I think is maybe good for everyone to know before we dive into the structure. Yeah. So like many ways we came to work backwards, where we came kind of from a praxis, which is oriented in the production of time. And then we found this theory and we were like, wow, this is useful to us. And so I guess the forward is the move where we're trying draw the line between where Anna left off and her teleological termination point and where we are today. Yeah, and I think that it is good to draw that line explicitly as well in terms of us not putting words in. Yeah, so like especially in the forward, you know, which we're going to,

you know, talk about a bit today, that is all our move, you know, we're extrapolating, it's speculative it's not like there's no kind of um blessings coming from from anybody uh so it's really just uh we're out on our own there so uh feel free to uh not buy our bullshit i mean also notion it's kind of like interesting that even though like um this is kind of like not a kind of uh or it's like 22 years since this was sort of like published um it's still interesting that we go back to it in a sense that we're looking for like theories or for some kind of like notions to analyze this like new emergent like kind of consensus systems and that um there

is nothing kind of other or like new written which would be more interesting to us so for us for me it feels like there's a big like almost like a leap where like a lot of like philosophy or like also you could also say like sort of like um techno technology phil like philosophy of technology is kind of like just lacking in certain terms that there are no kind of or that there were really little sort of um conceptualizations or concepts which we found like interesting or like applicable in a sense which which which i found like interesting that uh it was almost like a move or something which is like already yeah i wonder if it's to do with the complexity of technology you know like you know reaching points with the complexity of the systems that if you don't have

that kind of the insight from that side it's very hard to build uh grand concepts yeah um i'm sure there's a sweet spot in the middle yeah yeah which we'll find at some point um cool all right so yeah that was the line we were trying to draw and and like you know there's a different line that Anna was drawing in the thesis covering a much wider time span, much more ambitious in that in that regard. So do we want to start with the... do we want to start with the camp stuff? Yeah. Okay, so we're going to go like just very roughly while we're getting going like

kind of roughly chapter by chapter but like very welcome if anyone wants to like jump in the kind of um you don't need to put your hand up or anything like that just go off mute and jump in start talking like so if you've got um burning thoughts for a bit as we're going through please feel free to bring it up what we've done is we've gone through the primarily the forward that we wrote um and picked out excerpts which are both quotations of ann's work and others and the things that we wrote. We thought we'd use them as to kind of, you know, whatever, frame on the conversation. I guess we'll just jump to those now. And just like if anyone wants to like swoop in, go for it. Oh, that box. To the left. Yes. Yeah. So like the point we made on the screen, I think is quite, you know,

important one it might not be something that's that necessarily apparent like somebody's not familiar with the with the work and so like um i um yes i came to this thesis about three years ago i think maybe even less two and a half years ago and i you've i mean i come across the encounter the ccriu i did a conversation with benjamin noise at the art festival he's to organize in 2017 that was my introduction to accelerationism but i hadn't gone very deep and so I was coming from a place of practice as we said and I was looking for things that I could use that was kind of somewhat mercantile and like you know I could apply and I found you know this work really incredible to me because it was legible to me as like somebody that wasn't well

versed in theory like a continental philosophy or anything and it was immediately legible to me And that's the point we wanted to make here. Not only is it immediately legible to the reader, but it also increases the legibility of some of the quite occluded and twisted concepts that come out of the work that was originating at Warwick at the time. Yeah, I would totally agree. I think also we have in the forward this, like a great tweet by Amy, which is kind of like accelerationism is a theory of time, the end. Oh yeah, it's there, okay. You heard that. Which I think kind of says, or like gets really well to the point that like,

this like auto production, this like theory of time, which is laid out in this piece is actually for me quite essential to understand some other like notions of like capital and how sort of things get auto produced and what are actually the forces at place here or at play here. And yeah, I do think this is something which really helps to understand a lot of other things in this corpus. One other, I think, particularly interesting thing that also comes from the fact that there is a historical or like a materialist analysis of these timekeeping methods as well, which then ends up with the, you know,

with that final little equation, kind of, yeah, equals statement at the bottom of that text, time is money. Because of that material kind of the practice that is being discussed, one of the things that it also makes explicit is this, like, is the, well, the relations of power as well in terms of, because it's coming from technological apparatus and because it's coming in a certain sense from these different historical periods in which these, admittedly, transcendental structures are dealt with differently, right? Which is something that Greenspan talks about when she's talking kind of through the Lesa-Coucault

as his conception of history as being this materialist, materialist succession of things that are then punctuated by discontinuities is the phrase. You know, these things that maybe we could also talk about as like entrances from the outside. It is still ultimately, you know, there's a lot that you can then extrapolate out of this in terms of power relations, in terms of, you know, the authority of history as well, which is something that we particularly focused on, when we were then looking at applying this to you know these kind of like novel consensus systems but i think you can also has you know you can you can you don't have to apply it to them you can also retroactively apply it as well and it's so yeah it's a it's an incredibly like well-rounded

or at least um multi kind of polar thesis as well in that sense yeah we talked a lot about this that like even though like this is the thesis doesn't take like a completely materialistic standpoint where it's like okay you can explain everything through like the dialectic force of history it's kind of like saying explicit it doesn't do this but it still is like has like a materialistic approach which it tries to mix with some sort of like transcendental philosophy and i find this like quite interesting this kind of like notion that it doesn't have to be like an either or it can be like some of both and like explain like it doesn't have to you doesn't have to like explain everything through like the dialectics but it also doesn't have to explain everything to some kind of like a priori transcendental no but it's that it's that beautifully messy synthesis right yeah and

that's the i think that i mean that's one of the things at least with this you know with this thesis that i just found incredibly appealing to you know think and talk about and read however many times I've read it. Yeah. So you've got one of Amy's quotes on the screen. Yeah. Like I wonder, like, Amy's with us. The author of that particular part is present. I was wondering if you would like unpack the statement or like at least why you made it? It might be interesting. Yeah, sure. It's really cool that you guys like actually picked a tweet out and put it in the introduction because I seriously feel like some of my best writing some of my best philosophy is just like stuff I've tweeted and then just never done anything else with and it's disappeared into

like the history of my timeline um so it's really cool I think from memory this was in the middle of a period when there was a lot of debate on twitter about what accelerationism was um alongside like in this really cool way, I think that works with the structure that Greenspan is putting forward in her thesis, people were also just creating new ideas of new accelerationisms. So I don't know if you guys were kind of around Twitter at the time, but it was this moment kind of like 2017, 2018, I think, when there was like all of a sudden Catholic accelerationism, right accelerationism, left accelerationism, unconditional accelerationism, zombie accelerationism.

There were kind of various like subgroups of like traditionalist accelerationisms. It was kind of just this thing that you put on the like the end of whatever you were into, a bit like core. So this was kind of happening and And I, at the time, allied myself with a group of people who kind of were promoting unconditional accelerationism because there'd been the accelerationism that was related to what the CCIU were doing in the 1990s. Then there was the left accelerationism that was kind of developed and put forth by Nick Cernick and Alex Williams. students of Mark Fisher's at the time, or sort of before that kind of happened, and they were trying

to think about like how can we, or like the technological power of capitalism that's celebrated in the 1990s version of accelerationism is actually succumbing to stagnation. It's not doing what accelerationism had originally theorized and therefore we need to bring in some of these leftist structures like the state for example to help guide it and direct it and connect it to resources that it actually needs to progress so it was this kind of like leftist rectification of accelerationism which was then you know kind of had its day it sort of got absorbed into like Corbyn Corbynism and sort of contemporary UK politics and became very kind of just like mundane

part of political discussion and didn't seem like a like philosophical theory anymore and there was you know there were debates about whether it was actually accelerationism and so for the unconditional accelerationist group the point of calling it unconditional which I think was a word that Vincent Garton actually I think Nick Land called it this first in his concept of accelerationism course Vincent Garton sort of took it up and started to write blog posts about it. And the idea was that left accelerationism was trying to condition accelerationism as a transcendental force with a whole heap of leftist empirical structures, like the state, like different kinds of agendas that they saw that, like the we as the unconditional

accelerationists saw as being something that was in addition to accelerationism as a transcendental production of time. So we saw that as trying to condition something that was supposed to be in and of itself, capable of doing its own thing. And then right accelerationism kind of turned into this traditionalist discourse about, well, accelerationism is like, I don't know, like the Unabomber, or that was like all of this stuff was sort of tagged to it. It became about like intelligence production, which for that era of discourse collapsed into this kind of like, we just need to get smart Western populations to reproduce more. It kind of got loaded with all these other agendas. So again, like unconditional accelerationism was like,

trying to kind of strip it back to the real basics. And so this tweet happened in kind of context of that discussion um where i was like trying to just remind everyone of the thing that accelerationism is talking about when you strip all of this like extra stuff back and it's what time is doing it's how time is produced um and then the end is like just me being like kind of ambiguous because there was also this eschatological um kind of thing going on at the time as well So time produces the end of time. But that's kind of like, that's more of a sort of rhetorical flourish. So yeah, it was kind of just like trying to strip accelerationism back to its like very, very most fundamental, most minimal motor, and then kind of like look at what it does or what it is.

When I understood like a sort of unconditional accelerationism sort of right, it also like doesn't necessarily lead to some sort of practice, right? There is no sort of like intention in a sense as like you have with like right accelerations or left acceleration where you have this like notion of what things can like, where you want to steer things almost, and I almost had the feeling this was almost like a stuff runs in a sense. Yeah, that was very much part of the unconditional accelerationist kind of, I don't know, group of ideas. Edmund Berger wrote a lot about this, accelerationism as anti-praxis. This was again reacting to left accelerationism as adding sort of a bunch of kind of like human empirical intentions, but it responds to what Anna

is talking about in the thesis as well. In the same way that she uses, she talks about Marx critiquing Kant. I mean she critiques Marx in turn but Marx's critique of Kant is he is trying to develop a notion of the transcendental but what he does is he locates it in the bourgeois human subjects who is created who's basically mentally constrained by a set of of structures that are conditioning the perception of reality or knowledge or experience. And what Marx's problem with that is that Kant's taking something that is contingently produced inside history,

bourgeois subjects, and seeing it as eternal, locating it in the transcendental. So Anna kind of makes all of these equations between eternity and whatever comes to fill the placeholder of the transcendental sort of taking up more or less this kind of structure status of eternity, even though eternity is something different. So transcendental critiques eternity. Eternity is technically or traditionally in like different kinds of religion, a lot of different belief structures. Eternity is transcendent. The transcendental is a critique of transcendence. So transcendental and transcendence, two totally different things.

but Marxists about Kant he's making this mistake where the thing that he's saying is transcendental that's that is conditioning experience and knowledge and reality is kind of theological it's kind of eternal in the same way that God is a transcendent structure for eternity because it's this singular thing that doesn't ever change its structures are fixed and Marx wants to say, well, no, like, you know, it's a contingent, the bourgeois subject, the individual even, is a contingent production of history. And he wants to know, like, well, how can Kant explain how the individual subject is produced? And then he replaces that with a historic, with historical materialism. So this was kind of the critique that, I mean, you can keep going

into this all the way up into the lesbian's art but this was kind of the critique of the antipraxis was making basically as soon as you start putting you start locating these things in individual human subjects you're making a category error and all of the things that human individual human subjects want these are not the transcendental plane of production that are producing that's producing experience these themselves are actually produced by something else same way that history is producing the bourgeois subject. And unconditional accelerationism is very fatalistic, like kind of fundamental, like really determinist Marxism, where history is doing its thing, it's going to unfold into communism. And in a way, it's the contradictions that's going to make that

happen. And you don't have to really like, you know, it's going to happen anyway, you don't have to really like make an effort to do anything other than what history is already going to unravel just due to its due to the nature of the contradictions playing out so um that's why that's why yeah antipraxis was a thing it was a similar kind of moment to the critique that greenspan points out um the the rift between marx and carl i don't know like if that's just something like a whole bunch of stuff in there so maybe we can like step back and talk about and things a bit more yeah i mean like uh feel free anyone uh uh on the call like if you've got some burning thoughts uh jump in yeah can i can i jump into that it's it's carl if so nice nice to

meet you um so one question i have to to what you just said amy i think this is is really interesting i wonder what you mean it was sort of um i think there's a really important and interesting questionnaire about sort of what we take um the word transcendental to mean right in in in kant and and after you know i i just controlled f through the first critique and there's not really a mention of you know something that would be the transcendental aside from sort of you know as a kind of the transcendental doctrine the transcendental aesthetic or something like that so so you know there's just this interesting thing that some sometimes some at some point it happens that we sort of start talking about the transcendental as though it sort of becomes a reified realm but already in count i don't think this is necessarily the case right so it's it's it's it's quite

interesting sort of how this is happening in kind of in kind of discourse because you know the way i i sort of usually try to think about it would be a sort of transcendental is just a kind of relationship right it's a it's a relationship of of conditioning that sort of that x is kind of the what is required in order that we should have something else so and and i think i just wonder sort of if anyone would sort of want to you know i i haven't read sort of an anesthetist in that much detail uh just to be clear so i i wonder sort of how how is she talking about um you know transcendental relationships in in in the text if anyone sort of has it as a grasp on that and of how that differs between the different sort of examples and sort of she goes into and sort of when

she compares uh can't uh sort of the capitalist sort of time production and uh even sort of time production is quite interesting an interesting word in this context right that it's something that's produced right real quick carl on the screen now is just like a little bit we took from the forward with a short quote from anna which might be jumping off point yeah yeah yeah i'm just going to leave it there because otherwise it's going to turn into a monologue but I think I think sort of if anyone just wanted wants to run with that I think that'd be interesting also just adding on to what Amy said go ahead somebody yeah I think well one thing that I think is I guess relevant is just the the distinction that Kant I guess is implicit in the first critique is the distinction between the

transcendent and transcendental, right? Like the transcendental as the conditions of experience for Kant, or I guess, and for Greenspan, it seems to be the conditions for a certain type of time or a certain type of time production, whereas transcendent seems to be like that which is beyond the empirical and and and it seems like both of those for Kant they they get they get muddy in the first critique yeah but but but it's been it seems like in in in in Greenspan both of them are also at play like we have like this this this notion of

of like transcendent time perhaps um but there's also um i don't i i don't know my train of thought has failed me but yeah there's the transcendent nature of eternity in the kind of like pre-kantian paradigm of understanding of time where time is subordinate to space and then there is the um you know, the transcendental structure. There is essentially sort of like time a priori, right? Which is sort of like an inner sense, and which comes from like Kant's first critique, where he has like an outer sense, which is like space, and an inner sense, which is sort of time. And time is there defined as something which is sort of experiential.

So it has to be like, it's kind of like a precondition for any sort of experience in a sense. And like time and space have sort of like, almost like a hierarchy, like time is sort of like thought before space in a sense. And yeah, this is sort of a really important point for like the whole kind of epistemology or like the whole like epistemological process which can then kind of like go through where you have then different stages of like, essentially mapping sort of like kind of a priori kind of categories to this like experience or to this kind of raw data. Yeah, I mean, that was the move, right? You can't, like you can't have experience without time, but you could have a non-spatialized experience,

which was the flipping of the kind of the platonic space is the most base undergirding necessity yeah time happens in space rather than i think it's interesting um in the book in the way that um writing from a western christian perspective and the fact that and also i think fails to place can't um and the critique in the context of the protestant tradition from which he was working. Because I think it's interesting, one of the notes I made when I was reading the book was just where she talks about, oh, in the Christian tradition, they believe this,

this, and this. And it's like, well, in the Protestant tradition, they believe this. Whereas if you're in the Orthodox tradition, just as an example, they have like almost this Aeonic time that she refers to. Although Deleuze and Guterati's Aeonic time is more like a Lovecraftian God than than a you know like a an outside but um yeah just I just kind of feel like in the like in the orthodox tradition when you kneel down at the altar rail to receive communion you are in some sense outside of time receiving communion with every Christian that has ever received communion um and it's it's through the act of of taking the the blood and body of Christ and I just think it's interesting like within it's a completely different that that view of transcendental time

being something that that is in the world um outside of miracles so on and so forth like it's just a really different view um i just wanted to bring that up actually because i just thought it was interesting that obviously can is writing in the in the price from a from a protestant point of view and having the reformation just a couple of hundred years earlier oh sorry i might be wrong but i think the ceases also mentioned like weber at one point right so i think there is sort of a soft connection with like the the idea of like kant also kind of like having almost like a sort of uh making like a test bed for some sort of like protestant to and which then like turns into this sort of ways in which it like has is basically a

base layer for then a philosophy of capital or like yeah productivity and this kind of things yeah i'm i think that i i feel like in the thesis screen spot even refers to the way that can actually just dealt with you know actually his own like very practical day-to-day time management right because he's quite famously known for what people setting there watches essentially to his walks you know all of this as well so there is i think you know if going even uh going even more narrowly from like the history of uh the chris like the specific kind of uh you know flavor of uh protestantism that he was like writing within then also i think like you know greenspan even refers to just his own individual kind of uh kind of rigor and

protestantism in his own time and the way that he lived his life as well to others he was a timekeeping mechanism yeah yeah yeah yeah with his walks through town that's true it's very true shall we move on from Kant i would do the only thing i wanted to say before we do that is like johannes is on the call i know johannes is like knee deep into can't stuff so if you want to say anything johannes on the camp stuff now is quite quite a good time to do that uh maybe just um the term or maybe just like a short summary when time appears like in the first critique like once in the sort of like uh early sort of uh a priori and then later as like a

schemata or something as like a schema you're honest do you want to say something to this or Sorry to put you on the spot. We just put you on the spot. You have to save us with the first critique. Actually, maybe he dropped off the call. Oh, no, I think he had his... Okay. No, we scared him away. Right, yeah, we scared away our trans scholars. They're very shy when we're out in the wild. I mean, if someone else wants to say something about, like, like basically the idea of schemes and schemers in Khan, then feel free and like feel at the moment not. Yeah, we have the part. I thought we excerpted the part

about the schema somewhere. Yeah, here. And so like, yeah, I'm definitely not qualified to talk about this, but like whatever. It's kind of like a kind of conceptual kind of adapter something like that to free up the nature of time as you know he works with it further and we did try to connect the idea of the schema to there's something else we're trying to connect it to I thought I mean essentially it's kind of like a key it's kind of like one of the like core pieces in like the first critique where like Kant needs sort of almost like sort of like joint to connect like all the sort of like um let's say um kind of empirical experience

uh with sort of um the the kind of a priori like categories or like the sort of uh um yeah sort of transcendental categories in a sense so the time essentially becomes the filter through which you apply the a priori to experience yeah yeah sort of you know in a really like broad sense yeah um amy you can correct us please um i was listening to this i was listening to a recording or a speech text to speech that someone had made of the thesis on the bus um on monday and i made this diagram which is oh nice right um yeah it's what you're talking about and also the way that that Anna connects the structure that she's talking about,

joined by the schematism in the critique of pure reason to her kind of like materialist study of timekeeping in the centuries that follow. So this is what I sort of took from it while I was listening to it. So it could be like imperfect, but this is, I think the kind of general delay she's making. So in Kant, you've got the transcendental aesthetic, which is time and space. And it's like sensation, it's intuition, the faculties of intuition are kind of attached to it. So it's sort of like very roughly, this is like smearing over a whole lot of like intricate stuff in Kant, but it's like sensation. and then that's connected by the schema of schematism to um the transcendental logic which

is kind of which is um overseen by the faculty of understanding and it's where you've got your all your concepts so the schematism like the concepts to sensation basically it's the hinge like you said it was a really good description i think um and then when you get to this kind of discussion of calendar time and clock time after clock time is developed. Calendar time becomes kind of like the transcendental aesthetic so it's like qualitative, it's a sensation, it's like experiential and clock time is the much more logical, quantitative, homogenous, what she say, secular, homogenous, autonomous and abstract. It's kind of like the transcendental logic in the realm

of concepts. And the thing that connects them two together, or the kind of like part that plays the same role as the schematism, is she's going to say capitalism as an abstract plane that synthesizes these two things together, the qualitative and the quantitative. So by the time you get to like Deleuze and Guattari, they start to talk about, what do they call them. My mind's gone blank. The Hexates, these things. Yeah, yeah, maybe. I'm not actually, the whole Hesades thing, Delizantara is like not my strength, but yeah, because I know you talked about this in the foreword. Are they like quantitative and qualitative at the same time?

What is it again, Paul, that they're subjective, but they're individual, they lack subjectivity? yeah they're like sort of like pre-individualized sort of like notion of events i think yeah like little splinters something like this we have i think at least it might be like the kind of um like i can't remember the uh more internal i don't know anyway so the things on the plane of um consistency or the body without organs or this abstract plane of imminence which it takes the place of the schematism by connecting these two sides the material and the conceptual or the qualitative time of the calendar and the um homogeneous time of the clock or the transcendental aesthetic and the transcendental logic um for Deleuze and Qatari are both qualitative and

quantitative at the same time or their intensities for them so it's like um yeah it's the thing that is connecting and hinging all of these these two different regimes that she points out in each chapter of the thesis. That's how I understood it. Yeah, I think now we are like almost like in a Deloes and Qatari environment. Revit hole. Sorry, I can't talk about one thing without like talking about everything at the same time. Big weakness. No, but thank you for giving this kind of explanation of Schimers. I think they're like a super like I still struggle with them and I think even like Kant scholars sometimes like struggle with them because it's kind of unclear also how Kant like derives them and I

think like Greenspan also like critiques like Kant notions of schemas as they're like as Kant is like oh they like arrive from the deep soul of the union and it's kind of like yeah okay it's very convenient yeah it's very convenient like what do you mean with this I mean like there are like a a lot of things with Kant also like when we talk about like this kind of categories it's it's like sometimes like these logical categories or these other like categories sometimes like really not clear where they are actually coming from so like I think a lot of critique in this like in the Caesars is also that like Kant is not rigorous enough to himself almost right like that all that like he kind of like reinvents almost like some like platonic ideas through move some sort of weird sideways.

And I think this is super interesting as a critique which Anna sort of brings forward. I would like to pitch in very quickly, if it's OK, before we drift away from Kant, quite a lot. I was recently reading UggSchool, and we actually hosted a little reading group in Trust. So I think Vassim earlier mentioned. And actually it was really interesting because Jakob von Uxgur was also kind of like a natural philosopher, exploring the minds of animals and maybe one of the first ethologists and biosemioticians. He really built upon Kant's a priori, particularly about time and space perception.

And he kind of added a bit of an expansion, rather focusing on the animal subject and not just the human subject perceiving time. So I think it's really interesting to consider that time perception is absolutely different in many different organisms, depending on their respective nervous systems. And actually, there was a kind of funny experiment that Uxco did at some point. I'm going to share a paper that I think references it, but I can find more details later. Essentially, he puts a snail on this weird rotating machine and an experimenter would kind of pinch the snail and observe the reactions.

And at a certain frequency of pinching, the snail would react in a certain way. But if the frequency would increase, the snail would kind of treat this as a different input. So the snail would totally change its reaction, which sort of implies that snails see time differently than humans and vice versa. So, yeah, just wanted to maybe put that out there. snail temporality and animal temporalities and sort of like thinking about time perception not merely in humans but in the expanded um kingdom yeah just just as like a quick comment to that i think that's super interesting and like um yeah

khan makes like just like an offhanded comment like twice in the first critique where he's just oh by the way like this way of viewing time or this way of viewing space is unique to humans but like by the way like we don't know if like other intelligent entities are like going to view time and space the same way so we have a content critique from the snail's perspective that's what we need let's know i mean there is also like a lot of research i like went down the sort of like rabbit hole of like um kind of people trying to actually locate sort of like the a priori notion of things so of time and space in like cognitive like real cognitive facilities of the brain so people are like okay there are actually sensors like which like defined like how you kind of um

kind of see time in like a like pretty biological sense and this is quite a weird like notion and then you get to all these questions like how does this relate to like symbols how um yeah it boils down to stuff like can animals count and all of these like really notions of like epistemology which i think are super like interesting and super exciting yeah yeah absolutely i mean in terms of the brain like i don't want to go too deep in it um but yeah that was mainly like the focus on my studies it kind of is already established that there is a whole sensory system for time perception and it's pretty intertwined with space perception so there's certain populations

of cells in the brain that can basically compute and often time and space is sort of entangled and also one of the the variables that's encoded in the brain and communicated is also time so kind of um not only how much a certain population of cells fire um tells us something about a certain feature in the sensory world but also when it fires so the the neural temporality is a very very important dimension that basically is essential to to decoding uh activity but yeah that's that can go on in a whole different route but if you guys are interested I can maybe share some like basic introductory papers.

Please. Yeah. Amazing. So where were we? I think we're getting to Kronos and Aeon, I think just about, like without naming them. Let's get back to that. Yes, it's still 0x004, you just changed the title. Ah, yes, yes, yes. Oh, oops. Oh my God. Cancel. There we go. Put the share button next to the end button. That's really dangerous. Yeah. Some dark design practices. So where are we? Oh, no, we were actually in a... Oh, we were in a PDF. We were in this. I'm sorry. Is that?

Oh, it's a PDF. Is it because we're in it? Actually, don't know. Okay, weird. Plan B. What's happening? User experience. Right, there we go. So, yeah, we kind of, we got to the, you know, we went through the accounting move, and then Anna's kind of like second, I guess, like second strategy or something, is to, like through this weird reading of Kant via Deleuze and De Guattari and using kind of like the Spinoza concepts that

D&G also lean on quite heavily, to kind of replace or reconstruct this idea of the inside and outside of like, you know, measured time and the kind of subjective experience of it or whatever, into to do away with the transcendental structure and replace instead the outside with an immanent plane, this plane of thisness, of the hexessities that we were struggling to conceptualise earlier. So, yeah, there's this little quote on the screen, which I think is quite helpful to seeing comments in the chat firing as well. as well um yeah so this is kind of like uh setting up for uh like a uh uh a kind of a

strict time which is measured and which is logical linear and metric and then another one which is like altogether very different um so we have this kind of quote here like well on the so where are we spinoza's concept of the plane of consistency which is also kind of like the body of lap organs and is read by Deleuze and Gattari as an abstract machine of production which is by no means to be understood as a metaphor. The bodies on it, bodies which can be described mainly by temporal properties, slow, fast, at rest and so on, are real phenomena. While on this plane of production, effects are expressed by speed and affect, juxtaposed with a plane of forms, substances and subjects. One plane is assigned to linear time production which subjectivises, while the other simultaneously too late and too early as this plane itself produces time. Through

her reading of Deleuze and Guattari, Greenspan invokes two conceptions of time both defined by Deleuze in the logic of sense, a chronos and aeon. Chronos is characterized as linear, successive, metrical time which corresponds with the empirical ego's experience of corporeality and causality. In contrast, aeon is an empty time of intensive quantities and multiplicities in which affects emerge through interactions of thisness so we've set up a different kind of this is a different dynamic to the to the the inside and the outside um now and um it sets up for the um yeah for the rest of the for the rest of the thesis um does anyone want to like contribute or have any thoughts

questions comments on this this new this nature of the nature of chronos and an aeon we've got some quotations from the thesis which we can we can carry on with which might give a bit more like like color like feel free to jump in once uh if you have any thoughts uh pressing i mean maybe maybe it makes sense also to see or to to kind of contextualize first how anna is coming from like a cunt to like de leuze and gotari in a sense uh just like really briefly i think you can like say that like the problem or as i read it the problem for uh her was cunt is that like it's always like this like paradox of like where is essentially the production happening can't can't

say anything about it because it's sort of like beyond like the the the realm of reason in a sense but it's still sort of like determine the sort of like all the production and all the experience which kind of leaves you in a like really weird situation because you can't describe it's kind of like this weird like paradox where you can't describe like where stuff is coming from but you can like say like okay the experience is there or the experience is generated and I think to kind of um get further with this or to critique this i think she turns to de leuze and gotari and like tries to kind of almost like facilitate this critique in almost a non-epistemological matter as she said as she as or as de leuze and qatarie says like the that the synthetic a priori is

essentially sort of like freed from just like the individual subject um through kind of almost the sort of recognition of for example freud like sort of the unconsciousness which is sort of like okay there are like forces at play which you can't describe in like a purely kantian model of like uh reason and uh sort of this epistemological process of um mapping concepts to um experience um so i think this is the first thing which which brings us then to delus and qatari um and the The second one is this notion of Spinozian materialism, where I think the kind of matter itself or essentially there is a certain agency or presubjective agency towards matter in

which things can arise which can be grasped by the Kantian system. I mean, that's where this idea of an aonic occurrence, this disturbance on this kind of intrusion into... That also, yeah, exactly. It escapes the ability to kind of describe and ascribe it in terms of stuff like causality, which is why then she's focusing on Y2K as happening as well as having as a non-event that still kind of had this, you know, it still affected everything, but the spectrum of Y2K never actually did anything

in a sense. And yeah, kind of it was just, it was this intrusion from the outside that then we tried, we can try as well. That's the thing we can always try to, you know, kind of, as you were saying before, like apply these a priori concepts to the experience, as you were just saying, Paul, but like, then that, you know, it's not coming from those things, nor is it necessarily the root of it describable in those things either. Yeah, it's a nice quote here from Anesthesis. So let's read that out. Like, I think the part of Kronos is a bit more like, you know, graspable. We have like, we don't understand linear metric time in our everyday realities. But the section from Aeon is quite interesting. So, Aeon, the indefinite time of the event, the floating line that knows only speeds and continually divides that which transpires

into an already there that is at the same time, not yet here, as simultaneous, too late and too early, something that is both going to happen and just happened. So, yeah, we've all had these kind of like weird experiences like deja vu and things like that. I think that's, you know, speaking a bit more to things that come out of the, you know, the weirdness of time. there's also this like part in the seasons actually where she makes a reference to i think the shining there's like specific part of the shining where you see like a lot of um where like time is sort of like mashed up and like uh like you see i think like a lot of dead people standing in so so there is sort of like a gossip metaphor running here yeah uh oh yeah we

copied that in our play as well so everyone was dead on the floor at the start of it and then like and then they had to die in those same places during the play so that it would yeah um but but yeah i think the the general sort of like um notion of this disruptions are really sort of like interesting and they come actually from for co right yeah this is also what i just uh yeah yeah i mentioned yeah i mean like i kind of anna mentioned it as well when she's um discussing marx's in her opinion too you know too too rigorous to materialist or just only material is kind of conception of history um but then i suppose there's also this but then you know in a on a like a slightly less rigorous point but i think still quite an interesting one this idea

that you know capital is capital works by kind of continually careening towards some kind of a disaster that either is pulled back from or diverted or um you know these kind of there's always a crunch of some kind on the horizon actually like within the system and eschatology and you know it's always eschatological but it like never actually gets there um but that is the that is the driving force that is the momentum behind all of this yeah exactly you know um So I think just as a, you know, kind of mapping it structurally then actually, both conceptually and actually onto history in terms of the realities of how, especially the kind of the globalized form of capital that Greenspan starts with as well, that, you know, it maps so perfectly onto both of those, onto both of those things, like the real, the material history and also just conceptually in this discussion.

And, you know, I think that's also maybe a point as well that's worth bringing up as well, because, you know, obviously, you know, again, kind of going back to Tukar as well, obviously capitalism means different things at different times. But I think really, you know, one of the key things as well, where Greenspan is looking at the start of this history that she's really looking at, at this materialist capitalist history starts, in her opinion, with the advent of the clock as a strict timekeeping kind of mechanism. and is always actually linked to power as well and is historically also linked to the period of capitalism that kind of was the first spurt of globalization, right?

This was also the time of the East India Trading Company, of colonialism, of all of this as well. Peter, do you want to sort of say something about Foucault because you made a comment about Foucault there and i think that could be interesting yeah just like mention okay and we're like talking too much uh oh i don't i don't know uh what all to say apart from the fact that like i mean at the end of chapter uh two like in in the last few pages she um she she she makes she makes this she she doesn't explicitly compare for koda kun but i think it's implicit there that like there are there were these discontinuities where there's a radical change in one regime of something

to another. And in Foucault, she isolates it in the context of disciplinary punishment by our political systems. But these ruptures radically change the way that we understand the world and engage with the world around us. And I think, and actually, as I'm saying this and rambling a bit, I think that we can like retrospectively, like, read that back into the creation of like the longitude clock as well, like that once this thing was created, once Harrison created this clock that was able to be used at sea and was like super accurate or

whatever, that like just totally changed the game entirely for like Merchant Capital and we couldn't go back. And I think she doesn't, actually she doesn't make this explicit, but I think that's like the type of discontinuity that Foucault is talking about, although applied in in this sense to the materiality of time, I guess, but that's just kind of a thought off the top of my head. I'm not sure where to go with it. Kuhn sticks to the lower hanging fruit of concepts, the soft fabric of concepts for his kind of like epistemic, whatever of paradigm shifts. Whereas Foucault, I think is a bit braver.

I would say maybe like of those two, Foucault is accessing the base theory and Kuhn is a bit more cringe. I read the structures of scientific revolutions through my PhD. My professor, I was a science PhD. My professor gave it to me thinking he was gonna inspire me, but instead made me realize that 99% of the work going on in the university is completely pointless. So without Kuhn, you would be a physics professor at this point. Quite possibly, yeah. Or we wouldn't have a salon. At least that to thank Kuhn for. But I suppose also like the advent of the longitudinal clock then is kind of, I mean, that's the necessary precursor for Greenwich Mean Time, right? That's the necessary precursor for actual globalized time as well. Well, it's kind of the meme of the dominoes.

Yeah, exactly. You know, you start with, oh, we can actually just map longitude. And then suddenly it's like, oh, we can apply a global time system to this. I just want to point out that the steps between the longitude and the global time system, there's a really good book, if we're going to add to everyone's reading list, It's Vanessa Ogler's Global Transformation of Time. Really, really recommend this book. And it basically covers 1850, maybe it's 1820 through to 1950 in the atomic clock. But she basically goes through the construction of time as kind of that Prussian state building that then leads to kind of the nation. well you know we can also go go through the legibility stuff but she basically goes through

the the introduction of national times um and national times as colonial projects and then she goes through um arguments about standardizing universal time and on all of these various steps that went through and then you have like how time is actually controlled by the labor movement because even now it's like um whatever it is it's the the union of of chronologists or whatever it who were originally radio operators who were in charge of global time. It's a really, really fascinating book and I really, really would recommend it to anyone. But one of the key things that she talks about in that is about the later sort of 1900s harmonizing of time that you get around 1900 and just before that global, like global dating and global time because the Gregorian

calendar wasn't well fully accepted in Russia for example until like 1901 and in China it's a whole thing in itself because China still uses a different dating system but what was I going to say apart from it being a really good book she talks about the the the globe the move to globalize time and the dating system was a utopian project essentially that comes from the Prussian tradition because they basically predicted that capitalism was going to do what it was going to do with all of these new technologies like the telegraph, you know, the train networks and so on and so forth. And they basically put forward at this conference, and I forget what the conference

name is. It's been a while since I read the book, but they were like, we need standard time, Greenwich, which ended up being Greenwich Mean Time, but we need to do these things in order to make capitalism become what we think it could become. And I think that's, and it's really interesting, like it has this utopian element, but then also they know that they're laying the groundwork for what's next in the 20th century, basically. That's interesting. I think from there we could actually like move on towards the more sort of like techno-matrealist part of the thesis. Yeah. But I just wanted to make a point, which I think we discussed a little bit in our preparatory discussions, which is we mentioned labor just then.

Labor doesn't really come up very much in the thesis, like, you know, in a direct sense. We're more talking about, like, you know, the actions of capital with respect to time. Obviously, labor is, you know, part of that. We talk about factories and clocks and all the rest of it. But it's not really very much of the conceptual focal points of thesis. Before we move on, I was gonna just have a stab at talking about Eon. Try and try to sort of draw some lines between, I guess some other things that I'd been thinking about this week. I mean, it's, yeah, it's a kind of concept that I've thought of or thought about off and on the years but kind of not really focused on tremendously much until now and um yeah this

it's this idea of um of the the hexaetes which they i mean that that passage from uh um from de los gator that you that you evoke here they they describe these in a very interesting way um as i mean the kind of examples they give um i can't find a particularly good quotable bit but the overriding sense that you get of Hexertes is that they're almost like a possible world or sort of nodes in a possible world without necessarily someone to presupposing someone to experience them and the yeah it's interesting that Giovanni brought up um wax cool um earlier um but this this notion of having a world without someone specifically to

experience it i suppose sort of brings in brings to mind this the um heidegger's uh categories of the the different types of world experience of uh animals um non non non-beings like rocks and then human beings. This idea of being Weltlos, Orinworld, Weltarm, which is the experience that the animals have, and then Weltbildend, which is the sort of human or the Dasein experience. And I suppose what it strikes me as being is that this, the Aeon in the sense that it sort of concerns itself with Hexeates seems to be the bridge between the now, which a snail can experience

now as this bizarre experiment shows. But then between that and the now when is the crucial kind of step that goes into human experience. Now when in the sense that that no experience of the now or no significant experience of the now is merely associated with a time of day or a time of year or kind of anything that can be measured in terms of marking time but in terms of it's only a now when when it's considered in terms of categories of I guess you know kind of trying to stay clear of the word but kind of existential importance i suppose

strayed too close to heidegger so i had to take existential with me from that but um and the other things i've been thinking about in relation to this so actually the main thing that's been kind of like behind my thoughts what i've been saying this is um a book called radical hope um which is i don't know if if some of you might be familiar with that that's um it's to do with the um the end of the traditional way of life of the um the native american tribe the crow and it's this kind of fascinating evocation of of of a period of their history when the now when simply disappears um it's the whole book is structured as a as an investigation of this this one utterance by uh

the I think the final one of the last chiefs of the Crow who who talked about he said something like when when the buffalo left nothing else happened and the whole book is constructed as a kind of this quite amazing investigation of what exactly that might have meant and the simple version of it is that that's when the now when simply disappears the Crow history ends and there's a lot more to say about this i don't want to kind of uh take it up take it up too much but but yeah this this the concept of eon and the sort of hexaetes that concerns itself with seem to be quite an important uh bridge to actually thinking about supposed to bridge

from time to temporality in the sense of temporality being something that straddles the phenomenological experience of time and also something more, yeah, something I guess again by the existential experience of time. I also wanted to jump in about really quickly. I was, hi everyone, nice to be here. I was curious if there is, is if it's like posited how we could use this concept or form, like if Kronos is how we're organizing and making sense, which like brings us into this existence of time we're in,

and then we can know like eons exists due to physics and such. But how do we experience this, you know, if we're always constantly within Kronos? The only example I could think of is like being on psychedelics or types of meditation where you can actually experience this type of time um but then it's like once you have this is this something that you can work with too um because i was also wondering like um with this capitalism's transcendental time machine is this like a transcendental time machine that transcendent trends so many trans it's a tongue twister capitalism transcendental time machine capitalism's transatlantial time that transcends capitalism itself right because

it's like it goes beyond this thing within just capitalism where it's like already this like innate human survival almost so yeah i was just thinking of like how do we experience and use this or kind of like posit this into thinking um if that i mean i'm just pondering out loud i also haven't read the text so i feel like there might be yeah there's kind of the remainder of the discussion i I suppose in the remainder of the thesis, it's kind of like, you know, speaking to that page. So maybe it is time for us to get to the nitty gritty, like to Y2K and so on. I mean, I would also love to talk about labor and about like the thing which was in the chat, like essentially like the notion of like economics in the thesis, because I think that's super interesting. Let's do that real quick and then we can get to Y2K. Yeah. Okay.

So I will just like read like some of the chat here or people can also like just say what they like. Peter, if you want to just have a short notion of what labor is like, or how labor is sort of like defined for you, well, not defined for you, but like how you read this in the text and maybe also, I think. I don't know. I mean, there's the Marxian, I mean, I guess it starts with Adam Smith, I guess, but there's the Marxian labor theory of value, you know, stuff has value because we're doing work to it and stuff. I mean, to be honest, this is also a really kind of like,

I mean, this is like, yeah, obviously this is like a Marxist reading, but like Marx talks also a lot about like abstract labor and stuff like this, which is kind of like social like kind of determined and things. So, I mean, I mean, I think, I think the reason labor doesn't like isn't a focal point of the text is because like Greenspan just like drawing as as Amy noted, she's drawing on Bombarek and Schumpeter and just kind of rejecting the labor theory of value. And it takes then, at least in my reading, a more abstract approach where it's not so much like value then becomes associated with capital as an abstract thing and not so

much with like labor as such i guess but but but but i'm but i'm like not into economics and so i don't know enough to say anything more intelligently assuming that was intelligent no yeah i i think that's a super yeah i think that's super interesting i i also like try to read it like a couple of times and also can't like completely just kind of say what like kind of economic theory is like kind of drawn out there because it feels like there is a critique of marxism obviously there is a kind of like simple critique of like um as you said like a theory of uh value and how value and labor are like connected um but i'm also like not 100 sure like if i would totally subscribe

that this is like an austrian or like a classic kind of notion of economy where like um yeah it's Emi, you wrote something about Schumpeter and Bombarek Bombarek Yeah, they're both like this kind of I guess it's the Austrian school economics But the creative destruction theory of capitalism Comes back in a lot of Anna's work after this point And even her current The book that's going to be published I don't know, next year maybe with Edinburgh University Press called what's it called at the moment uh China it's had so many different titles China and the wireless undertow yeah there we go China

and the wireless undertow that's where it's at at the moment um starts with the whole thing on like a wave theory which kind of comes out of this um what's her name Carla Perez I think is the theorist that's invoked in that particular paradigm but it is this kind of these theories of capitalism or economics that are critiquing the labor theory of value but I don't think she like goes into that specifically in her writing that critique what's important in this thesis is she uses Foucault to critique Marx so she's like Kant says the transcendental the transcendental experience is produced within the subject um or it's located within the subject Marx is like no it's located in history the subject's just a product of it and she's like well Foucault has

this whole theory of history where actually it doesn't unfold in the smooth dialectical way that Marx predicts things don't flow obviously from one mode of production to another you don't have to wait for the seeds of one mode of production to be sown in order for it to like take over for Foucault it's like these things happen kind of out of nowhere it's just like a rupture occurs, no one really saw it coming, it's like a bit of a black swan event, and then all of a sudden we're in a different paradigm of knowledge or whatever. So she's like, well, this is a critique of Marx's account of the transcendental as being within historical forces, because history must have an outside for something to break into it and rupture it.

And then her kind of like progression from that is like Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism and schizophrenia talks about or kind of synthesizes the outside and the inside in this way that the outside is always imminent in the inside. So capitalism is always like begging this crisis that never comes because it doesn't have an outside anymore. The outside isn't like the outside of eternity. It's not strictly demarcated. it can't like break capitalism it's already imminently part of capitalism in every moment and it's like the description of aeon that was on the slide before it's like in the future and in the past simultaneously um so like uh yeah this is why they kind of talk about capitalism

not having an outside but then capitalism has within it forces that aren't um strictly captured by the kind of regulated capitalism that we live in today and that's what I guess they're interested in liberating right. So I mean if you want to talk about Anna Greenspan's Marxism in this thesis I guess she doesn't deal with it after her critique of Marx really but I guess it's kind of related to what Deleuze and Guattari's Marxism is in capitalism and schizophrenia no i think that's a good like ending points for this theme uh also like i would say like uh schumpeter and i mean like has also like a lot of marxist concepts so he comes also like

from a certain like marxist lineage and things but i think there's also like maybe a notion of like this hegelian sort of dialectics which is in marx and which has to be critiqued as you you said yeah but the discussion of the um the forces happening within capitalism that aren't fully regulated by it does again bring us very nicely onto yeah the rubicon exactly yeah y2k so just like for a bit of historical context um anna greenspan's phd thesis was published by the university of warwick in the year 2000 which would mean that she was writing it in the last days months of the millennium and so Y2K was this you know approaching phenomenon

and so it was kind of a guess you know like beautifully timed happening that became the the hinges of the thesis, like kind of the case study almost, to try and give a set of realized instantiations of what aeonic occurrence might actually look like, feel like, be like. And yeah, so like maybe we'll just read a bit of the, like there's a nice quote here, which I thought was quite good. In an act of calendric insurgency, Y2K threatened the authority of the Gregorian calendar by replacing it with cyberspace's own cyclical camp. Operating in this manner, it constructed itself as a time bomb that permeated the distributed

network of contemporary technology by directly targeting the pre-existing unity of capitalist time." And so I think that's the jumping off point. probably one of the things that ignited our interest in all of this, that Y2K was kind of a starting point for the rising supremacy of machinic temporalities of synthetic forms of time. Do we want to say something about the eschatological side of it as well? So I know that you're interested in millenarianism. I wonder if you want to tie the YGK to the...

I'm trying to... well I mean the... I'm furiously trying to also find the millenarianism points that I've actually wrote when I'm saying this. Why don't I read out the path that we wrote? Well, I'll buy you some time. Nice one. Yeah. So this is what we wrote in the foreword to kick off this part of the discussion. So as a literal and figurative representation of the limitations of digital timekeeping and machining pneumotechnics, Y2K was an aton timely exemplar of an aonic occurrence. Much of the work that went into producing the thesis was undertaken with the prophesied chaos of the year 2000 looming on the horizon, foretold but not yet actualized, Y2K heralded the dawn of the new millennium in the Gregorian calendar, dovetailing eschatological premonitions of apocalypse with concerns regarding the

widespread and synchronized failure of critical technical infrastructure worldwide. And there's, so I think the quote that I'm actually going to, that we talked about with regards to this kind of I mean the phrase calendric insurgency and this notion of an insurgency and like Y2K kind of positing these cracks but also this divergence between human time and machine time right the this divergence between the the smooth lovely linear progression of history is like we as human subjects kind of perceive and the the circular machine time because of the size of a was it you went eight yeah because of like we're using digital technology because we were first using digital technology and um you know uh no one who wrote the the time keeping systems in all of

the computers um back in the 70s presumed that these same timekeeping libraries would still be in use in the year 2000 so um basically the numbers would only count up to 99 and um which which was 1999, and then they would roll over. And so they rolled over to zero. So, yeah, and so this is unique time, which we can maybe go into if people want to do it. But like, I think that the, if we're talking about the kind of the eschatological and the aspect of Y2K, right? Which I think we can ground it by the fact that you can even ask about the consequences of Y2K as an event that didn't happen, right,

is maybe evidence of this kind of eschatologicalism that's implicit within it. But then there was also, you know, at the time, the amount of people who were working directly with, like, computers and time systems, right, was like a vanishingly small size of the population. but in the run-up to Y2K there was kind of a very across the board of whatever you know whatever left right prepper non-prepper globalist anti-globalist there was a lot of people who were kind of preparing for like the approaching end as it's quoted and I'm now going to quote from technosis myth magic and mysticism in the age of information by eric davis um and yeah

basically he says that technologies are shot through with myths that frame the story of time myths of utopia and cataclysm alike so it should not be surprising that many of the stories circulating about the information revolution feed off patterns of eschatological thought nor that technological images of salvation do keep hitting the screens of the social imagination And so what we kind of take from this when we're talking about this in the forward basically is that Y2K was the beginning of the kind of, I mean, we use the phrase balkanization of the different forms of temporalities that are all kind of overlapping and askew, right? Like within the space that we're now in. And this was just at the time talking about like very centralized, globalized, normal digital time.

There's a lot of other time, essentially like producing methods that, which is the main focus of our back, the end of the forward. But I think it's fair to say for Greenspan, like Y2K basically heralded the beginning of like cyberspace time, right? right with this move with with all of the things that i just kind of like shotgunned into the conversation you know this this divergence of human and cyber time in terms of cyber time operating as a spiral and human time still kind of continuing on the straight line being passed by it um as well as you know the the renewal millenarianism that like y2k brought up also i think you could think of this pop-up just popped into my mind like y2k is like you know we've tried to

represent time with the digital linear system, Unix time. And so Y2K is a failure of the linear system to represent, to faithfully convey the, you know, whatever, vulcanised, non-linear, non-hegemonic forms of time which might exist. Yeah. And for those who don't know, Unix time, it sounds very grandiose. Actually, all it is, is a it's a it's a an ever-increasing very long number which is the amount of seconds since um first of january 1970 right so that's all it is and um the the history of unix time which maybe

you know i'm aware we've only got 20 minutes left maybe we don't have to go down a divergence down unix time but um unix time as the basis of this like digital cyber time right that like heralded all of this, which maybe is actually a really good instance as well of these intrusions into what we experience as linear history that we were talking about before, right? So all of this stuff, this rollover, the architecture of this is based on a completely arbitrary decision by the people who were making Unix time at the time, right? Who were literally saying, oh, this is a time standard and we'll just start that. So it starts at this point, it's going to have this much address space, which then like necessitates that there will be a capacity which will be reached and overflow like with Y2K which is like two digits of an address space overflowing as the millennium or the

century changed. The Unix times a 32-bit string, 32-bit like you know ones and zeros, 32 of them and so that has either 68 or 136 years on the clock depending on whether the integers are signed or not. So there will be two new Y2Ks like we've already like preparing for next one uh in 2038 there will be 36 36 or 38 so it's 36 okay i've got on the screen 38 i don't know well trust the screen i think it's 68 years yeah so y2k38 the apocalypse when the 32-bit signed introduced will overflow um and then like in 2106 is when the unsigned ones will overflow um so yeah you know this is gonna keep happening again and again if we continue to use linear

representations of time. Yeah. Should we move to the kind of the next stage of the story? If we could finish with, I think we can maybe finish this with a quote as well, which maybe ties up some of these threads. So this is a quote from Greenspan from page 109 of actually from the original, 109 from the original PhD, which is what we're working from. But she basically says it is as an aonic event that y2k makes the connection between the transcendental philosophy of time and the socio-economics of capitalist timekeeping practices it dissolves the distinction between time and the materiality of timekeeping systems which i think is maybe a really lovely place to to end this bit of the chat yeah this is also where like you know

anna's work is done by this point you know she is kind of she's she's y2k'd and she's got her PhD thesis and like, you know, all hail Dr. Greenspan. It's quite too huge. So. I was quite too close and all I got was this piece. Yeah. So like then, so then this is kind of like where we tried to make our, draw a new line to where we are today. And as we said earlier, we have like the three of us work like artistic, philosophical and practical senses with the blockchains, cryptocurrencies, all that stuff. And so in those technologies we see like, perhaps we could go as far as to say, these are realized distanciations of some of the ideas, theories in anaesthesis,

specifically with the production of, highly ordered temporalities and histories. So it's a little bit here, which I'll read out, and then I think we can segue, which is that, We propose that distributed consensus-based timekeeping technologies, sometimes referred to as blockchains but more fittingly referred to as time chains, can be apprehended as a realized instantiation of a generative substrate for the spawning of occurrences in virtual time as a by-product of their production of chronic order. This ultimate abstract power and the concomitant shift in the temporal apparatuses at our disposal has ramifications regarding the increasingly fragmented era of patchwork modernity that now delimits the preconditions for experience itself.

So all of that is a very fancy way of us saying that, you know, there have been some changes in like technological developments in the last 20 years. And the one particularly with applying cryptography to distributed systems to get like blockchain networks seems to be like a very pure and succinct encapsulation of some of the theories in the thesis. I guess like, yeah, I don't want to... I think maybe if we, I think there's a, I think that the crux of, or one of the cruxes is actually, okay, why are we even drawing the distinction between these, you know, we talk about the time of cyberspace time, right? This is actually multiple different

webs of completely different things. Some of these are time servers, so these are computers, and some of these are literally atomic clocks, right? So this is not a single homogenized kind of mechanics or like apparatus of time, but of time production, right? Which is, or even the idea a different instantiation of like a temporal regime, right? Which you can think of as a mechanism for the distribution of temporal authority, right? So it's not the fact that you're just telling everyone the time. The time is being distributed according to this apparatus, right? And the interesting kind of, I suppose, very deep structural difference between the cyberspace time

of kind of like Y2K and then these new, yeah, kind of a time chain based potential temporal regimes, right, is really the, is essentially like the command structure of these things. The architecture. Right, it's the architecture of it. That's exactly what I was looking for. It's the architecture of these things and how time is actually distributed through these apparatuses. and the massive difference that was, I think, like the key, is maybe one of the key cruxies of why we use these as a comparison, right? Because you have the time of cyberspace ultimately is a very centralized, we call it command and control in the piece kind of way of actually kind of distributing this time, right?

So you have- It echoes back to what we had before. Exactly, right? This is just an update of what we had before, where beforehand you maybe had a you had a town clock that was according to gmt that came from you know this the kind of amazing history that jay was just telling us about now we have atomic clocks which are uh controlled either by uh governments or government-funded research institutions that then tell time servers you could almost say it's a transcend transcend time structure yeah because it's like an ultimate of authority exactly which is literally like one like like six clocks around the world yeah so like atomic clocks exactly like everything is like distributed capitalism is transcendent transcendent time machine yeah um exactly everything goes up to six clocks which are you know held in a mountain by and guarded by the

military right um but the the kind of the fragmenting of this like post y2k kind of capital this time right we are uh essentially staying is also being maybe accelerated let's see by um timekeeping systems that have a completely different architecture right they they have a um usually they're relying on some kind of like a peer-to-peer consensus um there is a hierarchy present in these networks but it's just not explicit not explicit authorities and it's a more kind of um actually like materially driven kind of emergent uh authority or apparatus no it's linked to capital we're not saying these things exist completely outside of it though also just

being insane but i think the interesting thing is they're like almost like more linked to direct like capital and like these other structures are more linked to like i mean power and capital is hard to distinguish them exactly because in cyberspace time time becomes money um and you is the declarative statement that the Greensboro makes, where time equals money. And this, as well as coming from kind of all of the Protestantism like Weber that we were already talking about, is also seen when we're talking about stuff like high-frequency trading, where the literal, the physical constant of the speed of light actually may dictate whether you make a trade or not. The ordering is very important in high-frequency trading, whether you win or lose.

And so then latency and speed of responses. But then it's subsumed. The two things are actually just collapsed in blockchain systems because time seen as a collection of blocks, a collection of transactions, a collection of state changes, of things that happened, the architecture of them, you come to this ordering in a completely different way, right? It comes from consensus. But it's only in the production of these blocks that a time moves forward but also in the majority of them that more money is actually produced right as a reward for moving time forward right so this it's all kind of compacted uh even further i think in these systems as well but they're coming from the the consensus as to how this

happens actually comes from a completely different mechanism and the notion of like the question in what order like events appear yeah it's like really a kind of hard question or was like a really hard question in like any sort of like informational system for a long time yeah and like what are these systems are like kind of proposing essentially is that the order of events is always kind of directly influenced by capital like and this is not even like a metaphor this is like quite literally that the order of events in like like blockchain systems are directly translating to who pays the most money yeah because like these systems are really inherent on like transactional cost and the higher the transactional cost the more like the faster

like transaction gets mined and you have all these like problems so like it even like brings together this time as money in a really like direct and condensed sense yeah arguably more brutal then and like more in your face than as like we have seen yeah but i mean at least it's transparent right you know in a sense uh yeah so like really like at the crux of cryptocurrencies is that they're uh time stamping and event ordering systems like messages are going around these networks and that's kind of changing the effective balances money that people have in the network um the blocks in something like bitcoin are mined using this kind of brute force computation and special specialized equipment and so the people that have the better equipment that have the faster internet access engaging this kind of lottery race and they're advantaged so like you

know the people that um have whatever like um higher quality temporal infrastructure are advantaged in these in these systems and the and then and the history is written by the winners in you know in that sense so like in some ways it's not such a radical break from the from the past i suppose you could uh you could say um history is written by the block producers yeah history is written by the blog producers yeah exactly um so we had this like conception of proof of work of the of the mining uh so on a practical sense as we said it's kind of like this lottery of brute force computation um but the the way it functions like in a more kind of poetic or philosophical sense is that it's a legalist consensus mechanism whereby the recording of virtual events which are the transactions towards a ledger takes place creating a chronological numerical order

materializing the potential of an imminent peer-to-peer network through computation energy, like in large amounts of energy, as I'm sure you'll know. And so I wanted to think, like it would also be nice for us to say something about the different kinds of temporality in these networks, the kind of the time of the network itself, which is, look, it's a bunch of computers all talking to each other. They're like proposing broadcasting transactions, messages in real time. And that's a bit like the kind of machining, the cyberspace time of Greenspan. But then there's the kind of the second move, the second clock in Bitcoin. And proof of work is, you know, taking these imminent, you know, virtual transaction network activity and crunching it into the blocks, into the strictly ordered linear append only data structure.

and where the transactions go is of critical importance in all of these systems. So yeah, proof of work is imminent timekeeping mechanism, needlessly transmuting virtual network activity into batches of pure chronos, as we say. So yeah, I think that is actually, that is actually like as much as I want to say about you know bitcoin in in in specific yeah but like yeah I hope it like at least it's clear why we thought it was an interesting um exemplar of like um some of Anna's uh theories kind of made yeah batches of pure

cronos I can see in the chat yeah do you want to jump on the mic Amy if you have any like ideas or thoughts on the I just thought that was a cool phrase that's all I think I mean I think what you're doing is actually really cool, trying to extrapolate the argument from capitalism's transcendental time machine into the 20, what are we in there? The 21st century. Who knows. Yeah, and I mean, I don't know, I think I, it's one of these things that you don't see until it's happened, right? We're in the middle of this process that's happening and it's hard to kind of like I mean you can't get outside of it to look at it from a distance and be like okay so that's what happened um so I'm just I mean I'm just kind of like observing it being in it watching all of

this stuff unfold kind of um I don't know wondering what what it how where it's all gonna end but um yeah I really like I really like the arguments that you pulled out of this um to update it And I think that you're right in looking towards time chains as the possible inheritor of the abstract time machine. Yeah, we were wondering what's next. Like, you know, the time chain cannot be the end of the story. So like, you know, that's that was our like, that's actually where we I think we basically left off. Yeah. Maybe we'll just read this bit out. It's just kind of where we left off the foreword. What can we imagine to be the next part of this story?

Does this trajectory end here, with the prophecy of capitalism's transcendental time machine seemingly fulfilled? We suppose not. But unlike Bitcoin's radical mechanism of synthesizing historicities, as mere humans we have no way of peering beyond the veil and seeing which of our possible futures may be borne out. This is perhaps the most reassuring matter of all, that in the age of ultra-pecision and chronic segmentation, the future is anything but certain. speculation seems uncontroversial, that capital and those entities in the service of it will continue to desire, enact and exploit ever grander conceptions and architectures of temporal engineering. For as long as there's value to be redistributed, there will be incentives to engineer more sophisticated machinery with which to manipulate the nature and flow of time. Today, whether we acknowledge it or not, we all live inside capitalism's transcendental

country. So yeah, as Amy says, you know, can't escape it. We're inside it now. And as technology continues to proliferate, become more advanced, permeate through various aspects of our lives, there's no going back. No. And there's actually one, this is now actually being reflected in consensus systems themselves as a quite a recent consensus system that came out, or that was theorized and kind of laid out and planned. It's actually called Ouroboros Kronos, which I don't really know how you get anywhere else than that. Yeah. So maybe that is the final distributed ledger tech consensus mechanism. It's like they're not even trying to hide it anymore. No, that's it. You want pure Kronos, do you?

Yeah. You want pure Kronos and the snake eating itself? Well, here you go. So, yeah. I just needed to drop that tidbit in and share it with everyone. That's nice. Well, I mean, like, I think we're actually kind of winding down now. So like, people, please feel free to jump in if you've got any burning thoughts you'd like to share. I thought I would just put up a, like, this is, you know, something a little bit more offhand and irreverent. So one of the things that the salon has been doing recently after all of these, like, theatrical and computer game projects has ended is we've been rewriting songs to be about different topics. And this is We All Live in a Transcendental Time Machine, which is originally by The Beatles. And so, yeah, I invite you to engage in this kind of activity with us to rewrite your songs

to be about Bataille taking you to the sun and finding a sea of green tan. You're not whipping out a ukulele for us. Next time, you've got to leave them wanting more, Jay. That's the secret. I know what I'm commissioning next. Yeah, so like we're at time now, it's 10 o'clock. I think it's been really great conversation to come off share. It's been a great conversation. Thanks so much everyone for joining us. Yeah, special thanks again to Peter and Miskatonic Virtual University Press for doing all this work, you know, with Anna's Blessing and getting it out there. So like, if you want to support the press, buy a copy when it's out there. And we're going to put this online,

um we're gonna put it on the salon uh youtube uh probably the next few days sort of thing if the recording is okay uh amy asks where where can we get the book uh peter should come on the mic and tell us i believe you can get it through amazon but there must be other places yeah it's i think it's it's actually available on amazon right now um and oh and but and and and and nobody nobody makes any money off of it except for amazon um so which is very exciting for them um but But yeah, it's available on Amazon. I'm just waiting to actually promote it until I get the final thumbs up from the Canadian library agency that the ISBN is all cool in their system.

But yes, you can buy it whenever. Yeah, well, of course it's on Amazon because today, whether we acknowledge it or not, we all live inside capitalism's transcendental time machine. it's also on barnes and noble so we can actually speaking of eschatologies i remember there was a there was a meme going around of uh the king james bible amazon basics king james bible with a four-way by jeff bezos and it turned out to not be genuine but i actually did go looking for that book on the internet uh so if anybody finds like either it's real or fake uh that that forward the preface i would love to read that all right so that we're gonna wrap there so thank you very much all for coming and hope to see you again at something soon we don't know what we're up to next but i'm sure there'll be some weird shit going on so thank you very much everybody from ciao bye from verla thank you a lot thank you bye ciao thanks thank you