Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine

Anna Greenspan

PhD Thesis

Philosophy Department

Universityof Warwick

September, 2000
Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisor Andrew Benjamin for his support.

This thesis has been written with the help of Louis Greenspan, Michelle

Murphy and the Ccru. It is dedicated to my family.

Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine

Contents

0. Introduction
[p. 2]

1. Philosophy's Copernican Revolution: Time in The Critique of Pure Reason

[p. 15] 1.0 Introduction: Kant's Discovery of the Transcendental

[p. 28] 1.1 The Transcendental Aesthetic: Time as Form of Inner Sense
[p. 41] 1.2 The Transcendental Deduction: Time and the 'I Think'
[p. 57] 1.3 The Schematicism: Time and Abstraction

2. Time in Modern Capitalism

[p. 68] 2.0 Introduction: Time in Kant and Capitalism

[p. 76] 2.1 Clock Time
[p. 93] 2.2 The Synthetic Culture of Clock Time, or Time = Money
[p. 121] 2.3 History and the Transcendental

3. The Materialist Revolution: Time in Capitalism and Schizophrenia

[p. 134] 3.0 Introduction: Aeon, or The Plane of Consistency

[p. 144] 3.1Transcendental Materialism: Deleuze and Guattari's Critique of Kant
[p. 157] 3.2 From Eternity to Aeon

4. The Aeonic Occurrence: Y2K

[p. 177] 4.0 Introduction: Anticlimax

[p. 184] 4.1 Time-mutations
[p. 198] 4.2 Dates and the Semiotic of Aeon

5. Conclusion
[p. 207]

Appendix
[p. 218]

Bibliography
[p. 219]
Summary

This thesis seeks to establish a connection between abstract thought

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

In colloquial language the terms inside and outside are used to

demarcate simple spatial relations. The boundaries between them are
physical and the passage which connects one to the other, though not always
easy to negotiate, is never completely blocked. For no matter how secure,
walls can always be scaled, doors opened, and gates unlocked. In
philosophical language, however, the terms inside and outside designate a
relation that is altogether more impermeable. For whether of an individual
subject or organism or of a social code or structure, interiority, as a
philosophical concept, indicates an absolute segregation., The inside, in this
context, is a mode of containment that operates not through physical
boundaries but by an imperceptible border which draws the contours of all
that can be thought and perceived. It is a contention of this thesis that, when
used in this absolute sense, the division between inside and out is not a
spatial determination but a temporal one. Existence is an enclosure not
because it happens in space but because it locks us in time. 2 It is perhaps for
this reason that one can detect a tendency in both philosophy and religion to
oppose the concept of time with notions of liberation, escape and exteriority. 3

' Much contemporary or postmodern thought has dealt with the segregation between inside
and out by concentrating on the interiority of language. Deconstruction, in particular, has held
that this zone of interiority is so all encompassing that it renders an occupation of the outside
impossible (note Derrida's famous phrase: il nya pas d'hors du texte). Subversion, from this
point of view, can only occur as a disruption from within.

2 This claim, that interiority has more to do with time than with space is one of the crucial
insights of transcendental philosophy and will be discussed in detail in the chapter 1.

3 Though extremely widespread, the notion that liberation is an escape from time is perhaps
most clearly expressed in the religions of the East such as Hinduism and Buddhism. Both
these religions have developed meditative techniques (yoga) that aim to release the
practitioner from the never-ending cycle of time, and both maintain that enlightenment is
reached through an escape from the illusion of time, or Maya. The details of this thought and
its relation to the arguments which follow are, however, beyond the scope of this thesis.

2
For an inside that is bounded by temporal rhythms must find its outside in a
realm which is exterior to time.
In the classical western tradition this connection between the
philosophy of time and the notion of inside and out is based on a disjunction
which opposes time to eternity. This disjunction is articulated most famously
by Plato who defines time "as the movable image of eternity, " (T, 77) a
definition which establishes the interiority of time in opposition to an exteriority
which is eternal. Though immensely widespread, this contrast between time
and eternity, rests, at least in its classical formulation, as we will see, on a
very specific understanding of both the nature of time and of the relation
between inside and out. 4
The classical tradition equated time with astronomy. Conceived of as a
'movable image', it was thought to be perceived in the cyclical changes of the
heavenly spheres. 5 Equivalent to celestial movement, time was made the very
6
principle of variation. Manifestingitself as a never ending processof change
and activity, it governed the continuous flow of becoming in which all
existence was trapped.
Thus, it was precisely due to its associations with variation that time
was considered to be a mode of capture. For the classical tradition

4 In what follows I offer a brief outline of the

classical conception of time and eternity. Though
this could undoubtedly be criticized for passing over many of the complexities of classical
thought, the purpose here is only to sketch the basic contours of this philosophical tradition so
as to provide a clearer means of understanding the temporal revolutions which constitute the
main focus of this thesis. To this end both Plato's and Aristotle's philosophy of time are
discussed in more detail in chapter 1.

5 See Plato `Timeaus' in Plato: The Collected Dialogues. Ed. Edith Hamilton
and Huntington
Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961(especially section 38 -39). Also note the
following from Definitions: "(chronos) time: the motion of the sun, the measure of its course. "
("Definitions" in Plato: Complete Works. Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Company, 1997, p
1678.)

6 As we will see, both Plato

and Aristotle tie time directly to movement. Though Plotinus
argues against this formulation, his notion that time is an activity of the soul shows that he too
conforms to the classical tradition in linking time with the variable processes of becoming and
change.

3
considered temporal rhythms, the passage of seasons, and the changes of
day into night as an elaborate simulation which belonged only to the created
world of phenomena. It held that the processes of movement and change
were but a shadow of a timeless realm that lies beyond, and it was inside this
world of shadow and mirage that the '
subject was caught. Governed by the
variations of matter, entangled in the multiplicity of becoming, humans were
held prisoner, duped by the illusory movement of time.
This vision of time found its direct opposition in the concept of eternity.
Differentiated from the temporal image of movement and variation, the eternal
was conceived of as a realm of constant stasis. In contrasting change with
identity, multiplicity with unity, and becoming with being, it offered an
alternative to the world of sensible appearance, and thus constituted a realm
which existed outside the phenomenology of time.
It is within this dualistic framework, then, that the exteriority of the
eternal must be understood. Eternity, conceived of in opposition to
temporality, should not be confused with the ever-lasting which is a
continuous extension of time. 8 Situated neither in the deep past nor in the
distant future, eternity is not a stretch of time but a timelessness. Co-existing
simultaneously with each and every moment, it is the essence of
appearances, the constant form which the variations of time can only
represent in a shadowy fashion.

TI am referring here, of course, to the writings of Plato. It is interesting to note that in the most
famous section of these writings Plato uses a spatial metaphor, the image of an underground
cave, to illustrate his conception of interiority. Even here, however, the prisoners are captured
not so much by spatial boundaries, but rather by their incapability of breaking free from the
entrapment produced by a fascination with the moving images of time. See: Plato. 'The
Republic. ' in Plato: The Collected Dialogues. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961

8 "Because eternity touches each and every time, it is easily confused with the closely related
concept of what "always was, is, and will be, " or, in a word, the everlasting. But in its own
proper concept, the eternal only "is"; only in the present tense can it be said to be or act in any
way. Exempted from all having-been and going-to-be, eternity is familiarly defined as
timelessness, in distinction from the everlasting (sometimes also called the sempiternal). "
Encyclopedia of Religion: Volume 5. Edited by Mircea Eliade, p 167.

4
As the essence of time, the eternal was revered as the divine
archetype. Operating from above, it was eternity that created time.
Considered to be the essence of transcendent production, it was able to
create without getting involved in the matter of its creation9 "Eternity, " writes
Plotinus "is a majestic thing and thought declares it identical with the
God. "(TE, 226)10
With this quote the obvious convergence between the classical notion
of eternity and the conception of the deity produced by the monotheistic
traditions of the West is clearly revealed. The form of the eternal - as the
genesis of the image of time - is paralleled in the opening section of the Old
Testament where we encounter God, as the eternal, who is presented as the
creator of time.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God
saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from
the darkness. And God called the light day, and the darkness he
called night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
(Genesis, 1: 3- 4)

According to the bible, then, time originates with the first act of
creation. Moving across the waters of the unformed void, God acts initially to
generate light and begin the passage of time. This primordial event is the

Drawing on the work of such feminist thinkers as Luce Irigaray (esp. Speculum of the Other
Woman. Trans. Gillian C Gill. Ithaca New York: Cornell University Press, 1985) it appears that
the classical distinction between the phenomenon of time and the transcendence of eternity is
essentially masculine in nature. For the notion of a transcendent eternity, beyond or above the
enclosure of time, only occurs by differentiating the eternal from matter, creation, becoming,
and multiplicity- that is from all things traditionally thought of as female. It is interesting to note
in this respect that in Hinduism, Shakti, the principle of female power, is sometimes conceived
of as time. See Zimmer, Heimrich. Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and civilization. Edited by
Joseph Campbell. New York: Pantheon Books, 1963

10The influence of Neoplatonism on monotheistic religion, and in particular on Christianity is

much too vast a subject to address here. Suffice it to note that it is clear - even from this
minimal exposition - that the philosophical understanding of the eternal converges with the
Judeo-Christian God.

5
singular occurrence which takes place outside the confines of temporality.
For, once it is established, a time determined by the passage of day into night

structures and conditions the rest of the week of creation. Eternity, as an

exterior and transcendent dimension, appears in its pure form only once
again, at the end of the bible, with the promise of messianic redemption.
Thus. in both classical philosophy and in the scriptures of the
Abrahamic traditions, life's entrapment in the continuous process of temporal
change, becoming and multiplicity was opposed to the wholeness and unity of
an eternal being who, untainted by the material world, existed as complete
perfection contained within itself. " The outside was thus equated with
transcendence, a mode of escape that led out of the enclosure of time and
allowed one to reach - whether through faith or through knowledge -a higher
and more primary inside.

This thesis is an exploration of two revolutions, one philosophical, the

other socio-economic which, together, have fundamentally altered the
philosophy, culture and technics of time. 12The first of these is philosophy's
'Copernican revolution' which was instigated by Immanuel Kant in his text the
Critique of Pure Reason. The second occurs with the onset of capitalism, and
involves the invention - and subsequent innovations of a time-keeping
-

"Note the following quote from Plotinus: "That

which neither has been nor will be, but simply
possesses being; that which enjoys stable existence as neither in process of change nor
having ever changed - that is Eternity. Thus we come to the definition: the Life-instantaneously
entire, complete, at no point broken into period or part- which belongs to Authentic Existent by
its very existence, this is the thing we are probing for this is Eternity. (TE, 225)
-

12 In order to achieve focus,

much that relates to the main theme of this thesis - that is,
revolutions in the nature of time - was of necessity left out. The two most obvious exclusions
are, on the 'materialist side, ' the recent changes in the physics of time (a topic that is
introduced in an interesting and comprehensive manner by Ilya Prigogene and Isabelle
Stengers in Order out of Chaos. Bolder Co: New Science Library, 1984) and, on the
'philosophical side', the work of Henri Bergson. (who is undoubtedly an important influence on
the philosophy of time found in the writings of Deleuze and Guattari - see Deleuze, Gilles.
Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barabara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books,
1988). To incorporate these topics would require much more time and space than is available
here.

6
system that is based on the clock. By bringing these two revolutions together,
the thesis seeks to establish a connection between abstract conceptual
thought and concrete material practices, a connection which is exemplified by
the convergence between the transcendental philosophy of time and the
socio-history of time-keeping practices. Establishing this connection, however,
requires not only a reformulation of the classical conception of time -
produced, as we will see, through the creation of a split between, on the one
hand, the constant structure of formal time, and, on the other, empirical
change conceived of as history - but also a reinvention of the classical notion
of eternity. This latter is found in the work of Deleuze and Guattari who
substitute the transcendence of eternity with the immanent concept of Aeon,
or the absolute Outside, conceived of as the continuous variation of an
intensive temporality. It is by way of this concept of Aeon that we will find, in
what appears as the "history" of capitalist time, Aeonic events which are at
once entirely abstract and fully material. The abstract materiality of these
events, as we will see, transfigure the boundaries between inside and out, for
though they are in no way eternal they nevertheless occur on an exterior
plane outside the interior confines of time.
From the point of view of the philosophy of time, the revolutionary
break brought on by both Kant and capitalism rests on a transformation which
occurs in how time is mapped on to the distinction between constant and
13
variable. As we will see in the chapters which follow, both critique and clock-
time differentiate themselves from the classical tradition by insisting that it is
not time itself which varies, but rather that variation inheres in that which
exists in time. This distinction, between time and that which is in time, arises
from the fact that both Kant and capitalism separate temporality from the
changing patterns of astronomical cycles. Split off from the concrete rhythms
of the phenomenal world, time becomes an abstract grid, the a priori frame

13This distinction corresponds to a set of oppositions including quantity and quality, and
content and expression which will be discussed throughout this thesis. It is a contention of the
thesis that these oppositional couples -or stratified distinctions - are what constitutes the
interiority of time.

7
which structures both philosophical thought and the socio-economic and
cultural milieu. Time is no longer variable since it has become the very
presupposition of change. The stasis of eternity is thus replaced by the
constant fixture of formal time.
This transformation in the nature of time is, as will be made clear, of
fundamental importance to the whole of the Kantian system. For it is this
division, between time and what occurs in time, which ultimately
distinguishes the empirical (a posteriori) from the transcendental (a priori).
Kant first insists that time cannot be equated with alteration in the
'Transcendental Aesthetic', the very first section of the Critique. "Alteration is
an empirical phenomenon, " claims Kant, and is thus "only possible through
and in the representation of time. " (CPR, 76) This paves the way for what
Deleuze has called the 'first great Kantian reversal' (KCP, vii) which frees time
from its age old subordination to movement. Unhinged from its ties to change
and activity, time becomes an abstract condition of experience, the a priori
structure within which all change and movement takes place.
In capitalism this differentiation - between a constant temporality and
the variation of that which occurs in time - receives concrete expression
through the division between clocks and calendars. Though this split has
existed for thousands 14
of years, it is only within capitalism that the distinction
between these two types of time-keeping devices has become an abstract
distinction in the nature of time itself. Through the continuous innovation and
growing ubiquity of the clock, capitalism contrasts the qualitative time of the
calendar (with its differences in seasons, light, temperature etc) with the
precise, homogenous, standardized and purely quantitative ticking of the
clock. It is within the formers qualitative time that variation takes place.
Change in time is recorded by the calendar which has ceased to measure the
rhythms of everyday life and become instead a mechanism subordinated to
the developmental narrative of history. Though capitalism makes use of these

14 Sundials have been in use since the third millennium B.C. and evidence of water clocks (or
clepsydra) have been found as early as the sixth century B.C. (HH, 20-21)

8
variations in calendric time, 15it is also essential for the capitalist mode of
production that time be treated as an abstract quantity that does not vary. It is
this that is provided by the time of the clock.
By establishing the difference between the structure of a constant
temporality and the variable experiences of history, both Kant and capitalism
have created a fracture in the appearance of time. It is by way of this fracture,
(and its coinciding synthesis) that these two revolutions have managed to
overturn the classical tradition and inaugurate what may be called the modern
conception of time. 16
Yet, despite the fact that the critical understanding of temporality finds
its parallel in the culture and technics of capitalism there is an adamant
insistence, on both sides, that a fundamental distinction be maintained
between the philosophy of time and its socio-economic and cultural
manifestations. This distinction rests, as we will see, on the apparent
divergence between transcendental and historical production. The explicit aim

of The Critique of Pure Reason is to establish, through immanence of criteria,

the legitimate domain of reason and thereby dismiss the 'groundless
17
pretensions' of metaphysical speculation. From the point of view of critique,

15This is a crucial point that will be made clear in our discussion of the economist Boehm-
Bawerk found in chapter 2.

16Deleuze uses this phrase when describing the Kantian conception of time. Though I have
not included any strict definition of modernity, I have used the term to describe both the
Kantian philosophy of time and the time-keeping practices that developed with the clock. Used
In this manner it is meant to differentiate both Kant and clock time from, on the one hand, the
philosophy of time upheld in the classical tradition, and, on the other, from the contemporary
or'postmodem' time-keeping practices that have emerged within cyberspace.

"To quote Kant's famous passage: it is obviously the effect not of levity but of the matured
judgment of the age, which refuses to be put off with illusory knowledge. It is a call to reason
to undertake anew the most difficult of all its tasks, namely that of self-knowledge, and to
institute a tribunal which will assure to reason its lawful claims, and dismiss all groundless
pretensions, not by despotic decrees, but in accordance with its own eternal and unalterable
laws. This tribunal is no other than the critique of pure reason. ' (CPR, 9)

9
therefore, it is strictly illegitimate to hold that time is the product (or the image)
of eternity. In revolt against this classical doctrine, Kant replaces transcendent
creation with the immanent synthesis of the understanding. Operating in a
realm which is constitutive of experience these synthetic processes construct
time as an a priori epistemological representation. This representation, which
Kant calls the form of inner sense, is the universal and necessary
precondition for all empirical phenomena. Put simply then, time, for Kant, is a
mental construct within which empirical reality takes place. History, which
develops in time, cannot be equated with transcendental synthesis since the
very existence of history presupposes and is dependent upon the
transcendental construction of time.
Karl Marx, the most famous philosopher of capitalism, shares Kant's
insistence of the need to develop an account of production which does not
seek recourse in divine transcendence. 18However, unlike Kant, Marx
maintains that the ultimate realm of production lies not in the synthetic
processes of reason but rather in the dialectical forces of history. Thus, for
Marx, the a priori are themselves subject to change. Produced by the dynamic
forces of history, formal time is not an epistemological representation but a
contingent historical formation. Marx's historical materialism, 19(his
"Hegelianism turned on its head"), thus maintains that outside the
particularities of the capitalist time machine is a form of variable time with a
logic of its own. The exteriority of this temporality which is not exhaustively
-
structured by any specific mode of production - is ultimately responsible for
creating the time of capitalism (conceived of as both the duration of the
capitalist mode of production and the structure of time prevailing within it).

18This is obvious from the famous Marxist

contention that religion is the opiate of the people.

19*Accordingto Engels' 1892 introductionto Socialism:Utopianand Scientific,historical

materialism designate[s] that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and
the great moving power of all important historical events in the economic development of
society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division
of society into distinct classes, and in the struggle of these classes against one another. "
(DMT, 234)

10
Thus, both critical thought which refuses to acknowledge its socio-
economic surroundings, and Marxism which denies the possibility of
transcendental synthesis, insist that - despite their obvious connections the
-
philosophical and socio-technical revolution of time be kept separate and
opposed. This opposition, as we have seen, ultimately rests on the fact that
the privilege given by transcendental production to the ahistoricity of a
constant time comes into conflict with the primacy that historical materialism
grants to the variations of a temporality governed by the logic of events. With
this conflict, the path to exteriority - on both sides - is lost, as each revolution
seeks to contain the other by presenting itself as a higher and more primary
inside. Neither Kantian thought, nor the Marxist analyses of capitalism, then,
will accept that the exterior realm productive of time is constituted by the
eternal transcendence of God. Yet; they nevertheless come into conflict over
what should substitute for eternal creation in the modern conception of time.
Transcendental critique, the critique of political economy and the secular time

of capitalist societies thus converge in their understanding of time but diverge

in their accounts of what lies outside it as the ultimate force of production.
The modem revolution in the nature of time is thus only partially complete.
For though the classical conception of time has been overturned, the notion

of eternity - the traditional zone exterior to time - has been left basically
unchanged (if only by being ignored).

Deleuze and Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia presents itself as

a revolution in transcendental thought which seeks to replace Kantian
idealism with a type of Spinozistic materialism. 20This involves, as we will

20Deleuze and Guattari's involvement

with Spinozisic philosophy is hard to overestimate.
Spinoza's nonreductive immanent, cosmic and ethical materialism could be said to be the
single most important influence in their work. Though the philosophy of Spinoza will be
touched upon in chapter 3, to explore it in detail is beyond the scope of this thesis. To fully
engage with this topic see Deleuze's two books on Spinoza (both listed in the bibliography)
and the numerous references to Spinoza found in A Thousand Plateaus.

11
see, a critique of the Kantian system itself. For according to Deleuze and
Guattari, the Kantian notion that transcendental production occurs under the

unity of the subject and is therefore epistemological in nature, is strictly

illegitimate from the viewpoint of critique. Refusing to see a priori synthesis as
an idealist representation, they reconstruct transcendental philosophy on the
basis of an immanent materialism. This combines the critical method with a
Spinozistic vision of a world laid out on a single plane (substance or
Nature). 21Transcendental synthesis, thus cease to function as the interior
operations of reason and become instead machinic22diagrams for the
intensive multiplicities that compose and populate an exterior body, which
Deleuze and Guattari call the plane of consistency, planomenon, or body
without organs.
Whereas Kant's Copernican revolution involved a reformulation of the
nature of time, so Capitalism and Schizophrenia's materialism involves a
revolution in the nature of eternity. This requires, as we will see, that the
opposition between an interiorized notion of time, associated with change,
multiplicity and becoming, and the conception of the outside as a divine,
transcendent and unified eternity, be overturned. Transcendental materialism
thus substitutes the classical disjunction between time and eternity with the
difference between two planes of composition which function machinically to
produce the distinction between extensive and intensive time. The former of
these - named Chronos - is attributed to the plane of organization and
development, while the latter belongs to the immanent plane of consistency
and is given the name of Aeon. With the concept of Aeon, Deleuze and

21To quote from Deleuze: "Everyone knows the first principle of Spinoza: one substance for all
the attributes. But we also know the third, fourth or fifth principle: one Nature for all bodies,
one Nature for all individuals, a Nature that is itself an individual varying in an infinite number
of ways. What is involved is no longer the affirmation of a single substance, but rather the
laying out of a common plane of immanence on which all bodies, all minds and all individuals
are situated. " (SPP, 122)

12
Guattari bring to philosophy a notion of eternity which is not based on the
wholeness and unity of a transcendent beyond but on the flat multiplicity of an
immanent outside.
In the biblical tradition the eternal cuts into time through singular
events that are explosive and highly dramatic in nature. At the limit, it appears
as genesis and apocalypse, the beginning and end of creation. Beyond these
points, the eternal is encountered only after death, on judgment day, where it
carries the threat or promise of damnation and salvation, or when it crashes
into history interrupting the linear order of time through miracles and divine
revelation.
We will see that - though no less intense - the connection between
Aeon and Chronos is much more quiet and subtle. For Aeon does not
manifest itself in time. Though it is itself composed of singular events - which
can be precisely dated and named - these events compose a virtual plane of
intensity that positively avoids climactic actualization. Deleuze and Guattari

call these Aeonic occurrences plateaus and show how they constitute an
exteriority that haunts the successive order of extensive temporality.
The final chapter of the thesis takes the pervasive sense of anticlimax
that accompanied the dawn of the third millennium as indexing one such
event and explores Y2K -a sign that operates as both a date and a name - as
a singular Aeonic occurrence. While this may first appear farfetched, we will
see that, though it has now been dismissed as irrelevant, Y2K is crucial to the
transcendental philosophy of time. This is primarily due to the fact that, as a
singularity, it shares all the characteristic features of Aeon including: an
effective virtuality, a nonsignifying semiotic, a disruption - or positive
avoidance - of extensive succession and an immanent machinic abstraction.
Cutting across the stratified segmentation of Chronos, Y2K thus

22The term machine will be used throughout the thesis as it is crucial to the work of Deleuze
and Guattari. It will be explained in more detail in chapter 3. Briefly, though, Deleuze and
Guattari use the term machine, not to signify a technical apparatus, but rather to designate the
immanent circuits of production that constitute any flat assemblage (regardless of its particular
form or substance)..

13
functions as a mutation (or accident) both in the structure of formal time and
in the empirical development of history. It collapses the distinction between
time's formal expression and the content which happen to fill it, dissolving the
rigid opposition between technics and culture, constant and variable and
temporality and change. In this way Y2K constitutes an event - not in time but
of time - that allows the capitalist production of temporality to escape from
the interiority of history and thus exemplifies the convergence between the
material practices of time-keeping systems and processes of abstraction
which are conventionally located in the philosophy of time.

14
Chapter 1: Philosophy's Copernican Revolution.

The history of Immanuel Kant's life is difficult to portray, for he had

neither life nor history ... I do not believe that the great clock of the cathedral
performed in a more passionless and methodical manner its daily routine than
did its townsman, Immanuel Kant. Rising in the morning, coffee drinking,
writing, reading lectures, dining, walking, everything had its appointed time,
and the neighbours knew that it was exactly half-past three-o-clock when
Immanuel Kant stepped forth from his house in his grey, tight fitting coat, with
his Spanish cane in his hand, and betook himself to the little linden avenue
called after him to this day the `Philosophers walk. "... What a strange contrast
did this man's outward life present to his destructive, world annihilating
thought! In sooth, had the citizens of Konigsberg had the least presentiment
of the full significance of his ideas, they would have felt a far more awful
dread at the presence of this man than at the sight of the executioner, who
can but kill the body. But the worthy folks saw in him nothing more than a
Professor of Philosophy, and as he passed in his customary hour, they
greeted him in a friendly manner and set their watches by him.
Heinrich Heine. Religion and Philosophy in Germany

p. 108-9

49. Ko. Revolution.

[Molting]
Fire in the water. The image of REVOLUTION. Thus the superior man
sets the calendar in order and makes the seasons clear.
I Ching: The Book of Changes, p. 190

1.0 Introduction: The Discovery of Transcendental Time

In 1781 Immanuel Kant published the first edition of the Critique of

Pure Reason. The history of philosophy registers the date as the moment of

Kant's "Copernican revolution, " a moment in which Kant is said to have

accomplished in the realm of thought what Copernicus had accomplished,

over two centuries earlier, in the realm of astronomy. Traditionally, the story of

Kant's revolution emphasizes epistemology and concentrates on the role of

15
the human intellect in constituting the external world. It is here, we are told,

that one should locate the dramatic shift that is at the core of Kantian

'
philosophy. What this chapter will argue, however, is that this emphasis, on

the role of the intellect, mistakes what is truly revolutionary in critical thought.

The argument, which draws on Deleuze's reading of Kant,2 consists of two

main points. First, that the transformation of the human subject is merely a

consequence of Kant's more fundamental innovation, the discovery of the

realm of the transcendental, and second, that to appreciate the truly

revolutionary nature of this discovery we must turn our attention away from

the enlightened subject of reason and focus instead on the occulted nature of

time.

The most common approach to Kant is to read him as an

epistemologist, a philosopher who is predominantly concerned with how

knowledge can be justified. "ccording to this account The Critique of Pure

Reason centers around the question: "How are a priori synthetic judgements

1 In the following section this position will be illustrated through the writings of Heinrich
Heine. Though Heine poetic and lyrical language is unique amongst the
commentators on Kant, his views are not at all unconventional. In the '"Past Masters"
text on Kant, for example, Roger Scruton, writes that the essence of the Copernican
revolution is that 'self consciousness requires that the world must appear to conform
to the categories' (Scruton, Roger. Kant. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, p.
28). The Encyclopedia of Philosophy concurs that this epistemological view is the key
to understanding Kantian thought. 'Kant's principle task in the Critique of Pure
Reason was to determine the cognitive powers of reason, to find out what it could and
could not achieve in the way of knowledge" ("Kant, Immanuel" in the Encyclopedia of
Philosophy Volume 3. Edited by Paul Edwards. New York: Macmillan Publishing,
1967, p.305)

2 This is comprised both of Deleuze's book on Kant and a series of lectures on Kant
that have been reprinted on the Internet (see bibliography).

16
possible? " (CPR, 59) To answer this question Kant must begin by defining

what he means by the synthetic a priori.

In the order of time, " writes Kant in the preface to the first Critique,

"we have no knowledge antecedent to experience, and with experience all

our knowledge begins. But though all our knowledge begins with experience it

does not follow that it all arises out of experience. " (CPR, 41) With this

distinction - between knowledge that is based in experience and knowledge

that is independent of it - Kant separates the a priori from the a posteriori.

This difference is absolute and rigorously determined. Empirical knowledge

which has its sources a posteriori, that is, in experience" (CPR-43) gives rise

to judgments which are particular and contingent (the sun rose today) while a

priori knowledge, on the other hand, gives rise to judgments which are

universal and necessary (today succeeded yesterday). Since knowledge

gained from experience is always particular and contingent it can never be the

basis for judgments which are universal and necessary. Thus, Kant writes,

"necessity and strict universality are the sure criteria of a priori knowledge. "

(CPR, 44) This difference between the a priori and the a posteriori is the first

basic division which allows Kant to demarcate the singular zone of knowledge

that he is concerned with in the first Critique.

Yet this distinction, between knowledge that is based in experience

and knowledge that is independent of it, is not in itself sufficient for

understanding the central problematic of Kantian thought. In order to discover

the transcendental, yet another distinction was required. The two sides of the

17
table had to be split in half. To accomplish this, Kant drew another line on a

different axes, cutting across both the a priori and the a posteriori. 3 This line

corresponds to the difference between knowledge that is analytic and

knowledge that is synthetic.

Analytic a priori cover logical truths. By drawing out "something that is

(covertly) contained within a concept" (CPR, 48) they analyze, elucidate, or

explicate what is already implicitly known. Kant's example is as follows: "If I

say, for instance 'All bodies are extended' this is an analytic judgment. For

do not require to go beyond the concept which I connect with 'body' in order

to find extension as bound up with it. " (CPR, 48)

Analytic knowledge is restricted to the domain of the a priori. It does

not arise empirically. For "judgments of experience, " writes Kant, "are one

and all synthetic" (CPR, 49) By the term 'synthetic' Kant is referring to

knowledgethat 'goes beyondthe concept'. To make the judgment 'this body

is heavy', for example, is to connect concepts 'synthetically'. For since not all

bodies are heavy, one cannot arrive at the concept heavy from an analyses of

the concept 'body'. 4

Transcendental philosophy concerns itself with the final box in the

table - the one that contains the 'synthetic a priori". The puzzle which it sets

for itself is how synthetic knowledge can be produced independently of

3 See Table 1 in the appendix.

4 On page 49 of the first critique Kant uses this example to explain synthetic
judgements which are made from experience.

18
experience. The prime examples of synthetic a priori knowledge are found

within the realm of mathematics. As the commentator Alfredo Ferrarin writes,

"If what the Critique shows is the possibility of synthetic a priori judgements, it

is mathematics that takes advantage of this ampliative principle with greatest

confidence and success. " (KECI, 147) 7+5' 12, to stick with the example

that is repeated throughout the secondary literature on Kant,5 is a synthetic a

priori judgment. It is a priori since it, like all mathematical propositions, is both

universal and necessary. It is synthetic since neither the number 7 nor the

number 5 has contained within it the number 12. "The concept of 12, " writes

Kant, "is by no means already thought in merely thinking the union of 7 and 5;

and I may analyze my concept of such a possible sum as long as I please,

still I shall never find the 12 in it." (CPR, 53)

Though philosophers had long been concerned with such a priori truths

as are found in mathematics it was Kant who first recognized them as being
6
synthetic. Thus transcendental philosophy, even when confined to

epistemology, is far from being a mere exercise in the catalogue of

knowledge. For in questioning the tendency to divide everything between the

a priori analytic judgment and the a posteriori synthetic judgment Kant

"exposed the insufficiency of certain philosophical categories and conceptual

5 Kant uses this example himself both in the first critique and in the Prolegomena to
Future Metaphysics.

6 As Deleuze
writes, 'analytic a priori judgment that meant something, synthetic a
posteriori judgment that meant something, but synthetic a priori judgment, that's truly
a monster. ' (KST, 9)

19
frames. "(KST, 9) Focusing his attention on the synthetic a priori he exploded

old distinctions and in so doing discovered a powerful new machine.

According to Kant, synthesis is "a blind but indispensable function of

the soul. " Though "we are scarcely ever conscious" of its power, without it,

he insists, "we should have no knowledge whatsoever. " (CPR 112) In

focusing on the connections and constructions of this hidden realm, the

Critique of Pure Reason develops a 'synthesized way of handling

philosophy'' which is not based on analyses of that which is already given

but on an "extension of our previously possessed concepts. " (CPR, 47) It is,

writes Kant "a genuinely new addition to all previous knowledge. " (CPR, 51)

It is this 'new addition' that accounts for the shift in the subject's

position which occurs in Kantian thought. What is important to recognize here,

is that this shift is a result, a corollary, of the more fundamental discovery of

this abstract and productive realm of knowledge. Before Kant, the subject was

found buried, submerged underground, chained in the darkness of Plato's

cave. According to this traditional vision, the subject was trapped in the body,

forced to access the world through the unreliability of the perceptual

apparatus. An unfortunate fool, blinded by ignorance, duped into mistaking

shadows for reality, the subject could not help but deform the world, mutating

it into the falsity of illusion. Philosophy's striving consisted in its promise to

provide the escape route. Operating with a truth that depended on a

6 This phrase comes from a question raised by Deleuze in an introductory lecture on

Kant. "Why, ' Deleuze asks, "wouldn't there also be a synthesized or electronic way of

20
"harmony between the subject and the world, " (KST, 5) philosophy struggled

to cut the chains, to correct the inherent deformity, to free the prisoner from

the world of shadows and illusions.

Through his discovery of the transcendental, Kant replaces harmony

with circuitry. The subject, no longer deceived and defective, becomes

productive and constitutive. Having given up the impossible attempt at

conforming to the objects of the world, "the rational being discovers he has

new power. " (KCP, 14) After Kant the objects of the world must conform to

us. "The first thing the Copernican Revolution teaches us, " writes Deleuze,

"is that it is we who are giving the orders. " (KCP, 14) The prisoner has

become a legislator.

As previously noted, it is this shift in the subject's position which is

traditionally taken to be at the core of Kant's revolutionary thought. In a

dramatic passage,the poet Heinrich Heine,describesthis, philosophy's

Copemican revolution, as follows:

Formerly, when men conceived the world as standing still, and the sun
as revolving round it, astronomical calculations failed to agree
accurately. But when Copernicus made the sun stand still and the
earth revolve round it, behold! Everything accorded admirably. So
formerly reason, like the sun moved round the universe of phenomena
and sought to throw light upon it. But Kant, bade reason, the sun stand
still, and the universe of phenomena now turns round, and is
illuminated the moment it comes within the region of the intellectual
orb. (RPG, 114)

Yet, while Heine has capturedthe drama of Kant's discovery,his

handling philosophy. ' (SLK, 1)

21
account reveals a certain problem. For if the stress is on human reason,

Kant's allusions to Copernicus are somewhat puzzling. Before Copernicus,

Heine reminds us, the earth stood as the central pivot or axis around which

everything else revolved. Modem astronomy, which is based on the

Copernican system, removed the earth from this central position, making it

equal to any other planet. The Copernican revolution thus derailed us from

our privileged status in relation to phenomena. Kant, on the other hand, is

said to have done the exact opposite. Whereas Copernicus displaced us from

the center of the universe, Kant put us there. Why, then, does Kant speak of

his philosophy as Copernican? For it would seem that the emphasis on the

human intellect is not a sufficient explanation. Perhaps, if we look more

closely, we might find some other reason for this seemingly confused

analogy.

In the early years of the 16th century, Nicolaus Copernicus, a polish

astronomer, attained immortal fame by overthrowing the Ptolemaic universe

of the ancient world. Frustrated with the impossibility of achieving accurate

measurements of astronomical movements, Copernicus began to question

Ptolemy's geocentric vision. Instead of assuming that the stars revolved

around a still earth, Copernicus thought, to quote Kant, "whether he might

have better success if he made the spectator to revolve and the stars to

remain at rest. " (CPR, 23) Copernicus posited a heliocentric world in which

the stars no longer measured time. He explained the day by the earth's

rotation on its own axes and the year by its annual cycle around the sun. In

22
the Copernican system, then, it is the movement of the earth which marks out

the temporality of the astronomical calendar.

The Critique of Pure Reason, writes Kant, proceeds "precisely on the

lines of Copernicus' primary hypothesis. " (CPR, 23) Inspired by the

astronomers' method, Kant attempted an analogous experiment in

philosophy. Frustrated by the inherent instability of metaphysics, critical

thought seeks to attain more solid foundations by focusing not on the

authority of experience but on the conditions which make experience

possible.

It is well known that Copernicus' discovery met with fierce resistance,

both from natural philosophy and from the church. For these two institutions

were allied in their commitment to maintaining the authority of Aristotle, who

had insisted that the earth stood still. This resistance was heightened by the

fact that despite Copernicus' findings the world still appeared to conform to

Ptolemy's ancient vision. Copernicus was thus responsible for a strange and

mysterious revolution in which nothing seemed to change but through which

everything has been transformed. It is in this way, as we will see, that Kant is

a true Copernican. For the Copernican revolution, whether in astronomy or

philosophy, changes nothing at the level of experience. Our perceptions and

even the way we talk about those perceptions have not altered. Phenomena

remain the same. The sun still appears to revolve. The earth still appears to

stand still. External bodies still appear to be in motion. We still say that the

sun rises and sets. The difference is, and this is the revolution, that now

23
everybody knows it is only a manner of speaking.

In a series of lectures on the Critique of Pure Reason, Gilles Deleuze

maps out a singular and original account of Kant's Copernican revolution

which is based neither on epistemology nor on a change in the position of the

intellect but on a shift in the nature of appearance itself.

According to Deleuze, the classical tradition structured the world

around a basic opposition. "The whole of classical philosophy from Plato

onwards, " he writes, "seemed to develop itself within the, frame of a duality

between sensible appearances and intelligible essences. " (KST, 4) Thus,

previous to Kant the world was divided between, on the one hand, the

degraded realm of sensation which was based on bodily knowledge and

experience, and on the other hand, the realm of ideas, pure forms or

essences which were transcendent and therefore untainted by the blemishes

of sensation.

For Plato a priori knowledge was the proof of transcendence. His

dialogues insist that the very fact that there is knowledge independent of

experience shows that reason remembers a time when it was unfettered by

the body's cage and was free to gaze upon the pure essence of things. 8 The

philosophical distinction between a posteriori and a priori knowledge was

' One of the most famous examples of the Platonic view of the a priori occurs in the
Meno where Socrates infers the transcendence of the Forms through a slave's
knowledge of geometry. See Plato, 'Meno' in Plato-The Collected Dialogues. edited
by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1961 (especially pages 363-374).

24
thus, for Plato, evidence of the fact that our capture in the illusory realm of

phenomena could be opposed to an exteriority characterized by the

transcendent truth of the idea.

The Critique of Pure Reason overturns the classical tradition by

developing a philosophy that is no longer grounded in this basic opposition.

"For the disjunctive couple appearance/essence, " writes Deleuze, "Kant will

substitute the conjunctive couple what appears/conditions of appearance.

Everything is new in this. " (KST 4)

With Kant, then, phenomena cease to be trapped by the ancient

duality. "It's like a bolt of lightening" (KST, 4) The world of appearances

vanish. What is left instead, according to Deleuze, is the apparition. "The

is
apparition, what appears in so far as it appears. Full stop. I don't ask

myself if there is something behind, I don't ask myself if it is false or not false.

The apparition is not at all captured in the oppositional couple, in the binary

distinction where we find a PPearances distinct from essences. " (KST, 4).

No longer bound by the fundamental distinction of classical thought,

Kant transforms the meaning and implications of a priori knowledge. "In the

case of the a priori, " writes Deleuze, "Kant "borrows a word but he

completely renews its sense. " (KST, 1) For unlike Plato, in Kant the a priori,

as we will see, is associated with the immanence of abstraction and not the

transcendence of the eternal forms. To quote from Deleuze: "Kant is the one

25
who discovers the prodigious domain of the transcendental. He is the

analogue of the great explorer - not of another world, but of the upper and

lower reaches of this one. " (DR, 135) In opposition to the transcendent ideas

and logic of the analytic a priori, the synthetic a priori constitute a continuous

process of production that is both exterior and immanent to our experience of

the world. The basic question of transcendental philosophy "how are a priori

synthetic judgments possible? " can thus be restated as follows: given a

certain experience what are the conditions that went in to producing it?

Kant's answer, as we will see, shows that that which is exterior - or

independent - of experience is not a transcendent world above us but rather

immanent outside. It is this which he calls the transcendental. 9

an

As was noted in the introduction, the classical disjunction between

essence and appearance corresponds to the distinction in the philosophy of

time between, on the one hand, the phenomena of temporality and change,

and, on the other, the essence of eternity. Overturning this classical duality

between essence and appearance requires not only a transformation in way

we approach phenomena but also a fundamental reinvention in the

philosophy of time. As we will see in the chapter which follows, the discovery

of the domain of the transcendental ultimately rests on this reinvention - or

revolution - in the nature of time. Deleuze, recognizing this, writes in an

introduction to Kant that "all the creations and novelties that Kantianism will

9 According to Deleuze, `The whole Kantian notion of the transcendental is created in

order to refute the classical notion of the transcendent. The transcendental is above
all not the transcendent' (SLK, 7)

26
bring to philosophy turn on a certain problem of time and an entirely new

conception of time. (KST, 1) It is to this new conception of time which this

chapter now turns.

27
1.1 Transcendental Aesthetic: Time as the Form of Inner Sense.

Until now the task we have given ourselves was to represent space, the
moment has come to think time.
Gilles Deleuze, Kant: Synthesis and Time, p. 1

With its central divisions, parts, sections, chapters, books, sections of

chapters, and chapters of books, the structure of the Critique of Pure Reason

seems more like the work of a ramshackle artificial intelligence than that of a

human being. ' The immense scale and complexity of Kant's 'thinking

machine' is revealed with one glance at the table of contents.

The bulk of the text is divided into two main parts, the 'Transcendental

Aesthetic' and the 'Transcendental Logic'. This split corresponds to the

central distinction in Kantian thought which divides the intuition from the

understanding. Intuition deals with the realm of sensation. Receptive and

immediate, it is the form in which the diversity of sense material is presented

to the mind. Understanding, on the other hand, is defined as the

'spontaneous production of concepts'. (CPR, 92) An active mediation, rather

than a receptive and immediate presentation, it serves to represent the

perceptions that are given to us in intuition in accordance with the categories

' De Quincy's text 'The Last Days of Immanuel Kant' gives further evidence of this
seemingly preposterous claim. Besides the meticulous order of his daily schedule,
Kant never perspired, evoked rigorous numerological arrangements for the guests at
his dinner table, and, at his deathbed, when all human faculties had left him, was still
able to speak at length on any problem in history, philosophy or mathematics. See: De
Quincy, Thomas. 'The Last Days of Immanuel Kant! in The Collected Writings of

28
of reason. Time appears first in the former category. It is defined in the

opening section of the Critique of Pure Reason as a 'pure intuition, ' or the

'form of inner sense'. (CPR, 77)

The Transcendental Aesthetic, "the science of a priori sensibility"

(CPR, 66) begins with a strict process of elimination. It is concerned only with

what is left after both the concepts of the understanding and the matter of

sensibility have been stripped away. What remains are what Kant calls the

'pure intuitions, or 'the form of appearances. ' These are defined as the

underlying conditions that constitute our perception of the world. The

transcendental media for the reception of sensible content, they constitute the

structure and form which the apparition must take. For Kant there are only

two such forms, space and time.

Kant defines space as "the form of outer sense". It is "the property of

our mind" through which "we represent to ourselves objects which are

outside us. " (CPR, 67) Thus, for Kant, space is the form in which the external

world is presented to the senses. That is to say, everything that we sense as

external to us we necessarily perceive of as being in space. To quote from

the first Critique:

In order that certain sensations be referred to something outside

me (that is, to something in another region of space from that in
which I find myself), and similarly in order that I may be able to
represent them as outside and alongside one another, and

Thomas De Quincy Vol. IV. London: A&C Black, 1897.

29
accordingly as not only different but as in different places, the
representation of space must be presupposed. (CPR 68)

Time, on the other hand, is defined as "the form of inner sense, that is

of the intuition of ourselves and of our inner state. " (CPR, 77). In the

'Transcendental Aesthetic, ' then, time provides the underlying structure of all

our states of mind. It is what conditions the very experience of thought,

including our awareness of outer perceptions and the consciousness we have

of ourselves. As Kant writes, "everything which belongs to inner

determinations is represented in relation to time. " (CPR, 68)

In the following section we will see that in making time the form of inner

sense Kant revolutionizes the classical philosophy of time both by liberating it

from its dependence on change and by releasing it from an implicit spatial

bias.

According to Deleuze, the first great Kantian reversal in the Critique of

Pure Reason was to free time from its subordination to movement Taking

Hamlet's phrase the 'time is out of joint' and applying it to Kant, 2 Deleuze

shows how in taking time off its hinges, Kant develops a "sort of modern

consciousness of time. " (KST, 1) In this 'modern consciousness' time is

separated from the external world of space and thus undergoes a sort of

2 In his text 'On four poetic formulas that might summarize the Kantian philosophy"
(found in both Kant's Critical Philosophy and in Essays Critical and Clinical) Deleuze
uses this Shakespearean quote -'the time is out of joint' - to explore Kantian thought.
To quote Deleuze: 'Hamlet is the first hero who truly needed time to act, whereas
earlier heroes were subject to time as the consequence of an original movement
(Aeschylus) or an aberrant action (Sophocles). The Critique of Pure Reason is the
book of Hamlet, the prince of the north. (ECC, 28)

30
topological twist. What was once located in the external world is folded in.3

Time, detached from the movement of that which is outside us becomes the

structuring principle which conditions the inside. Thus, as we will see, in

making time the form of inner sense Kant not only redefines the classical

conception of time, he also transforms the traditional understanding of

interiority and its relation to the outside.

In Plato's dichotomized world, time exists on only one side of the

mirror. Essences, which are eternal and real, exist in a transcendent realm

outside time. Time, on the other hand, belongs to the world of appearances,

which, according to Plato, is governed by a continuous process of change

and movement. For Plato, then, it is change and movement that are the

defining features of time.

In his dialogue Timeaus, Plato describes time as the "image of

eternity" (T, 1167). He perceives this image in the movement of the stars and

thus equates the production of time with the 'perfect and immutable' cycles

within which the planets revolve. "Such was the mind and thought of God in

the creation of time. The sun and the moon and five other stars which have

the name of planets were created by him in order to distinguish and preserve

the numbers of time. " (T, 1167). In the 'curved time' of a 'circular universe

Plato's God has bent the skies into an arc. "A Demiurge which makes

3 To quote Kant: "Time is not something which exists of itself, or which inheres in
things as an objective determination, and it does not, therefore, remain when
abstraction is made of all subjective conditions of its intuition.... Time is nothing but the
subjective condition under which alone intuition can take place in us. "(CPR, 76)

31
circles, " (SLK, 2) as Deleuze puts it, has created a world whose map is

observed in the heavenly spheres. Thus, for Plato, 'the name' and 'the

number' of time can be found in the changes and motion that take place in

the sky.

Kant's break with Plato is absolute. For, according to the first Critique,

movement is empirical, which is to say it exists at the level of experience.

Transcendental philosophy, he writes, "cannot count the concept of alteration

among its a priori data. " (CPR, 75) For Kant the revolutions of the stars, the

swing of a pendulum, the sand in an hourglass all occur in time and as such

fall outside the problematic of critique. Plato's perfect image can not be time,

for, "time itself does not alter but only something which is in time. " (CPR, 82)

According to Kant, time explains the possibility of movement, but movement

is not time. "The concept of alteration and with it the concept of motion, as

alteration of place, he writes, " "is possible only through and in the

representation of time. " (CPR, 75)

Thus, Kant liberates the form of time from the endless cycle of the

Platonic world. Time is no longer contained within the circular revolutions of

the planets. Instead, it is the relation of time to motion itself that revolves. In

Kant, writes Deleuze, "time is no longer related to the movement which it

measures, but movement is related to the time which conditions it. " The

Critique of Pure Reason conceives of a `straight line" of time that is cut off

32
from its subordination to all that exists in time. 4 To quote from Deleuze:

Time is no longer coiled up in such a way that it is subordinated to

the measure of something other than itself, such as, for example,
astronomical movement. Everything happens as if, having been
coiled up so as to measure the passage of celestial bodies, time
unrolls itself like a sort of serpent, it shakes off all subordination to a
movement or a nature, it becomes time in itself for itself, it becomes
pure and empty time. It measures nothing anymore. Time has
taken on its own excessiveness. It is out of its joints, which is to say
its subordination to nature; its now nature which is subordinated to
it. (KST, 12)

Since time is already presupposed in motion, Kant, 'the great

explorer', must begin to search elsewhere. Looking behind objects to

discover the conditions of their production, Kant finds that time is "not an

empirical concept that has been derived from any experience. " (CPR, 74) In

the abstract realm of the transcendental, Kant discovers a form of time that is

independent of the experience of motion.

It would first appear that Kant finds a predecessorin Aristotle who

modifies the Platonic vision, by making a distinction between motion and time.

Though Aristotle connects time to the cycles of astronomical change he does

not equate it with them. His argument rests on two points. First, that while

4 It is interesting to note that Foucault, when writing of Deleuze, evokes the 'straightening' of
time that is initially produced by the first Critique. The circle must be abandoned as a faulty
principle of return; we must abandon our tendency to organize everything into a sphere. All
things return on the straight and narrow by way of a straight and labyrinth line" (TP, 166) This
notion of the straight labyrinth of time is used by Deleuze to designate the transcendental form
of time. In the preface to Kant's Critical Philosophy, he writes as follows: We move from one
labyrinth to another. The labyrinth is no longer a circle, or a spiral which would translate its
complications, but a thread, a straight line, all the more mysterious for being simple,
inexorable as Borges says, 'the labyrinth which is composed of a single straight line, and
which is indivisible, incessant. ' (KCP, vii) Deleuze also uses the notion of a straight labyrinth to
describe the time of Aeon (a concept that will be discussed in detail in chapter 3).

33
time exists everywhere, movement only occurs in particular things. Second,

that while things that move can be either fast or slow, time itself does not

shift in speed. "It is evident, then, " writes Aristotle, "that time is neither

movement nor independent of movement. " (P, 371)

In order to discover the precise relation between motion and time,

Aristotle turns to number. To quote his famous formula "time is just this - the

number of motion. " (P, 372) The circular revolutions, the heavenly spheres

are still linked to time but the two are no longer directly equivalent. "Time, is

only movement, ' writes Aristotle "in so far as it admits of enumeration. " (P,

372) Change must be numbered for it to be time.

"Time, then, " for Aristotle, "is a kind of number. " (P, 372) The kind of

number that it is, rests on a distinction made in the Physics, between the

"number with which we count", and "the number of things which are

counted" (P, 373). To quote from the Physics: "Number, is used in two ways -

both of what is counted or countable and also of that which we count. Time,

then, is what is counted, not that with which we count: these are different

kinds of thing. (P, 372)

Thus, Aristotle, like Kant, seeks to discover time by shifting focus away

from the concreteness of astronomy. However, as we will see, the abstraction

he makes in the direction of number is ultimately subordinated to empirical

movement. For according to Aristotle the numbers of time are determined as

"the measure of a quantity of change. " (P, 375)

34
For Kant, as for Aristotle, time is conceived as being fundamentally

numeric. Kant recognizes that any representation cannot help but serve to

spatialize time. Since time 'yields no shape' (CPR, 77) it cannot be

represented. Still, he focuses on a single spatial image that will function as an

analogy for his new form of time. For Kant, the closest we get to time in

space, is the image of the real number line. 5 "We represent the time

sequence, he writes, by a line progressing to infinity, in which the manifold

constitutes a series of one dimension only; and we reason from the properties

of this line to all the properties of time. 6 (CPR 77)

Yet, despite the fact that both Kant and Aristotle link time to number,

Kant breaks with Aristotle no less than with Plato. For in freeing time from its

subordination to movement, Kant had to uncouple number from

measurement. In the domain of the transcendental, the numerical processes

of time are unhinged from the concreteness of change. With Kant the number

of time thus breaks from Aristotle's classical formula. Ceasing to function as

5 Commentator Alfredo Ferrarin makes much of this, arguing that in Kant numbering
and arithmetic are practically synonymous with the generation of time.

6 This sentence continues as follows: with one exception that while the parts the
of
line are simultaneous the parts of time are always successive' (CPR, 77) Yet, it is
important to note, that while the parts of time are successive, time itself, for Kant, is
not. Deleuze is insistent on this point. "Time, ' he writes, Is no longer defined by
succession because succession concerns only things and movements which are in
time. If time itself were succession, it would need to succeed in another time, and on
to infinity. Things succeed each other in various times, but they are also simultaneous
in the same time, and they remain in an indefinite time. It is no longer a question of
defining time by succession, nor space by simultaneity, nor permanence by eternity.
Permanence, succession and simultaneity are modes and relationships of time. '
(KCP, vii-iii)

35
'the quantity of motion', the 'things that are counted' become 'that with

which we count'.

It is easier to understand what is at stake in this reversal if we map

Aristotle's distinction in the philosophy of number on to the difference

between cardinal and ordinal numbers. Cardinal numbers [one, two, three... ]

are used to express amount or quantity. Ordinal numbers, on the other hand,

are used to express position [first, second, third]. Bound to keep track of that

which it belongs to, the cardinal number is tied down, attached to what is in

time. "Cardinal, writes Deleuze, "comes from cardo; cardo is precisely the

hinge, the hinge around which the sphere of celestial bodies turns and which

makes them pass time and again through the so-called cardinal points. "

(KST, 12) Ordinal numbers, on the other hand, are indifferent to the space of

'
measurement. What counts, for them, is order not measure. In unchaining

time from its bonds to what is in time, Kant silmutaneously freed number from

its subordination to measurement. As Deleuze writes, in Kant's 'new

definition of time' number "ceases to be cardinal and becomes ordinal, a

pure order of time. " (DR, 88)

In the end therefore, despite the differences between Plato's and

Aristotle's conceptions of time, from the perspective of transcendental

7A familiar
example of ordinal numbering is that used by the library cataloguing
system. It is clear, in this case, that what is important is the order of the books and not
the amount of space between them.

36
philosophy, they are basically alike. For both belong to "a certain tradition of

antiquity, in which time is fundamentally subordinated to something which

happens in it, and this something can be determined as being change. " (SLK,

1) By separating time from the heavenly spheres and making number

independent of motion, Kant thus splits with an entire tradition. Operating

with the conjunction 'what appears/conditions of appearance, ' Kant creates

(or discovers) a disjunction between the form of time itself and the changes

which occur in time.

This distinction between the abstract form of time and the changes

which occur within it requires that time be released from its spatial

determinations. In the Critique of Pure Reason, time is no longer located in

the objects of the world or in their relations, but is situated instead in an

abstract realm that is independent from our perceptions of space. The

transcendental form of time, as we have seen, is an empty form, conceived of

as nothing but a pure ordinal sequence. Since time has no spatial dimension,

even the number line is but an analogy.

In the Transcendental Aesthetic, space, as we have seen, captures the

whole of exteriority inside itself. Thus in order to separate time from space,

time which was once located in the external world, must be folded in. For,

according to the first Critique, the only thing that is not in space is the inner

determinations of our mind. In making time the 'form of inner sense' Kant

thus locates time in the singular domain which exists outside the

representation of space.

37
This process of interiorization gives time a certain dominance over

space. For according to Kant everything that we represent as in space must

also be processed by time, precisely insofar as it is experienced (and thus

belongs to our inner states). "Appearances", writes Kant, "may, one and all,

vanish; but time (as the universal condition of their possibility) cannot itself be

removed. " (CPR, 75) Thus, for Kant, while everything that exists is in time,

time is the one thing that does not exist in space, since everything in space

'already' presupposes time. 8 To quote from the first Critique:

Time is the formal a priori condition of all appearances whatsoever.

Space, as the pure form of all outer intuition, is so far limited; it serves
as the a priori condition only of outer appearances. But since all
representations, whether they have for their objects outer things or not,
belong in themselves, as determinations of the mind, to our inner state;
and since this inner state stands under the formal condition of inner
intuition, and so belongs to time, time is an a priori condition of all
appearances whatsoever.... Just as I can say a priori that all outer
appearances are in space, and are determined a priori in conformity
with the relations of space, I can also say, from the principle of inner
sense, that all appearances whatsoever, that is, all objects of the
senses, are in time, and necessarily stand in time relations (CPR, 77)

Once abstracted and interiorized time takes on enormous new powers.

Productive of the actual rhythm of thought and sensation it gains control over

the whole of experience. Time, as the form of interiority, is thus absolutely

inescapable. For everything we see, think, feel, hear and know has already

been given a speed, an order and a rhythm in time. With Kant, then, the

inside ceases to be conceived of an empirical container and is instead

8 From the
perspective of transcendental philosophy, then, William Burroughs

38
thought transcendentally (as an interiority over against space and not merely

in space). One can never escape time, since time is a limit that works us from

the inside. Yet, as Deleuze notes, there is something very strange in this

notion of time as interior limit.

To think time means to substitute for the classical schema of an

exterior limitation of thought by the extended, the very very strange
idea of an interior limit to thought which works it from the inside, which
doesn't at all come from outside, which doesn't at all come from the
opacity of a substance. As if there was in thought something
impossible to think. As if thought was worked over from the inside by
something that it cannot think. (TLK, 1)

In moving from transcendence to the transcendental, Kant reworks

both the inside and the outside. Time conditions an inescapable interiority,

but in doing so opens a new and more radical exteriority, since the production

of time itself cannot be captured "within" time. In other words, the one thing

that is not interior to time is the transcendental form of time itself. Thus, in

discovering the abstract realm of the transcendental, Kant unmasks an

unanticipated immanent exteriority - an outside that does not transcend the

world but that is no less alien for that. "The greatest initiative of

transcendental philosophy", writes Deleuze, "was to introduce the form of

time into thought. " (DR, 86) Yet, as the next section will show, it is only a very

particular mode of thought that can process Kant's modern consciousness of

time. For Kant revolutionizesthe interiorityof thought only by immersingit in

formula, The only way out of time is into space' ("H, 19) can only be a trick.

39
the exteriority of time.

40
1.2 Transcendental Deduction: Time and the `I think'

How can man think what he does not think, inhabit by a mute occupation
something that eludes him, animate with a kind of frozen movement that
figure of himself that takes the form of a stubborn exteriority.
Foucault, Order of Things, p. 323

It is false to say: I think. One should say: one thinks me.... I is another
Rimbaud, Complete Works, p 101

I am separated from myself by the form of time.

Deleuze, Kant's Critical Philosophy, p. ix

In modem philosophical thought it is Descartes who first secures the

borders which separates the inside from the outside. His book, The

Meditations, assures the divide by devising what has become one of

philosophy's most familiar horror '

stories. Deeply suspicious of appearances,

Descartes speculates that God has been replaced by an evil demon who

tricks us into taking the exterior world for reality. Determined to escape these

demonic delusions, Descartes supposes 'that the heavens, the air, the earth,

colours, shapes, sounds and all external things that we see, are only illusions

and deceptions which he [the demon] uses to take me in. " (M, 100) Stripped

of all faith in reason and truth, Descartes imagines the external world as a

I As Slavoj Zizek
writes, the Cartesian cogito "opens up, for a brief moment, the hypothesis of
the Evil Genius who, behind my back, dominates me and pulls the strings of what I experience
as reality." Slavoj Zizek. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1993, p. 12

41
mad and uncontrollable experiment. The senses, which grant us access to

this outside world, must no longer be trusted. Even the certainties of abstract

truths such as are found in mathematics and geometry must be questioned.

For once the demon has been let in, there is no telling how far his influence

extends. Plagued by a powerful and cunning entity bent on deception,

Descartes tries to flee from the demon, demarcating the outside by a rigorous

process of philosophical doubt.

Yet, as time passes, Descartes manages to gain control and dispel the

horror which torments him. Turning in on himself, Descartes discovers that

the doubt which haunts the outside serves to ground the inside in an
2
undeniable certainty. The fact that I doubt, the Meditations famously

concludes, assures me that I exist. For, "when I doubt, there is one thing

which I cannot doubt, which is that as a self that doubts, I think. " (SLK, 2) In

doubting the objects, properties, truths and sensations of the external world,

Descartes thus carves out a secure container for the subjects insides. The

famous formula "I think therefore I am" guards us against the demonic

games that threaten our perception and knowledge of the outside world.

Separated from the dubious nature of exteriority, the Cartesian subject

thus finds its protection by folding in. For though everything outside us may

2 To quote Descartes: "There is a deceiver know not who he is most highly powerful and
-I -
most highly cunning, who always industriously deceives me. If he is deceiving me then without
doubt I also am. And he might deceive me as much as he can, he will still never effect that I
would be nothing, so long as I shall cogitate that I am something. So that - all things having
been weighed enough, and more - this statement were, finally, to be established: "/ am, I exist"
is necessarily true, so often as it is uttered by me or conceived by the mind. "(Meditation 11: 3)

42
be a trick, nothing, Descartes contends, can fool us about what exists inside.

Guarded by the security of self consciousness, Descartes uses the

boundaries of a conscious interiority to rebuild his faith in the external world.

After Descartes, it is this certainty of interiority which has became the sure

foundations for philosophical inquiry. 3 Schopenhauer describes this as

follows:

By his taking cogito ergo sum as the only thing certain, and
provisionally regarding the existence of the world as problematical, the
essential and only correct starting point, and at the same time the true
point of support, of all philosophy was really found. This point, indeed,
is essentially and of necessity the subjective, our own consciousness.
For this alone is that which is immediate; everything else, be it what it
may, is first mediated by consciousness, and therefore dependent on
it. It is thus rightly considered that the philosophy of the moderns starts
with Descartes as its father. (WWR 2,3)

It would seem from the traditional account of the Copernican

revolution, with its emphasis on the synthetic powers of the human intellect,

that the Critique of Pure Reason is a continuation of this basic line. In

focusing on the constitutive inner powers of human subjectivity, Kant,

according to this interpretation, outlines a philosophical position that - in

Cartesian fashion - prioritizes the inside. By positioning reason at the center

of the universe and concentrating on the legislative powers of the

understanding, critique, according to this reading, reinforces the subject

discovered by Descartes. Kant's 'modernity', from this perspective, consists

in his belief that the external world of representations is generated by the

productive powers of interiority.

3As Deleuze writes, in Descartes "doubt was only a deter to a more secure
edifice of

43
All this dissolves, however, with the contention that Kant's 'modern

consciousness' stems not from his repositioning of the subject but from his

redefinition of time. For in making time the form of inner sense, Kant

subordinates the certainty of interiority to the productive forces of

temporalization. Transcendental philosophy, as we will see, abandons the

Cartesian line by conceiving of an inside that is passive in relation to the

immanent exteriority of time. Dismantling the security of interiority by

discovering an outside line that divides the inside from within, the Critique of

Pure Reason riddles interiority with the difference between the receptive

nature of what exists in time and the synthesizing processes of the form of

time itself. With Kant, then, the certainty of self consciousness dissolves into

questions about the relation of time to itself. Critical thought thus not only

differentiates itself from the tradition of modem philosophy which stems from

Descartes, it fractures its very foundations.

As we have seen in the discussion of the 'Transcendental Aesthetic',

the first critique divides the inside from the outside through the distinction that

it makes between space and time. Space, for Kant, as the form of outer

sense, constitutes the structure in which the objects of the external world are

presented to the mind. The form of interiority, on the other hand, is time. Kant

here defines the outside as that which exists in space and the inside as that

which occurs in time. Yet, as we have already noted, since the exteriority of

space is mediated by the inner determinations of the mind, everything that is

knowledge. ' (DD, 77)

44
in space is also in time. For Kant, then, all our experiences, whether internal

or external, are inescapably conditioned by the order and relations of time.

From the perspective of transcendental philosophy, Cartesian doubt

has an implicit spatial bias. Descartes seems far more concerned with the

ways in which the evil demon may be deceiving us about the external world of

space than he is with the deception that might be taking place in the internal

realm of time. 4 This becomes startlingly apparent when one recognizes that

the Meditations, structured around a series of successive days, is governed

by a strict temporality5. Duped by the comfort of self consciousness,

Descartes seems blind to the fact that his entire philosophical method unfolds

inside a structure that is conditioned by time. Kant's break with Descartes

must be located here. It is impossible for Kant to make the inside the "true

point of support for philosophy" since the thought of the transcendental

insists that the inside is produced by the alterity of time.

This notion of time as the productive force of interiority depends, first of

all, on shifting the line which. separates the inside from the outside. The

4 Though Descartes claims that amongst the things which he doubts is the time in which
things endure' (Meditations 1:8) this has little practical consequence. For Descartes'
reconstruction of certainty occurs inside the passage of temporal succession (that is the days
in which the Meditations unfold). Thus, though Descartes claims he is questioning time, his
philosophical method does little to challenge the interior structure of time.
5 Deleuze claims that this structure of the Meditation makes it `the first text to introduce time
into philosophical discourse. " For unlike previous philosophical texts, with Descartes, the
unfolding of temporal succession has positive implications for what can or cannot be said. In
Descartes, says Deleuze, "there is a temporality which has unfolded which meant that he
could not say in the second what he will say in the fifth. "(TLK, 4) There is undoubtedly an irony
here. For despite the fact that time operates in the Meditations as a positive structuring
principle, Descartes nevertheless ignores the operations of time when securing his
philosophical foundations.

45
border which Descartes locates at the break between the certainty of self

consciousness and the doubt which haunts our knowledge of the outside

world is radically altered by the first critique. With Kant the division between

interiority and exteriority, as we have seen, ultimately corresponds to the

distinction between the empirical realm of experience and the transcendental

plane, which is to say that in Kant, the inside is defined as that which occurs

in time, while the outside is left to the only thing which escapes this interiority,

that is the abstract and productive forces of time itself.

In focusing on this distinction - between time and what is in time - Kant

dramatically diminishes the importance of self consciousness. For

consciousness of ourselves, to use Schopenhauer's term for the basis of

Descartes' philosophy, is, for Kant, relegated to the level of the empirical. It is

an experience which happens in time. Recognizing that "I am" is a verb

by temporality, 6 Kant thus questions the very core of the

conditioned

Cartesian formula. The proposition 'I think' or 'I exist thinking, ' writes Kant,

"is an empirical proposition. " (CPR, 381) To quote from the first critique:

Consciousness of self according to the determinations of our state of

inner perception is merely empirical, and always changing. No fixed
and abiding self can present itself in this flux of inner appearances.
Such consciousness is usually named inner sense, or empirical
apperception. (CPR, 136)

6 As Deleuze writes the assertion 'I am a thing which thinks' serves however implicitly to
- -
bind the I think to a determinate entity in time "We cannot say with Descartes 'I think therefore
I am. I am a thing which thinks. ' If it is true that the I think is a determination, it implies in this
respect an indeterminate existence (1am). But nothing so far tells us under what form this
existence is determined by the I think: it is determinable only in time, under the form of time,
thus as the existence of a phenomenal, receptive or changing ego. (KCP, viii)

46
Therefore, what Descartes perceived as an asylum from doubt,

becomes in Kant a constantly changing " flux of inner appearances" which

constitutes, not the stability of the I think, but the superficiality of the empirical

ego.

The ego, then, according to Kant, is in a passive or receptive relation

to the structuring principles which condition it. As Deleuze writes, "the Ego

itself is in time, and thus constantly changing: it is a passive or rather

receptive Ego, which experiences changes in time. " (ECC, 29) No longer

transparent to itself, the subject becomes an entity continually affected by

something which it cannot reach. For, the experience of interiority, like all

inner determinations of the mind, has necessarily been structured by time as

the form of inner sense. The primary position granted to the self as an object

of awareness is thus subordinated in Kant to the synthesizing processes of

time. Caught inside the web of temporality, the being which doubts cannot

serve as a foundation since, according to critical thought, we only know the

ego after it has already been given a sequence, an order and a rhythm by

time. Critical philosophy is thus led to an extremely strange assertion. For,

according to Kant, the 'spontaneous' activity of the synthetic a priori which

characterizes the subject of the Copernican revolution must be separated

entirely from the knowledge of what goes on in our minds.

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant describes this curious

consequence as the paradox of inner sense. Foreshadowed in the

'Transcendental Aesthetic', but only fully brought to light in the 'Deduction, '

47
the paradox of inner sense, writes Kant, arises from the fact that "this sense

represents to consciousness even our own selves only as we appear to

ourselves not as we are in ourselves. For we intuit ourselves only as we are

inwardly affected, and this would seem to be contradictory since we would

then have to be in a passive relation [of active affection] to ourselves. " (CPR,

166) The self of transcendental philosophy, is paradoxically split, fractured by

a line that separates the consciousness of an empirical ego from an

unconscious transcendental I. Moreover, the riddle continues, we are only

conscious of ourselves after we have been worked over by that part of

ourselves that we can never know. For one only becomes aware of the ego

after it has affected itself from within. For Kant, then, inner sense is governed

by a complicated circuit in which the self is 'auto-affected' by 'another'.

This paradox which haunts Kant's notion of interiority is, as we have

seen, a necessary consequence of the transcendental method. For, the

fundamental conjunction of critical thought, appearance ' conditions of

appearance, demands that one look behind empirical reality to the abstract

forces which condition it. According to Kant's Copernican revolution our

experience of ourselves is not given, it is produced. Thus, for Kant,

knowledge of the empirical ego is not an answer but a riddle. For the concrete

experience of interiority is incapable of revealing the abstract transcendental

conditions of its own production. Thus it is the very nature of transcendental

production that ensures the shift away from the subject to time. For, the only

thing that can produce the experience of being in time is the operation of time

48
itself.

Thus far, the transcendental notion of time has been described as an

abstract and empty form defined as nothing but a pure ordinal sequence.

Taken on its own, however, this description is severely limited. For it is in

danger of missing the fundamentally productive nature of the transcendental.

Spontaneous and active, time at its most abstract is characterized by a

continuous process of production. The form of temporality, for Kant, is, above

all, not a static eternity. For as we will see, time, in transcendental philosophy,

is made up of blind acts of synthesis continually at work producing the

experience of a world that exists in time.

These productive capacities of the transcendental form of time are

outlined by Kant in his discussion of the three fold synthesis set out in the first

part of the 'Transcendental Deduction'. Before exploring these synthesis in

detail it is important to stress, once again, that Kantian synthesis occurs in a

realm independent of experience. The three synthesis outlined in the

Deduction are the a priori machines that underlie experience. As Deleuze

writes, they do "not bear on diversity as it appears in space and time, but on

the diversity of space and time themselves. Indeed, without them, space and

time would not be 'represented. "(KCP, 15)

Kant's discussion of the three fold synthesis, then, is an attempt to

uncover the productive constituting forces of the form of time itself. "All our

knowledge, " writes Kant in the introduction to the section, "is finally subject to

time, the formal condition of inner sense. In it they must all be ordered,

49
connected and brought into relation. " (CPR, 131) The synthetic processes of

the deduction are meant to explain the means through which this occurs.

Kant's goal is to explicate how the transcendental form of time functions to

put the world in time. The focus, then, is not on a realm of production that

occurs in time, but rather on the 'spontaneous' activity that accounts for the

abstract possibility of the very experience of time.

After cautioning the reader of the difficulties which will inevitably beset

an enterprise "never before attempted, " Kant begins his discussion with

what he calls 'the synthesis of apprehension in intuition'. "Directed

immediately upon intuition" (CPR, 131) the 'synthesis of apprehension, is

located in the receptive domain of sensibility. It transforms our intuitions into a

grid that renders them capable of being perceived. For according to Kant, as

Deleuze makes clear, there is not only a diversity that exists in time but a

diversity of time itself. The very possibility of perception requires that this

diversity be synthesized. For intuition to take place the unrepresentable

multiplicity of time must be made representable. The synthesis of

apprehension fulfills this requirement by combining the manifold of intuition

into the units that constitute moments in time. It thus operates, as Deleuze

writes to "produce the different parts of time. " (KCP, 15)

The second synthesis, the synthesis of reproduction in the imagination,

is the act through which the imagination ensures the a priori rules which

determine the "sequence or coexistence" of appearances. It is, according to

Deleuze, "the means by which we reproduce the preceding parts as we arrive

50
at the ones following. " (KCP, 15) Without this second synthesis the order and

association of representations would be completely random.

If cinnabar were sometimes red, sometimes black, sometimes light,

sometimes heavy, if a man changed sometimes into this and
sometimes into that animal form, if the country on the longest day were
sometimes covered with fruit, sometimes with ice and snow, my
empirical imagination would never find opportunity when representing
red to bring to mind heavy cinnabar. (CPR, 132)

The synthesis of reproduction is thus the transcendental ground which

ensures the reproducibility of experience. It is the means through which past

appearances are duplicated. It thus assures the coexistence and order of that

which appears in time.

The third and final synthesis Kant calls the synthesis of recognition in a

concept. By relating the synthesized manifold to the concepts of the

understanding the synthesis of recognition allows one to recognize what has

been intuited and reproduced by the other synthetic operations. According to

Kant it is only through this final synthesis that one gains knowledge of the

objects of experience. For "that which constitutes knowledge, " writes

Deleuze, "is not simply the act by which the manifold is synthesized, but the

act by which the represented manifold is related to an object (recognition: this

is a table, this is an apple, this is such and such an object). " (KCP, 15) In the

Critique of Pure Reason it is the synthesis of recognition which ensures the

continuity of time. For in order to recognize any given object as identical in

different times there must be a synthesis capable of guaranteeing identity

through time.

51
Through this final synthesis, Kant deduces what is known as the

synthetic unity of apperception, the 'pure, original, unchangeable

consciousness' (CPR, 136) which constitutes the Kantian 'I think'. For, the

ability to recognize the same object as identical in different times requires,

according to Kant, a unity of consciousness, an unchanging identity, which

ensures the temporal continuity necessary for recognition to take place (from

the side of the transcendental subject). Transcendental apperception, then,

is the necessary 'condition which precedes all experience, and which makes

experience possible. ' (CPR, 136) Defined simply as "numerically identical' it

is the synthetic operation which explains the continuity of experience,

belongs to 7
guaranteeing that all my experience me.

As we have seen, it is with the notion of the transcendental I that Kant

most clearly reveals his radical departure from the modern philosophical line

that has its roots in Descartes. The security of self consciousness which

serves as the ground for Cartesian thought rests on the identity that exists

between the knowledge of the I think and the temporally determined,

conscious entity that I am. The Kantian 'I' on the other hand, does not

determinate 8
entity. For, as has already been noted, the
correspond to any

7 As Deleuze writes, 'My representations are mine in so far as they are linked in the unity of a
consciousness in such a way that the 'I think' accompanies them! (KCP, 15)
8 According to Deleuze, this notion that the I think is not attached to a determinate entity is at
the heart of Kant's objection to Descartes. With the Cartesian cogito, writes Deleuze, the I
think is an act of instantaneous determination, which implies an undetermined existence (I
am) and determines this existence as that of a thinking substance (I am a thing that thinks).
But how can the determination apply to the undetermined if we cannot say under what form it
is 'determinable'? (ECC, 29) With this objection Kant profoundly challenges the Cartesian

52
self of transcendental philosophy, is paradoxically split, fractured by a line that

separates the consciousness of empirical experience from the unconscious

realm of the synthetic a priori. As Deleuze writes, "the I and the Ego are thus

separated by the line of time which relates them to each other, but under the

conditions of a fundamental difference. " (KCP, viii) By defining interiority

through the split between time as an abstract synthetic process and the

concrete determination of that which exists in time, transcendental philosophy

conceives of a self that is based on the absolute difference between the

transcendental I and the empirical ego.

Critique demarcates this difference by a rigorous determination of the

boundaries of knowledge. The Ego, as consciousness of inner sense, admits

knowledge whereas the I, for Kant, can never be known (but is always

presupposed in knowing). Existing in a realm outside all experience,

transcendental apperception is never the object of direct awareness. Devoid

of all logical characteristics, the I, writes Kant, is nothing other than a

numerical identity. Empty of all content, stripped of its ties to substance or

personality the I becomes an empty slot. Necessary to explain the very

possibility of experience the 'Transcendental I' can be thought but never

known. Transcendental apperception is philosophy's final answer to the

oracle at Delphi. For Kant, 'know thyself' has become a rigorous

impossibility, an illegitimate use of reason.

formulation which equates the empty representation 'I think' to the determinate substance'
am a thing which thinks. '

53
There is then, in Kant, a radical difference between what we are and

what we know ourselves to be. For according to the 'paradox of inner sense'

we are only conscious of ourselves after we have been worked over by that

part of ourselves that we can never know. Kant thus posits a subject that is

in
exterior relation to itself. 9 An empty synthetic process that accompanies all

your representations, the I in Kant is so named not because it exists inside

you but because wherever you are it is. In Deleuze's reading of Kant, this

finds its expression in Rimbaud's formula 'I is another. '

What this section has sought to show is that this 'other is time.

Deduced from the temporal continuity that underlies experience,

transcendental apperception is determined solely as the agent of the

transcendental form of time. For Kant, "I is an act which constantly carries

out the synthesis of time. " (KCP, viii) Thus, while the Ego marks the interiority

of the subject, the I can only be defined as the exteriority of time. In

introducing time into thought, Kant inserts an irreparable fissure into the core

of the subject. To quote Deleuze: "the form of interiority means not only that

time is internal to us but that our interiority constantly divides us from

ourselves, splits us in two. " (KCP, ix)

9 This notion of a subject in an exterior relation to itself has obvious resonance with the
psychoanalytic distinction between the ego and the id. Freud himself recognized that his
notion of the unconscious borrowed much from transcendental thought. The psychoanalytic
assumption of unconscious mental activity appears to us, he writes in his essay The
Unconscious, as an extension of the corrections undertaken by Kant" (U, 173).

54
According to Heinrich Heine "The name of Immanuel Kant has the

might of an exorcism. " "His thought, " he writes "was a revolution and one not

wanting in horrors. " Even night wandering spirits, are stricken in terror at the

sight of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. " (RPG, 107) Deleuze agrees, Kant's

"thinking machine is absolutely frightening. " (KST, 1) This fright arises from

the fact that Kant has transformed the nature of philosophical horror,

replacing Cartesian fear with a sort of transcendental dread against which the

certainty that guards us against the demon is powerless. For Kant there is no

security in self consciousness, for it is nothing but a mask. By implanting

uncertainty at the core of interiority, Kant riddles even the cogito with doubt.

Like the replicants in the film Bladerunner, transcendental philosophy thus

torments the subject with the taunting refrain 'you are not what you think you

are. '10 With Kant, then, "everything happens as if the "enemy" of thought

was within. " This enemy - the transcendental outside - does not exist in

another time or another space. Its exteriority consists only of the fact that it

knows nothing of borders. Thus unlike Descartes demon it can neither be

locked out nor contained. One no longer need be afraid that the 'reality' of

outer perceptions is a trick, for Kant's 'modem consciousness of time, "

plagued us with a much more intimate fear. Surrounding us in an inaccessible

exteriority which infiltrates the inside at the very level of its production, the

Kantian outside (or the syntheses of time) not only constitutes the experience

10 In Tarrying
with the Negative, Zizek writes of Blade Runner as a Kantian film in Blade
Runner Deckard, after learning that Rachel is a replicant who (mis)perceives herself as
human, asks in astonishment: "How can it not know what it is? " We can see, now, how more

55
of the external world, it generates the very experience of ourselves. For, as

Deleuze writes, with Kant "it is not time that is interior to us; it is we who are

interior to time. " (ECC, 31)

than two hundredyears ago, Kant's philosophyoutlinedan answerto this enigma. (TN, 15)

56
1.3 The Schematism: Time and Abstraction

In his essay Theatrum Philosophicum, Michel Foucault proposes that

all philosophy can be defined according to its underlying antagonism towards

the principle figure of classical thought. "What philosophy, " he writes, "has

not tried to overturn Platonism?.. .Are all philosophies individual species of the

genus AntiPlatonic? Does each begin with a declaration of this fundamental

rejection? " (TP, 166). These questions, when applied to Kant, will serve as

the guiding thread in the final pages of this chapter. For to follow Kant in his

exploration of transcendental time demands, as Foucault suggests, a return

to critique's initial declaration, its fundamental rejection of transcendence.

The Critique of Pure Reason, as has already been noted, overturns

Platonism by discovering an abstract form of time that has been freed from its

subordination to movement. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that

this implies that Kant's argument with Plato can be restricted to any particular

dialogue. ' For, the notion of abstract time does much more than
zone or

transform the ancient conception of temporality. As this section will make

clear, abstract time subverts Plato at its core by revolutionising the notion of

abstraction.

It is important to note from the start, however, that these two moves,

the redefinition of time and the reformulation of the abstract, are ultimately

1 Plato's most explicit discussion of time is found in the dialogue Timeaus', but as we
will see the Kantian engagement with Plato has implications which extend far beyond

57
indistinguishable. For critical thought only makes time abstract by equating

the abstract with time-production. This circuit, explicated in the chapter on the

schematism, serves to distinguish abstraction from the transcendence of the

philosophical idea. No longer distant and withdrawn from its concrete

instantiations, abstraction, in Kant, becomes directly implementable.

Operating as the general medium of exchange, 2 abstract time is not a

transcendent form situated beyond the world of phenomena but becomes

instead the immanent plane of the transcendental.

Thus, abandoning both the interiority of the subject and the

transcendent, eternal idea, the Critique of Pure Reason subordinates thought

to the abstract production of time. For this reason, the attempt to situate Kant

in the 'Anti-Platonic genus' that defines philosophy will inevitably prove

inadequate. Foucault's questions, when applied to critique, are not definitive

but strategic. Having discovered the abstract synthetic machine which

constitutively underpins the philosophical idea, Kant becomes immersed in a

revolution that extends far beyond the history of ideas. For, as we will see in

the following chapter, the Kantian notion of transcendental time has at least

as much to do with capitalism as it does with philosophy.

To begin to unravel these claims requires an examination of the role

given to time in the chapter on the schematism. A notoriously difficult concept

this particular dialogue.

2 As the 'third thing' which functions to connect the two heterogeneous

parts of the
system, the schematism has certain similarities to the abstraction which Marx sees as
necessary to the production of exchange value. This will be discussed in further detail

58
in Kant, the schematism is best understood by the crucial function that it

serves. Put simply, the schema is a 'monogram' or diagram which connects

the faculty of sensation discussed in the 'Transcendental Aesthetic' with the

faculty of understanding as discussed in the 'Transcendental Logic'. The

difference between sensation and understanding, as has been previously

stated, is one of the basic distinctions at work in the Critique of Pure Reason.

The schematism, as the abstract plane that connects these two sides, is thus

the necessary link which provides coherence to the underlying structure of the

first critique.

The Transcendental Aesthetic, as was shown in the first section of this

chapter, is dedicated to a discussion of time and space as the a priori forms

of sensation. Though animated by the synthesis of intuition, these pure forms

according to Kant, are essentially receptive in nature. They act on what is

given, ordering sense data into a transcendental grid. As Deleuze writes they

are the "means by which we pose the manifold as occupying a certain space

and a certain time. " (KCP, 15) Dedicated to the presentation of the manifold,

the faculty of sensation synthesizes the diversity of intuition into an image

capable of being perceived.

The understanding, on the other hand, is defined as the spontaneous

production of a priori concepts. In the Transcendental Logic, Kant outlines

these concepts in what is known as the table of categories. 12 in number, the

categories are laid out in 4 groups of three with specific principles which

in chapter 2.

59
determine both their order and their relations. 3 By making use of the table of

categories, the understanding provides knowledge through the act of

representation. Deleuze describes this as follows: "The important thing in

representation is the prefix: re-presentation implies an active taking up of that

which is presented; hence an activity and a unity distinct from the diversity

which characterize sensibility as such. " (KCP, 8)

Thus, by the time one reaches the chapter on schematism, the realm

of the transcendental has been divided, split between, on the one side, the

production of the image, and, on the other, the production of concepts. Yet, in

so far as these processes remain separated they work in vain. For, neither

thoughts nor perceptions are capable on their own of constituting experience.

To quote Kant's famous formula: "Without sensibility no object would be

given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts

without contents are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. " (CPR, 93)

According to the first critique, therefore, there can be no account of

knowledge which does not synthesize our a priori understanding of the

concepts with our intuition of the objects of experience. Crucial here is the

fact that, for Kant, unlike for Plato, concepts only gain their legislative power

through some ulterior mechanism which makes them directly and immediately

applicable to phenomenon. "Concepts, " writes Kant, "are altogether

impossible and can have no meaning if no object has been given to them. "

3 For a list of the categories see Table 2 in the appendix.

60
(CPR, 181)

The discussion of the schematism thus inevitably begins with a

question. "How, then, " asks Kant, "is the subsumption of intuitions under

pure concepts, the application of a category to appearances possible? "

(CPR, 180) Kant is here searching for a key. The task of the schematism is to

provide a medium of communication - something that is at once intellectual

and sensible - which can serve to fuse the two halves of his system together.

"Obviously, " writes Kant, "there must be some third thing, which is

homogeneous on the one hand with the category, and on the other hand with

appearance, and which thus makes the application of the former to the latter

possible. " (CPR, 181)

This 'third thing' is time. Thus, while it initially seemed as if the form of

time was clearly situated along side space in the 'Transcendental Aesthetic',

in his discussion of the schematism, Kant abstracts the form of time from this

particular determination. For as the previous section on the Deduction

showed, it is not only sensation but thought as well which occurs in time.

Thus, for Kant, just as all appearances are subject to temporal form so too

are the categories. In order for the a priori concepts to connect with the

appearance they must, according to Kant, "contain a priori certain formal

conditions of sensibility, namely those of inner sense. " (182)

Providing the categories with a temporal dimension is the task of the

transcendental schema. "This formal and pure condition of sensibility to

which the employment of the concept of the understanding is restricted, we

61
shall entitle the schema of the concept. " (CPR, 182) By ensuring that they

can be expressed as a determination of time, it is the schema of the concept

which implements the categories, giving them an organizational function in

relation to intuition.

Although both the concept and the image are conditioned by time, the

production of the schema arises neither from the understanding nor from

sensation. Submerged in a realm anterior to knowledge, the schema is

produced by the operations of a third faculty, the transcendental imagination.

"The schema is in itself always a product of the imagination,' (CPR, 182)

Kant writes "the two extremes, namely sensibility and understanding, must

stand in necessary connection with each other through the meditation of the

transcendental function of imagination. " (CPR, 146) Situated in the middle,

on the diagonal line in between intuition and understanding, Kant describes

the synthetic process of the transcendental imagination as a secret art. `This

schematism of our understanding, in its application to appearances and their

mere form, is an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real

modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to

have open to our gaze. " (CPR, 183)

In discovering the secret art of the productive imagination the first

critique formulates time as a circuit of abstract production. In both sensibility

and the understanding production occurs in a linear flow, channelled into the

production of a product (the concept or the image). With the imagination, on

the other hand, production is taken to a higher power of abstraction, in which

62
the product (the schema) is itself nothing other than the process of abstract

production. 4

The schema is neither an image nor a concept but a diagram. Like all

true diagrams, it is not a static representation but a functional machinic

5
component. As an aspect of transcendental time it operates, for Kant, as the

abstract process through which experience is produced. With the chapter on

the schematism, then, Kant frees time from being locked into any particular

determination, either on the side of the image or on the side of the concept,

and makes of it instead the abstract plane of connectivity on which his whole

system depends.

In Platonic philosophy the abstract is equated with a realm that exists

outside time. Universal and eternal, this realm is only accessed through the

transcendence of ideas. The process of abstraction, then, was considered to

be philosophy's privileged tool. As a method of extraction or generalization it

served to prompt a 'recollection' of all that is universal, eternal and

transcendent in the idea. By drawing away from temporally determined

appearances, abstraction was thus used to connect one with a realm outside

time.6

4 It is this discovery, which will be explored in greater detail in the chapters

which
follow, which plugs transcendental thought directly into the technological and social
machines of capitalism.
s This is why Deleuze speaks of the schematism as 'rules of production. '(FLK, 3) For
a
discussion of the diagram as it functions in Deleuze and Guattari see ' Thousand
Plateaus pp. 143-146
,
BA good example of this is found in the discussion of the
slaves knowledge of
geometry found in the dialogue'Meno'.

63
Defined in this way, the abstract is dialectically opposed to the

concrete. The distinction between these two spheres corresponds to the

difference between essence and appearance, the basic duality which, as we

have seen, functions as the structure for the whole of classical thought.

Within this duality the concrete is associated with temporally determined

appearances, while the abstract belongs to the eternal nature of essences.

Separated in this way, the abstract and concrete exist on two separate levels.

Bound by a rigid hierarchy, the relation between them is one of reflection.

Thus, just as the appearance is conceived as a degraded image of the

essence of the idea so, for Plato, the concrete is conceived of as a shadow of

the abstract.

For Kant it is not a realm outside time, but time itself that is abstract.

Conceived of in this way the abstract ceases to be equated with the

transcendence of the idea and is instead the process by which concepts (or

ideas) are applied to the objects of sense perception. That is to say, for Kant

concepts are only implementable because they are given a temporal

determination by the abstract production of time. It is this abstract production

which constructs an immanent plane of connectivity, a sort of general medium

of exchange on which the Kantian system of the transcendental is based.

As a process of production, the abstract ceases to be dialectically

opposed to the concrete, transcendent reflection gives way to an immanent

connection. The relation between the abstract production of time and

temporally determined appearances is no longer dichotimized. For in

64
transcendental thought abstraction operates within the concrete. 7 It is thus

conceived of, not as a means through which one can escape from the illusion

of appearances into the truth of the idea, but rather as the virtual synthetic

processes through which the actuality of appearances are produced.

Despite the fact that he distinguishes between abstraction and ideas,

Kant still seeks to maintain that at its most abstract, the production of time

takes place inside the mind of the knowing subject. Yet, the fact that the

schema is described as a hidden art whose secrets can never be revealed

suggests that perhaps even he is aware that the transcendental philosophy of

time is irreducible to an epistemological theory. 8 A process of construction

that is neither perceived nor understood, 9 the production of abstract time (or

schema) is not a product of interiority but belongs instead to the unconscious

plane which produces the inside. 10Kant's contention that the schema is

found 'hidden in the depths of the human soul' is ultimately nothing but

vague lyricism and must be considered illegitimate from the standpoint of

critique. For as we have seen, according to the immanent criteria of

7 In Deleuze and Guattari's transcendental materialism abstract machines

are defined
as follows: 'There is no abstract machine, or machines, in the sense of a Platonic
Idea, transcendent, universal, eternal. Abstract machines operate within concrete
assemblages: They are defined by the fourth aspect of assemblages, in other words,
the cutting edges of decoding and deterritorialization. ' ("TP, 510). Both transcendental
materialism and abstract machines will be discussed in detail in chapters 3 and 4.
aIt can in fact be argued that Kant is only inclined towards epistemology when he is
not being transcendental enough.
Since it is neither a concept nor an image, the abstract production of transcendental
time can be neither known nor perceived.

10Defined as a 'secret and hidden art', the schematism should be understood as

an
unconscious process.

65
transcendental thought the production of time cannot be confined to the

interiority of the subject, philosophical or otherwise.

It used to be the case that the ultimate agent of abstract production

was found in the realm of metaphysics. It was believed that the

transcendence of God created us and the world that we experience. We have

seen, however, that the Kantian revolution has demolished this belief. With

his sustained attack on the 'Queen of all sciences', critique undermined the

transcendence of God and, to use Heine's words, functioned as 'the sword

that slew deism' in philosophy. (RPG, 107)

The conventional tale is that Kant replaced God with man".

Developing a theory of production which does not pass through God, Kant

placed the transcendental subject in the role of the ultimate creator. To quote

Alistair Welchman in his thesis Wild above rule or art., Creation and Critique,

the Kantian subject "operates a production fully theological in scope: it is

nothing less than the production of the empirical world, of the universe as

such." (CC, 46) In this thesis it is argued that it is the inhuman forces of time

that surpass the power of the subject as the ultimate agent of transcendental

production.

This chapter began by maintaining that the Kantian discovery of the

11It is important to keep this term

gendered. For, as Luce Irigaray points out in her
writings on Kant, any theory of the subject has always been appropriated by the
masculine. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman. trans. Gillian C Gill. Ithaca
New York: Cornell University Press, 1974, p. 133.

66
transcendental required a revolution in the nature of time. The classical

conception which conceived of time as equivalent to the phenomenal world of

change and motion had to be overthrown. In its place Kant constructed an

account of a constant, formal time within which all variation takes place. He

called this the 'form of inner sense' due to the fact that it conditions all

thoughts and perceptions from within. Yet, as we have seen, in located time

inside the subject, Kant radically altered the notion of interiority by

subordinating it to the exteriority of time. In the chapter on the schematism

this exteriority of time overturns the transcendence of Ideas and of God by

replacing them with an immanent plane of abstract production which is

nothing other than the transcendental production of time.

67
Chapter 2: Time in Modern Capitalism

2.0 Introduction: Time in Kant & Capitalism

To describe Kant and capital as two sides of a coin is as necessary as it is

ridiculous. `strange coin indeed that can synthesize a humble citizen of
Konigsberg with the run-away construction of the planet.
Nick Land, Thirst for Annihilation, p. 3

In the previous chapter it was argued that Kant's Copernican revolution

is not, as is traditionally contended, centrally concerned with a change in the

role of the human subject, but is instead about a transformation in the nature

of time. Subordinating the human intellect to the abstract, synthetic and

productive operations of temporality, the Critique of Pure Reason

demonstrates that it is not the subject that produces time but rather time that

produces the interiority of the subject. Transcendental philosophy, then, is not

simply an epistemological theory but must also be understood as the

discovery of something fundamentally new in the nature of time.

In the following chapter, we will see that at the dawn of capitalism,

centuries before the writing of the first Critique, history registers a change at

the empirical level, in the culture and technology of time. ' Thus, we will find,

that the transformation of time in Kant's philosophical revolution is matched

by an equally dramatic "revolution in time"2 brought on by changes in

technology, sociology, geography and economics. By bringing together these

' This will be explored by examining the work of a variety of socio-historians of time, including,
amongst others, David Landes, Lewis Mumford and Gerhard Dohm-van Rossum.

2This phrase is taken from DavidS. Landes' book Revolutionin Time:Clocksand the Making
68
two revolutions, the chapter seeks to investigate links between the production

of a capitalist time and time as it is conceived of in transcendental philosophy.

In order to do this most effectively, the chapter is composed of three

sections divided according to the following themes: 1) the technological

development of the clock and the emergence of a new form of time, 2) the

synthetic nature of the capitalist temporal regime (with particular emphasis on

GMT and on the equation 'time = money'), and 3) the problems and

philosophical implications which inevitably arise when one attempts to

connect historical change with transcendental philosophy.

In his book History of the Hour. Clocks and Modem Temporal Orders,

Gerhard Dohm-van Rossum writes that it is now considered to be 'textbook

wisdom' that in the Late Middle Ages, there occurred, in the culture of the

West, a transformation in the apprehension of time. The most important

instrument of this transformation was the invention and development of the

mechanical clock. The impact of the clock, which Lewis Mumford has called

the "key machine of the modem industrial age" (TC, 14) is impossible to

overestimate. For, as we will see, the rapid growth and overwhelming

influence of this new device attests to the fact that the clock was not merely

an advance in time-keeping technology but was also the expression of a more

fundamental alteration in the nature of time itself. With the arrival of the

mechanical clock there arose, for the first time in history, an abstract, secular,

homogenous, quantitative and autonomous mode of time which was separate

and distinct from the historical, astronomical and qualitative time of the

of the Modem World.Cambridge.Mass. HarvardUniversityPress, 1983.

69
calendar. 3

It should be immediately apparent that these distinctive features of

clock time - its distinction from the movement of objects in the external world

and its autonomy from the events which happen inside it - closely correspond

to the Kantian form of time discussed in the 'Transcendental Aesthetic'. It

would thus appear, that the first great critical reversal which revolutionizes the

classical conception of temporality by conceiving of a time independent of

change is mirrored by transformations which occurred to the nature of time

under capitalism.

The notion that Kantian thought is linked to developments in the

technology of time should come as no surprise. For, as we will see, the lore

which surrounds Kant's life and habits suggest that, as an empirical subject,

Kant was obsessed with the temporality of the clock. What this chapter seeks

to maintain is that the time which governed Kant's life seeped into his writings

and made a crucial impact on his philosophy. In assuming a link between

Kant's life and his writings the chapter seeks to propose that Kant discovered

a new form of time, not by looking into the hidden recesses of the human

soul, but through his sensitivity to the way time was functioning in the culture

which surrounded him.4

It is not only the technology of the clock, however, which links Kantian

3The distinction between clocks and calendars will be discussed in detail in the following
section.
4This is not to say that Kantian philosophy can be reduced to socioeconomics. For the
connection between Kantian thought and clock time cannot be explained through a linear
causal relation. In fact the precise relation between these two aspects of the 'revolution in
time' is extremely complex and is thus treated as one of the main themes addressed
throughout this thesis.
70
thought to the production of capitalist time. For when seen through the

perspective of transcendental philosophy, it becomes apparent that capitalist

time establishes itself as a universal synthetic regime. This perspective is

importantly different - but nevertheless compatible with - the analyses of

capitalist temporality that is traditionally maintained by the socio-historians of

time. From Mumford to Marx, the story of the emergence of a modem

industrial time is implicitly structured through the dynamics of dialectical

struggle. In a tale riddled with nostalgia and warnings, these thinkers lament

the fact that in the modem period the concrete, organic, and natural time of

the calendar has been overwhelmed and dominated by the artificial time of

the clock. 5

Seen through the lens of the Kantian system, however, clocks and

calendars no longer appear as the two sides of a battle. For, as we have

seen, the Critique of Pure Reason operates with a tripartite structure which is

capable of connecting apparent divisions through a process of abstract

production. Replacing dialectics with the 'synthesised or electronic way of

handling philosophy" (SLK, 1) transcendental thought configures the time of

capitalism, not as the tyrannical rule of the clock, but rather as the

establishment of a new regime of synthesis. Instead of subordinating the

more 'natural' time of the past, it sees capitalism as constituting an abstract

plane of connection which brings together the time of the clock with the

temporality of the calendar. This abstract connection is instantiated by

5 To quote Mumford: 'Abstract time became the new medium of existence. Organic functions
were themselves regulated by it one ate, not upon feeling hungry, but when prompted by the
clock: one slept, not when one was tired but when the clock sanctioned it.'
71
Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), an 'artificial' synthesis which acts as the

universal standard of a globalized time.

The establishment of GMT (with it's synthesis of clocks and calendars)

is further combined, under capitalism, with another crucial synthesis, most

succinctly captured by the phrase 'time equals money'. This equation - which

constitutes the basic formula of the capitalist system - involves, as we will

see, not only a new and autonomous form of time but also a transformation in

the cultural and economic practices which serve to constitute a particular

temporal regime.6 It is precisely these transformations in the cultural-

economics of time and the practices which they make possible which provide

the primary conditions of existence for the capitalist social system.

A certain confusion arises, however with the recognition that the

capitalist production of time could only have taken place within a particular

historical context. The invention and development of the mechanical clock,

the establishment of Greenwich Mean Time and the practices which equate

time with money required that certain contingent socio-economic forces were

in place. And yet, the paradoxical fact is that these forces were determined in

large part by the temporality that they made possible. In short, capitalist time

depends upon a particular historical formation, and yet this historical

formation presupposes the production of capitalist time from the start.?

e As we will see these practices include such phenomena as wage labour, credit and interest.

Capitalism, then, must be conceived of cybemetically, that is as a system which operates

with feedback loops, or nonlinear circuits of production in which ' causes B and B causes '. In
this way culture and technology no longer need be viewed through models of linear causation
but can be seen instead as locked into nonlinear circuits of reciprocal presuppositions. It is
undoubtedly a circuit, or cybernetic loop such as this that is responsible for generating both
the time of the clock and the culture to which it belongs.
72
The fact that the production of capitalist time introduces a new mode of

temporality that is independent of change, that it operates through the

establishment of universal synthesis and that these synthesis are

presupposed in the culture they produce, suggests that, like transcendental

philosophy, capitalism accesses a realm independent of empirical processes,

and is productive not of events that occur inside experience but of the

underlying conditions that make experience possible. Escaping the confines

of interiority it functions, not only through that which happens in time - but as

the abstract production of time itself.

The difficulty with this claim, however, is that the attempt to equate

transcendental time with capitalist time runs into the familiar problem of how

to connect philosophical concepts with material reality. Put simply, this

problem can be stated as follows: Capitalism is a historical event thought to

be empirically produced and thus, by definition, falls outside the domain of

Kantian thought. For, as we have seen, the first crucial step in identifying the

realm of the transcendental is to differentiate it from the experiential world of

the empirical. How, then, could capitalism, a socio-economic event which

occurs in time, be associated with the transcendental? What is the

relationship between the empirical change in time that occurred at the onset

of capitalism and the revolution in the theory of time that occurred in

transcendental philosophy?

This is the problem which the final section of this chapter seeks to

address. It does so, first, by turning to the work of Karl Marx. For it is in Marx

where one finds one of the most consistent and well known attempts to

connect philosophical thought with the concrete socio-economic conditions of

73
material practice. Marx concurs with Kant that analyses should not be based

on experience but should concentrate instead on the conditions which make

experience possible. His work departs from Kant, however, in that it

subordinates transcendental structures to the internal forces of history.

According to the principles of historical materialism, production at all levels

ultimately rests with the dialectical struggles of the past. For Marx the a priori

are not eternal but subject to change and transformation. Transcendental

time is thus determined by historical time.

Though Marx gives an account of how Kant's philosophy of time might

relate to capitalism, the Marxist analysis will be shown to be ultimately

inadequate. For Marx's insistence on the productive forces of history leaves

no room for a theory of transcendental production. Thinking dialectically

rather than synthetically, his conception of material production risks folding

the transcendental back into the empirical. Thus, though offering a bridge

between philosophy and the empirical conditions of capitalism, Marx's

writings manage to hide precisely the zone that Kant's work makes visible.

In order to bridge the gap that has opened between Kant and Marx,

the chapter turns finally to the work of Michel Foucault. By taking on board the

Marxist critique of idealism without falling back into a naive empiricism,

Foucault develops a theory that has the potential to link Kant with capitalism

without sacrificing either the empirical or the transcendental.

For Foucault, just as for Marx, the a priori is historical. His books are

famous for mapping the ways in which transcendental structures vary from

age to age. Yet, unlike Marx, Foucault is deeply suspicious of accrediting

74
these changes to the internal dynamics of history. According to Foucault the

rhythm of historical transformations,

"does not follow the smooth, continuist schemas of development which are

normally accepted. " (PK 112) Foucault's work thus leads us to the conclusion

that though transcendental structures change in time, these changes are not

themselves historically produced.

Foucault combines a Marxist historicism with transcendental thought in

order to arrive at the notion of discontinuity. This often controversial concept

is meant to signal the breaks in history, when, in the space of only a few

years an entire regime of power, which governs all that can be said and seen,

is subject to a 'global modification. ' In Foucault's work the continual passage

of time is interrupted by sudden eruptions. The interiority of history is opened

to forces from the outside. Thus, for Foucault it is not that the transcendental

can be reduced to history but rather that history is punctuated by

transcendental events. It is the task of this thesis to explore capitalism's

peculiar intimacy with these discontinuities.

75
2.1 Clock-Time

Throughout history, social revolutions have tended to be linked to

calendric transformations. New leaders (whether religious or political) have often

sought to inaugurate their reign through the introduction of a new calendar. For

the calendar, as we will see, is closely tied to the specificity and individuation of

a culture and is therefore viewed - both by rulers and by revolutionary groups -

as the means through which they can separate themselves both from their

immediate past and from their existing surroundings. Thus, calendric change has

been seen by cultures as the first and most crucial step in establishing their

autonomy and solidifying their traditions.

The capitalist revolution, however, has ignored this tendency, For

capitalism, as a social system has a peculiar indifference - and therefore

practical conservatism - to its calendric milieu. In its entire history there has

been but one successful attempt at calendric reform. ' This occurred in 1582, at

the dawn of capitalism, when Pope Gregory XIII introduced modifications into the

1 There was a serious attempt at calendric reform during the French Revolution. This occured
through the introduction of a time-keeping system known as the 'Calendar of Reason. ' `Launched
in 1792 - the revolutionary Year One - this new calendar had uniform months of 30 days each,
taking on an extra 5 (or 6) days at the end. These were reserved for holidays called Virtue,
Genius, Labor, Opinion and Recompense. Instead of gods and emperors it used names for the
months: Nivose for snowing months, Pluvoise for Rainy Month, Thermidor for Heat Month, and
Brumaire for Foggy Month. Weeks were 10 days long, with three weeks per month. Days were
likewise divided in a decimal arrangement into 10 hours each of 100 minutes, with every minute
containing 100 seconds. ' (C, 238) However the 'Calendar of Reason' lasted only until 1806 when
Napoleon quietly reintroduced the Gregorian system.

76
Julian calendar. The Gregorian reforms, however, were not - intended as the

installation of a new calendar, but rather as the modernization of an old one.

Pope Gregory had no desire to challenge the culture of the existing calendar, he

simply wanted an improvement in time-keeping accuracy. The Julian calendar

was slowly coming out of sync with the seasons. In order to stop this slide Pope

Gregory XIII initiated a number of fairly modest changes. He decreed that the 4th

of October would skip to the 15th of October, 2 moved the beginning of the year

from March 25th to January 1st, and made a slight adjustment to the Julian leap

year axiom3. These reforms gave the Julian calendar an added degree of

precision while leaving all the essential elements, the eras, the numerals, the

counting systems, and the festivities, unchanged.

Under capitalism, the Gregorian calendar has spread throughout the

planet4 and now appears as the dominant time-registry of the global oecumenon,
5
overcoding local calendars without serious challenge. This is a testament to an

2 This particular reform prompted a series of riots in which 'mobs collected in the streets and
shouted 'give us back our 11 days'. ' (C, 228)

3 The Gregorian calendar, like the Julian calendar, treats every fourth year as a leap year. The
only difference is that in the Gregorian calendar no century year is a leap year unless it is exactly
divisible by 400 (eg 1600,2000). 'A further refinement, the designation of years evenly divisible by
4,000 as common (not leap) years, will keep the Gregorian calendar accurate to within one day in
20,000 years". Encyclopaedia Britannica, Volume 5, Micropedia, p.476.

4 The Gregorian calendar was adopted by the protestant German states in 1699, England and its
colonies in 1752, Sweden in 1873, Japan in 1873, China in 1912, Soviet Union in 1918.
5 The first, serious challenge to global dominance of the Gregorian calendar occurred at the dawn
of the third millennium and was brought on by a computer bug known as Y2K. This will be
discussed in detail in chapter 4.

77
ultra conservatism in capitalist time. For despite its globalized culture, capitalism

operates with the calendar of the Holy Roman Empire.

This almost parodic stability in calendrics is starkly contrasted by the

remarkable changes that have happened to the technology of the clock.

Capitalism's 'revolution in time' thus combines an extreme conservatism on the

side of the calendar with an unprecedented social and technological run-away on

the side of the clock.

Socio-historians agree that the crucial turning point in the history of

capitalist time occurred with the development of the mechanical clock. Though it

has so far proved impossible to pinpoint the precise place, time and

circumstance of this invention, most historians date the process, in Europe, to

6
the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century. (HH) It is commonly agreed that

the key to this technological breakthrough was a simple engineering device

known as the verge and foliot escapement. By regulating the speed and flow of a

spoked wheel this small metallic lever was able to internally generate a

standardized beat or pulse. This was undoubtedly a crucial step in making the

clock a consistent and reliable device for keeping track of the time. As Lewis

Mumford writes, after the creation of the mechanical clock "the clouds that could

6 Joseph Needham's work on Chinese science has shown that some type of mechanical clock
was developed centuries earlier (perhaps as early as the eighth century) by the Chinese.
Nevertheless, by the time Jesuits came to China in the 16thcentury there was no sign of these
devices. For a good summary of this work and the issues that it raises see History of the Hour pp
86-88.

78
paralyse the sundial, the freezing that could stop the water clock on a winter

night, were no longer obstacles to time-keeping; summer or winter, day or night,

one was aware of the measured clank of the clock. (TS, 14) This first

technological breakthrough unleashed a series of inventions and discoveries

(from the pendulum to the metric beats of the caesium atom) which have

combined to make the clock the most precise and accurate machine that has

ever been built. As Mumford suggests, from the mechanism of early clockwork to

the digital pulse of cybernetic computers, clocks and clock making have

consistently been at the forefront of technological innovation.

In its relationship to determinable quantities of energy, to standardization,

to automatic action, and finally to its own special product, accurate timing,
the clock has been the foremost machine in modern technics; and at each
period it has remained in the lead: it marks a perfection towards which
other machines aspire. " (TC, 15)

At first glance it would appear that the difference between clocks and

calendars is ultimately nothing more than a difference in scale. While the

calendar is used to count the days, months and years, the clock divides the day

into hours, minutes, seconds, (and now ever more intricately divided

subseconds). Yet, the seeming simplicity of this distinction is deceiving. For as

we will eventually see, implicit in the distinction between these two types of time-

keepers is a distinction between two very different types of time. Thus, in

developing the technology of the clock, capitalism has discovered and unleashed

something entirely new in the very nature of time.

79
In order to understand what is peculiar about clock-time it must be first

distinguished from the temporality of the calendar. At its most abstract this

distinction rests on the different ways these two devices combine a beat and a

count - the two elements that are necessary in calculating the time. The beat, a

regular and repeating pulse or tick, is used as the basic unit of measure. While

the count, on the other hand, provides the numerical sequence which places the

units of measurement into an ordinal series. In order to tell the time, all time-

keepers, whether calendars or clocks, require some kind of synthesis between

these two elements.

Calendric time is based on astronomy. The calendar takes its beats from

the revolutions of the planets. Its' tick is determined by the earth's rotation

around the sun. For all calendars, from the ancient Egyptian to the modern

Gregorian, use the day as their basic unit of measure. Defined most simply then,

is
the calendar a day count. Yet, as Thomas Crump writes in his book The

Anthropology of Numbers "in practice no system ever confined itself to the

counting of days. " ("N, 85) For calendric uniformity, the constraint on the side of

the beat, is made up for by the complicated web of differences which are added

to the side of the count.

The calendar complicates the linear numerical sequence that adds up the

days by developing a system of counting that is based on a series of cycles. By

combining a variety of astronomical movements with the rhythms of religious

tradition (i.e. the yearly cycle of earth around the sun, the monthly cycle of the

80
moon, and the 7 day week of the Genesis story) the calendar envelopes the day

count into longer and more complicated cycles of time. 7

The great problem for calendrics is that these cycles are inevitably

incommensurable. The most striking example of this is the incompatibility of the

lunar month with the solar year which results from the discrepancy that exists

between the time it takes for the earth to travel around the sun (365 days, 5 hr

48 min 46 sec) and the 12 months (29.5 days each) which, make up a lunar year.

Since almost all calendars seek some mode of accounting for both these cycles

the different elements of the calendar invariably come out of sync. Thus, in all

calendars, supplementary axioms of convergence - known as intercalations - are

required in order to harmonize the cycles and reconcile the count. 8

The incommensurability of the cycles and the necessity of intercalations

ensure that the time of the calendar is intrinsically rhythmic. Produced through a

variety of different but interconnected cycles, the calendar is made up of a

multiplicity of systems all intertwined. Metric regularity gives way to cyclic

discontinuity as the periodicity of the tick becomes governed by a polyrhythmic

count.

The most common expression of calendric time is found in the practice of

7In the Gregorian calendar, for example the day-count is subsumed under four cycles, the week,
the month, the year and the era (BC/"D).

8 In the Gregorian calendar this is known as the leap year axiom, the practice of inserting one day
every four years.

81
dating. Viewed as a numerical sequence or pattern the date is the record of a

rhythm. Using a combination of temporal units which are qualitatively distinct, the

date is inherently synthetic. 8/29/00, for example, is a combination of day, month

and year. It is a string of numbers (lacking a common modulus) which expresses

the heterogeneity intrinsic to calendric temporality.

The calendar's numerical complexity, its heterogeneity at the level of

expression, speaks to the fact that the time of the calendar is itself composed of

qualitative variations. Calendric time is directed towards the question 'when? '

This temporal marker, which depends on the difference between past, present

and future, presupposes qualitative distinctions in the nature of time itself. Thus,

it'is not only the internal variation at the abstract level of the count which makes

the calendar fall on the qualitative side of the quantity/quality divide.

In the calendar, temporal units are not only determined numerically, but

are also distinguished by intensive changes in temperature, light, climate etc.

Thus, the calendar not only dates events, but is also, as we will see, a time-

keeping device which is ultimately structured according to the events which it is

dating. For in the calendar, the separation between time and that which occurs in

time is very difficult to make.

This merging of time with concrete phenomena occurs because of the

calendar's close links with astronomy. Based on the revolutions of the planets,

calendric temporality is determined by repetitive natural events such as days,

lunar cycles, seasons etc.... These astronomical occurrences act as a sort of

82
macrocosm for organic life, further strengthening the qualitative nature of

calendric time.
The discipline of chronobiology, for example, attests to the fact that the 24

hour day is connected to the internal rhythms of the human sleep/wake cycle.

The lunar month, which governs the movement of the tides, is in almost all
-

cultures - closely linked with a woman's menstrual cycle? While the year is tied

to the passage of the seasons which regulates everything from life cycles, to

migration patterns to the extremely influential rhythms of agriculture.

A rhythmic, heterogeneous count, tied to astronomy, organic life and the

cycles of civilization, the calendar has always had a close affinity to ritual and

religion. Traditionally the calendar was the sole responsibility of religious leaders

(in Egyptian the word for priest means star watcher). Almost all cultures give

great attention to the maintenance of an accurate calendar, since it is this that

structures the rhythms of religious life. Punctuated by ritual, holy festivals and

prayer, the passage of calendric time is a cultural celebration.

It is thus not an exaggeration to claim that one's culture is one's

calendar. In a book entitled Hidden Rhythms Eviatar Zerubavel uses the

example of Judaism to illustrate this point. According to Zerubavel the Jewish

people distinguish themselves from gentiles through the specificity of their

calendar. He stresses, in particular, the importance given to the observance of

9As Samuel Macy writes in his book The Dynamics of Progress: Time, Method and Progress,
"months, moons and menstruation are so closely related that we use the same root-word for all

83
the Sabbath, a weekly reminder of tradition which operates to structure and

determine the rest of the week. "The Jewish calendar, " writes Zerubavel, "has

been hailed as the single most important book of the people of Israel. It has

been said to have preserved the Jews as a people, to have united all those who

have been scattered around the world and made them one people" (HR, 73)

It is perhaps this which explains the tendency for cultural revolutions to

inaugurate calendric change. The adoption of a new calendar is amongst the

most powerful means of separating a people from their social surroundings. By

celebrating different holy days and not sharing in the same festivities a new

calendar works to entrench cultural difference. Thus, Christianity distinguished

itself from Judaism through the adoption of a luni-solar calendar and by switching

the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday. Mohammed, operating with the same

principle, "replaced the luni-solar calendar that had prevailed in Arabia with an

entirely lunar calendar. " (HR, 81) He also made the Islamic day of rest fall on a

Friday, thus distinguishing his-followers from both the Christians and the Jews.

Clock time, as we will see, can be differentiated from the calendar on a

point by point basis. First, because clock-time substitutes the calendric

emphasis on the count by innovating on the side of ticks or beats. Using cardinal

rather than ordinal numbers the clock does not count time: it measures it. The

clock is by its nature indifferent to astronomy. It can, as is the case with the

three of them." (DPTMP, 26)

84
sundial, use the rotations of the planets as its mode of measure but its tendency

has been to find the tick of time elsewhere. Following a line through metallurgy

and on to geology the clock extracts the beat away from astronomical

movement. -For as D S.. Landes writes in his book Revolution in Time: Clocks and

the Making of the Modem World, "to the physicist any stable oscillation is a

clock. " (RT, 6) The clock, then is a machine which either engineers its own tick,

as is the case with the mechanical clock or it incorporates one from the outside

into its own internal mechanism, as is the case with clocks which run on the

pulse of the quartz crystal. Thus, unlike the calendar in which a vast distance

separates the count from the beat, clocks have assimilated natural time into the

machine.10

Secondly, clock time is metric rather than rhythmic. There are no

intertwining cycles or irregular beats in the constant ticking of a clock Unlike in a

.

calendar in which each date has a specificity of its own, clock time is

homogenous. August'21,1998, for example, is a sign attributed to a particular

historical year (the year the presidency was rocked by scandal, two years away

from the millennium etc... ), allied with a specific season (summer), allocated to a

particular time at that season (towards the end), and linked to designated day of

10This tendency for clock's to develop a new form of time independent of astronomy reached its
apex in the 1960's with the development of the atomic clock. This machine "which depends for its
operation on the incredibly precise rate of decay of a caesium isotope," (BT 71) has now become
the ultimate chronometric reference. "Atomic clocks, which operate at accuracies equivalent to an
error of one second in 150,000 years enable us with ease to measure irregularities in the rotation
period of the Earth itself the former standard of timekeeping." (BT 161)

85
the week (Friday). Yet, while calendric units are constrained by the qualitative

aspects of the time which they are meant to designate the units of clock time are

based on arbitrary divisions which are purely conventional. " The results in a

strong tendency of the clock to autonomize the time from any events outside its

own mechanism. 12

Unlike the calendar, clock time does not date events but determines the

length of time they take. It replaces the internal variation and complicated system

of counting with a metric and homogeneous measure. Extracted from history and

stripped of ceremony, ritual and religion, the regular beat of the clock is allied

with quantity rather than quality. It is an abstract and formalized time indifferent

to the events which it measures.

For the majority of history the clock has been subordinated to the

calendar. Until the invention of the mechanical escapement, clocks in so far as

they existed (as sundials, water clocks and sand glasses) operated within the

confines of the calendar. Using variable hours which were determined by the

length of the day and fluctuated with the seasons, the time of the clock had little

"Traditionally clock time has been organized according to the Babylonian 60 based system (there
are 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute). However, with the rise of digital
technology clocks have begun to split the second into gradations based on the decimal system
(e.g the nanosecond, the picosecond etc... )

12This is most evident with cyberspace time which does not distinguish between the days of the
week or even between night and day. This results in businesses having to develop new models in
which they are 'open' 24 hours, 7 days a week, and is also an increasing factor in processes of
globalization which make use of different time-zones to increase productivity.

86
or no autonomy. Though it was used for certain civil functions, 13in comparison to

the calendar, the clock was a trivial device.

Thus, in focussing on the technological development of the clock,

capitalism has actualized a distinction in time which had, until the capitalist

regime, existed solely as a virtuality. In effecting a technological change that

made clock time ever more independent from the calendar, capitalism not only

invented a new type of time-keeping device it also discovered a new type of

time.

"Academic's lives, " Deleuze is quoted as saying, "are seldom

interesting." Days are invariably filled with some mixture of reading, writing, and

lecturing, and unless this routine is punctuated by some surprising or dramatic

event biographical details rarely hold much importance. In the case of Immanuel

Kant, however, the situation is somewhat different. For the legends surrounding

Kant's life suggest that he performed the monotonous routine of his academic

schedule with such extreme regularity and precision that one cannot fail to

become absorbed in the meticulous, almost psychotic timing of his day to day

existence.
In an essay entitled The Last Days of Immanuel Kant Thomas Dequincy

13For example, in the fifth century water clocks were used in Athenian law courts to limit the time
of speeches. "Since court proceedings usually had to be concluded within a day, the total
speaking time in criminal trials was split three ways between the accuser, the accused, and the
judges, using as a basis the approximate amount of water that flowed out of vessels on a short
day (about nine hours). (HH, 23)

87
combines historical fact with fictional flare to describe this existence in detail.

Kant's day, according to Dequincy, began "precisely at five minutes before five

o'clock, winter or summer, when Lampe, Kant's footman, who had formerly

served in the army, marched into his master's room with the air of a sentinel on

duty, and cried aloud in a military tone. "Mr Professor, the time is come. " (LDIK,

341 ) Upon hearing this pronouncement Kant rose immediately and "as the clock

struck five he was seated at the breakfast table" (LDIK, 341) In accordance with

his passion for order and "love for architectonic symmetry" (WWR, 448) Kant -

so the story goes - adopted a routine reminiscent of the tables that structure the

first critique. His daily schedule was divided into 3 parts of 8 hours each, the first

dedicated to work, the second to leisure, and the third to sleep. The first part, the

working day, was brought to a close when at "precisely three-quarters before

one he arose from his chair and called aloud to his cook, 'It has struck three-

quarters' (LDIK, 341) Kant then closed up his office and preceded to lunch. After

the meal at 3: 30 pm, almost half way into the section of the day reserved for

leisure, Kant would go on his daily walk. He was greeted, according to legend, by

the citizens of Konigsberg who would look out their windows, wave to the

professor and set their watches by his movements. Thus, when Heine compares

Kant to the "great clock of the cathedral" he is not speaking metaphorically. For

if the stories are even partially true, the extremity of Kant's punctuality was such

that his very activities functioned to tell the time.

88
As an empirical subject, then, Kant was deeply influenced by the clock.

Historically, he was writing in a period in which these time-keepers had already

achieved a certain amount of ubiquity and were well on their way of establishing

themselves as the key device in time-keeping technology. A year before the

publication of the first critique, clocks made the first step in supplanting

astronomy as the ultimate chronometric reference, when "in 1780 Geneva first

started to use "mean time" in preference to solar time. " (ST, 4) Kant lived in a

world in which clocks had long since been introduced to urban centres and it is

undoubtedly the case, as is clear from Heine's analogy, that central to the town

of Konigsberg was a public time piece. Moreover, the lore which surrounds

Kant's life suggests that some form of clock or watch adorned every room of his

home and study.

Yet, while it is clear that clock time was a crucial factor in Kant's life, the

impact it had on his writings remains uncertain. There is a strong tendency,

especially in the discipline of; philosophy, to separate a thinkers life from his

work. This is reinforced in the case of Kant, since at the very foundations of

critique is an insistence on the split between empirical experience and

transcendental thought. It is thus in accordance with his own principles that

Kant's experiential existence is deemed irrelevant. For it is not through the

empirical that one gains access to the transcendental.

One of the consequences of this line of thought is that it reinforces the

89
commonly held assumption that Kant, like most other thinkers, made his

philosophical discoveries by secluding himself from the outside world. According

to this view, Kant, explored the transcendental in the solitary confines of his

office where, through a process of epistemological introspection, he developed

his critique of reason by examining the operations of thinking itself.

The problem with this view is that it cannot help but ignore the uncanny

resemblance which exists between the time of the clock which governed Kant's

life and the discussion of time found in the 'Transcendental Aesthetic'. This

resemblance can be characterized according to the following features:

First, clocks converge with Kantian critique in that with both time ceases

to be in the control of an outside authority. Kant's relocation of time within the

individual subject is paralleled in the history of time-keeping when, with the

miniaturization of clocks and the mass production of cheap watches, time

ceased to be in the hands of the priest or the ruler of the state and becomes

instead the property of the individual. Thus developments in time-keeping

technology both echo and support the autonomy of the modern subject. To quote

from Davis S Landes:

Where people had once depended on the cry of the night watch, the bell
of the church, or the turret clock in the town square, now they had the time
at home or on their person and could order their life and work in a manner
to
once reserved regulated communities. In this way the privatisation
(personalization) of time was a major stimulus to the individualism that
was an ever more salient aspect of Western civilization. (RT, 89)

90
In both the history of the clock and in the first critique, this personalisation

of time corresponds to a process of interiorization. In Kant, as we have seen,

time as the form of inner sense moves inside the subject to become both the

limit and the defining feature of interiority. An analogous process can be said to

have occurred with the technology of the clock. The clock, like the Kantian

subject, is an internally articulated system which relates itself to the outside

precisely through temporal autonomization.

Furthermore, clock time is similar to time as pure intuition in that with both

the power of temporality becomes the ultimate system of a surreptitious capture

and usurpation. The clock is a machine for producing time. Once developed, its

product (hours, minutes, seconds) envelopes everything, including its own

internal processes. Even those objects and events of the external world that had

once been used to mark the time (i.e. the rotation of the planets) are now given

precise and accurate measurement by the ticking of the clock.

The final and most important point of convergence, however, is that both

clock time and time as a pure intuition revolutionizes the classical conception of

time by liberating temporality from the events which happen inside it. In creating

a purely quantitative time - distinct from astronomy -14 clocks developed a mode

of temporality which ceases to be determined by the objects of the external

14In 1967 the rate of cesium's pulse was calibrated to 9,192,631,770 oscillations per second.
This is now the official measurement of world time, replacing the old standard based on the
earth's rotation and orbit, which had used as its base number a second equal to 1/31556925.9747
of a year. This means that under this new regime of cesium the year is no longer measured as

91
world. In this way, the autonomy of clock technology parallels the Kantian

distinction between a formalized structure of time and the changes which occur

inside it. Thus, in paying relatively little attention to the calendar as a time-

keeping system in order to concentrate instead on the new technology of the

clock, the production of capitalist time converges with Kantian system

inaugurating a revolution - not in time but of time - which substitutes a

transformation in time-marking conventions for a much more fundamental shift in

the nature of time itself.

365.242199 days but as 290,091,200,500,000,000 oscillation of C's, give or take an oscillation or

two. (C, 234)

92
2.2 The Synthetic Culture of Clock Time, or Time = Money

Joseph Conrad's book The Secret Agent turns upon the idea that the

most effective way of attacking capitalist culture is to target the time. Set in

London in 1884, The Secret Agent is a tale based on the historic attempt to

bomb the observatory at Greenwich. In Conrad's fiction the rationale for this

bizarre occurrence is related through a conversation between the agent, Mr

Verloc and his boss Vladimir, the Russian agent provocateur. Appearing on

summons to Vladimir's office, Verloc is informed that in order to earn his keep

he must use his links with the anarchist group 'Future of the Proletariat' to

oversee a series of terrorist activities designed to arouse extremism amongst

the British, discredit the revolutionaries and provoke panic amongst the

bourgeoisie. In order to accomplish these goals, Vladimir insists, all the

traditional modes of terrorism must be abandoned. Attacks on either royalty or

religion will not do. Assassinations are expected. Assaults on public buildings,

while they undoubtedly cause some alarm, are easily dismissed as the act of

a lone maniac. "A bomb in the National Gallery would, " Vladimir concedes,

`make some noise, " but not amongst the right people. To hit at the heart of

the bourgeoisie, Verloc is instructed, one must strike against `the true fetish of

the hour - science and learning. " (SA, 35) "It would be really telling, " says his

boss, gloating in the persuasiveness of his own logic, if one could throw a

bomb into pure mathematics. " (SA, 36) Though this is unfortunately

impossible Vladimir contents himself with the next best thing, "What do you

93
think, " he asks, of having a go at astronomy? " (SA, 36) By the end of the

meeting it is dear that in order for Verloc to stay on the payroll he must stage

an attack on Greenwich. 'Go for the first meridian' Vladimir demands as he

pushes the disgruntled but acquiescing Verloc out of the room.

Conrad's book sets out to ridicule the cruel and baseless inanity of this

unsuccessful gesture. His is a story of the perversion of politics, the evil of

ideology, emotional betrayal and personal grief. And yet, the notion that

Marxist revolutionaries should attack the prime meridian is not as absurd as it

first appears. Though the bombing of Greenwich is perhaps ill advised, the

thinking behind it is sound. For, as we will see, there are few things as central

to capitalism as Greenwich Mean Time.

The observatory at Greenwich made its initial impact in the mid

'
eighteenth century, when the clockmaker John Harrison devised a solution to

what had come to be known as the longitude problem. Up until this point,

ocean travellers had only one coordinate with which to determine their

location. The means of judging one's latitude which depends on natural signs

such as temperature and planetary positions had been known for thousands

of years. The much more arbitrary task of determining one's longitude, on the

other hand, was, to quote from Dava Sobel's best selling book on the subject,

a 'dilemma which stumped the wisest minds of the world for the better part of

human history. " (L, 4)

' The precise date for the development of H4, the clock that eventually won the Longitude
prize is 1759.

94
In 1714 the British Parliament, sought to resolve this dilemma by

offering a prize "equal to a king's ransom for a 'practicable and useful'

means of determining longitude. " (L, 8) What followed was a struggle that

pitted the tradition of astronomy against the emerging technology of the

clock. Since longitude is a fusion of space and time the solution to the

problem could come from one of two ways, either through the perfection of

lunar charts, or through the development of a timekeeper that would handle

the extreme conditions of ocean travel John Harrison, defied the

.2
astronomers at Greenwich who favoured the lunar method and devoted his

life to producing a clock which could keep the time at sea. In 1759 Harrison's

work came to fruition with the completion of H4, the "time-keeper that

ultimately won the longitude prize" (L, 106).

Harrison's marine chronometer was, undoubtedly, one of the most

influential machines ever built. It played a critical role in securing control over

the oceans, expanding trade routes, and stabilizing commercial networks. By

offering a practicable solution to the longitude problem Harrison's clock

established Greenwich at the heart of the British empire, and was thus crucial

to the onset of global capitalism.

It was not until over a hundred years later, however, that the power of

Greenwich was globally entrenched. By the late 19th century the rapid growth

of communication and transportation, in particular the expansion of the

railroad system, meant that some kind of temporalcoordinationhad became

2 This latter
method rests on the fact that longitudecan be inferred by knowingthe time on
95
essential. With each city, town, or village governed by its own local time the

scheduling of pick ups, deliveries, arrivals and departures was next to

impossible. For industrialized culture to function it became necessary to adopt

a standard time frame.

The idea of dividing the world into 24 time zones, 15 degrees of

longitude wide and one hour apart was initially devised to co-ordinate North

American rail way traffic. The installation of this plan, however, demanded

that world time be synchronized on a zero point. This occurred in 1884 at the

International Meridian Conference held in Washington DC. Here it was

agreed that the prime meridian would be the one passing through the 'centre

of the transit Instrument at the Observatory at Greenwich'. 3

Mapped at 00 00' 00" Greenwich thus became the official 'centre of

time and space'. Still today Greenwich is the 'keeper of the stroke of

midnight'(L, 168) It marks the beginning of the 'universal day' for all the

world and defines the east/west position of everywhere else on the planet.

"Greenwich time even extends into outer space: Astronomers use GMT to

time predictions and observations, except that they call it Universal Time, or

UT, in their celestial calendars (L, 168)

The history of Greenwich, then, is central to the emergence of a

capitalist production of globalized time. Beginning with a battle which pits

boarda ship and comparingit to the time at port.

3 There was opposition to this, primarily from the French, who 'continued to recognize their
own Paris Observatory meridian, a little more than two degrees east of Greenwich, as the
starting line for another twenty-seven years, until 1911. (Even then they hesitated to refer
directly to Greenwich mean time, preferring the locution 'Pads Mean Time, retarded by nine

96
astronomers against engineers, it tells the story of a transition into a new age

in which the entrenched power of the 'star watchers' gives way to remarkable

feats in engineering, technological innovation, and a continuous upward curve

of industrial development. From the discovery of longitude to the

standardization of time, Greenwich, as the centre of capitalist time, appears to

neglect the calendar in order to celebrate instead the manifest triumph of the

clock.

History of the Clock

It is common amongst sociologists and historians of time to trace the

culture of the clock back to the monastic tradition of the Middle Ages. For,

according to a number of accounts, it is in the monasteries of the West where

one finds the first signs of a culture based on the quantifiable and abstract

regularity of clock time. 4 Monks, in particular those of the Benedictine order,

divided their day into measurable units in order to develop a strict daily regime

of work, rest and prayer. 'For centuries the religious orders had been the

masters of discipline: they were the specialists of time, the great technicians

of rhythm and regular activities. " (DP, 150) By scheduling time and

'synchronizing the action of men' (TC 14) they creating a mode of existence

minutes twenty one seconds. )' (L, 168)

4 In the opening pages of his book Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford suggests that the
clock, the key-machine of the modem industrial age; (TC14) arose out of the temporal
culture which developed in the monasteries. The monastery, ' he writes, was the seat of a
regular life, and an instrument for striking the hours at intervals or for reminding the bell-ringer
that it was time to strike the bells was an almost inevitable product of this life' (TC, 13)
97
based on discipline, rationality and rule.

The temporal regularity and time scheduling of monastic life is said to

have arose initially in order to provide shelter against the unpredictability and

confusion of everyday existence. Living in the isolation of the monasteries

monks created cloistered communities which offered seclusion and refuge

from the chaos of ordinary life. To quote Lewis Mumford: Within the walls of

the monastery was sanctuary: under the rule of the order surprise and doubt

and caprice were put at bay. Opposed to the erratic fluctuations and

pulsations of the worldly life was the iron discipline of the rule. " (TC, 13)

The force which imposed the time table, however, should not be seen

as a solely negative one. Time scheduling was more than a means of trying to

keep the forces of chaos under control. It was also a positive religious

injunction. First, because the rhythms of prayer demanded an accurate

account of the division of time. "The central element in monastic daily routine

was divine worship. In keeping with Psalm 119, verses 164 (A Seven times a

day I praise thee") and 62 (At midnight I rise to give thee thanks") it was

performed seven times during the day and once during the night. " (HH 35)

The fact that prayers occurred so often, and that their scheduling did not

adhere to calendric time (there is no calendric or astronomical means of

determining midnight) meant that monks had to develop some other way of

keeping track of the time. In order to accomplish this the monasteries put the

abbot in charge of maintaining a new temporal order, one which was no

longer structured by the concrete rhythms of the planets but was determined

98
instead in accordance with the dictates of the monastic rule. Signalling the

time by the ringing of a bell, the abbot would call the monks to prayer. Thus,

unlike other religious practices in which the passage of time dictates when to

pray, in monastic life prayer began to dictate the calculation of time.

This strict timetable of devotion was, as we will see, motivated by a

theological necessity5. For according to the monastic tradition, time

scheduling was in itself a means of devoting oneself to God. 'Idleness, "

wrote Benedict, is an enemy of the soul. " His text, the Benedictine rule,

committed itself to fighting this enemy by developing a particular relation to

time. Leisure was not permitted. For unless one adopted a disciplined

structure which compartmentalized meditation, devotion and work, idleness

would seep into the soul and steal away time that was meant to be dedicated

to God. Thus, if monks were to fulfil their religious duty and live according to

the will of their creator, time had to be strictly rationalized. According to this

story, then, the clock was developed almost as a form of worship, necessary

to uphold the beliefs of a certain strand in the Christian tradition.

This thesis, that clock time originated inside the walls of monasteries,

has been challenged along a number of lines. In his book History of the Hour,

Gerhard Dohm-van Rossum argues, for example, that while it is true that the

monastic tradition rationalised time it did not pay much attention to measuring

it.6 Time in the monasteries was regulated but it was not yet made regular.

5 This will be made clear in our discussion of Max Weber below.

6 See History of the Hour pages 33 40

-
99
For the religious orders marked the division of the day not by the use of the

clock but by the ringing of the bell. Still dependent on the temporality of the

calendar, monastic time operated with hours that fluctuated with the

seasons.? Temporal distinctions were made through divine office not by the

ticking of a mechanism. 8 Thus, discipline and scheduling were not by

themselves sufficient to create the autonomy of clock time.

In an essay entitled Merchant's Time and Church's Time in the Middle

Ages the historian Jack Le Goff makes the claim that clock time arose, not in

the monasteries, but rather through the pragmatic culture of the merchants.

He argues that in order for clocks to take hold, time had to be freed from the

clutches of God. His essay begins with a discussion of usury. "Among the

principal criticism levelled against the merchants, " he writes, "was the charge

that their profit implied a mrtgage on time which was supposed to belong to

God alone. " (MT/CT, 29) Both credit and interest, which are of course crucial

to the merchant, demand tliat the prohibition on usury be lifted and that -as

we will later see - money not God be equated with time. 9 Furthermore, in that

" 'Talk of'Tron discipline' or the machine-like or clockwork rhythm of monastic life,
even in a
purely metaphorical sense, is misleading, because it suggests a time giver (a machine or
clock) external to natural rhythms and the daily round of human life. In actual fact, life
according to the Rule was bound in a very high degree to natural time givers, daylight and the
seasons, and was by no means marked by ascetic resistance to the natural environment. "
(HH, 38)

a'Despite the density of activities, the ordering of the daily monastic routine got by
with
remarkably few indications of time. The beginning of the offices was linked not to a particular
point in time but to a signal or short sequence of signals. ' (HH, 36)

Le Goff writes that once commercial networks were organized, time (and its relation to
monetization) became an object of measurement. The duration of a sea voyage or of a
journey by land to one place or the other, the problem of prices which rose or fell in the course
of a commercialtransaction(the more so as the circuit became increasinglycomplex,
100
they were operating in an environment of technological precision, navigational

necessities, and complex financial dealings, merchants could no longer

accept the unpredictability and variations of a time dominated by religion. To

operate commercial networks merchants needed a mode of time that could

be explicitly measured and regulated-10Commercial capitalism requires a

secularization of time, which operates with constant rather than variable

hours, one in which the science of technology rather than the authority of

priests is in control.

Yet another factor, crucial to the development of clock time, was the

"
process of urbanization. Historically, rural life had been governed by the

qualitative time of the calendar. The passage of the seasons, the natural

cycle of the day and the concrete rhythms of agriculture dictated how time

was structured and filled. In the country, working time was task driven and the

duration and scheduling of each activity was determined by natural cues.

In the urban environment, on the other hand, time become unhinged

from events. From a very early period, public clocks were installed in the city

affecting profits), the duration of the labor of craftsmen and workers (since the merchant was
almost always an employer of labor), all made increasing claims on [the merchant's] attention
and became the object of evermore explicit regulation. (MT/CT, 35)
10This was absolutely necessary due to the emphasis on facts, documentation
and double
entry book keeping that were a crucial component to the life of the merchant. To quote Le
Goff: 'The statuses of corporations, together with such commercial documents as account
sheets, travel diaries, manuals of commercial practice and the letters of exchange then
coming into common use in the fairs of Champagne (which in the twelfth and thirteenth
century became the 'clearinghouse' of international commerce), all show how important the
exact measurement of time was becoming to the orderly conduct of business. ' (MT/CT, 35)
11Deleuze emphasizes this aspect in speaking of the relation between clock time
and Kant.
For Deleuze it is Kant's'historical situation which allows him to grasp the implications of the
critical reversal [in the philosophy of time]. Time is no longer the cosmic time of an original
celestial movement, nor is it the rural time of derived metereological movements. It has
become the time of the city and nothing other, the pure order of time. ' (ECC, 28)
101
centres and time in the towns became governed by these new machines. The

time of the clock began to regulate when one was to eat, sleep and especially

when and for how long to work. As Mumford writes, "the bells of the clock

tower almost defined urban existence. (TC, 14) With the migration from the

country to the towns, then, there arose 'a regular, normal time associated

with daily life, a sort of chronological net in which urban life was caught" (TL

48)

All three of these cultural forces crucial to the development of the clock

- the discipline of monastic life, the secular world of merchant capital, and the

growth of industrialized urban centres - have also been strongly linked to the

development of capitalist culture.

It has been argued, for example, most influentially by Weber and

Mumford, that the structure and discipline of the monastic tradition was a

crucial precursor to modem industrial society. Operating with the same model

as modem factories, monasteries, writes Mumford, were crucial in "helping to

give human enterprise the regular collective beat and rhythm of the machine. "

(TC, 14), Having built a society based on order, rationalism and rules, the

influence of these religious communities is such that, according to Mumford,

"the Benedictines, the great working order, " can be seen as 'the original

founders of modem capitalism. ' (TC, 13)

In much the same way, merchant capital is often viewed as the

prototype of the capitalist system. There are of course crucial distinctions

between merchant capital, which is restricted to circulation, and industrial

102
capitalism which extends capitalist relations into the sphere of production.

Nevertheless, merchant capital laid down the grid of 'socially decoded' or

commercially rationalized interchange within which industrial capitalism could

develop. 12

Finally, the ongoing process of urbanization, particularly because of its

relation to the abstraction of labour, has also been seen as fundamental in

the transition to the capitalist mode of production. The move away from the

country stripped people of their concrete roles. No longer coded according to

particular tasks or positions (the peasant, the farmer, the baker) vast portions

of the population became defined purely as quantities of abstract labour

power. Having lost access or ownership to the means of production they

became 'free labourers'. Thus, life in the city developed a socio-economic

in
system which labour could be traded with relative ease. A factor which

many - from Smith to Marx and beyond - believe to be the key to capitalist

production.

Thus, the proto-industrial discipline of monasticism, the rationalism of

accountancy and credit practised by the merchants and the large and fluid

labour markets that arose through the process of urbanization, are all

considered key, both in the history of the clock and in the history of

capitalism. Yet, one should not be surprised that the development of clock-

12It has been argued, by Engels in particular, that merchant capital was the vehicle by which
capitalism replaced feudal society.

103
time is so intertwined with the production of capitalist culture. 13 For, as we will

see, at the very foundations of capitalism is the synthetic operation which

equates time with money.

Time Is Money

Part 1: Weber and the Spirit of Capitalism

Remember, that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by
his labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle, one half of that day, though
he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to
reckon that the only expense; he really has spent, or rather thrown
away, five shillings besides.. ' (PESC, 51)

According to Max Weber, when Benjamin Franklin speaks these

words, which warn against the dangers of idleness and wasting time, he is

speaking as a mouthpiece for capitalist culture. His words are the

embodiment of the Protestant ethic, an ethic, which Weber has famously

is
argued, the characteristic feature of 'the spirit of capitalism. ' 14For Weber,

13 As we will see, this relation between clock-time and capitalist culture can neither be
explained by the discourse of technological determinism (which presumes a one way causal
relationship which runs from technology to social systems) nor by social constructivism (which
maintains a linear causality but sees it as running in the opposite direction). For as we will see
in the following pages, the culture of capitalism and the technology of the clock are mutually
involved in a circuit of reciprocal presuppositions such that it is impossible to say which
precedes the other. For it is clear, both, that the development of the clock could only have
taken place within capitalist culture and that capitalist culture presumes, from its very
beginning, the ubiquity of the clock.

14The connections between critique and capitalism are no doubt due at least in part to
- -
Kant's obvious connections to Protestantism. This relation is stressed both by Heine, who
argues that Kantianism is 'nothing else than the last consequence of Protestantism. ' (RPG,
59) and by Weber who maintains that "being partly of Scotch ancestry and strongly influenced
by pietism in his bringing up-many of [Kant's] formulations are closely related to the ideas of
ascetic Protestantism. ' (PESC, 270)

104
capitalist culture is a Christian culture since its 'spirit' corresponds to the

beliefs, practices and ethos of a particular strand in the Christian tradition. His

work sets out to show that by cultivating an ethos of 'active asceticism' this

strand of Christianity became the first religion to have developed an economic

is
ethic which conducive to the capitalist way of life. 15

This ethic depends, first of all, on what Weber has called, the

'disenchantment of the world. ' (FMW, 290) Christianity, like its precursor

Judaism, is founded on a grand exorcism which banishes magic, expels

spirits and strips objects of their animistic power. Outlawing the sorcerer, it

puts the prophet in charge of a world that is "disenchanted of its gods and

demons. " (FMW, 148) The sacred, which is now captured by the

monotheistic rule of transcendence, has retreated from the everyday. In place

of a magical world, there arises a rational, intellectualized cosmos which is,

for the first time, capable of being measured and quantified.

Seeking to distance itself from mysticism as well as from magic, the

Judeo-Christian tradition shuns not only sorcery but also what Weber calls the

'exemplary prophet', a figure that is characterized by an ecstatic relation to

the divine. (FMW, 289) Trance and possession are criticized since they

attempt to flee from the world that God has created. What is required instead

15It would be
a mistake to assume that Weber's argument is that the Protestant religion is the
cause of capitalism, or the capitalist way of life. No economic ethic, " he writes, has ever been
determined solely by religion. In the face of man's attitudes towards the world - as determined
by religious or other (in our sense) 'inner' factors - an economic ethic has, of course, a high
measure of autonomy. Given factors of economic geography and history determine this
measure of autonomy in the highest degree. The religious determination of life-conduct,
however, is also one - note this - only one, of the determinants of the economic ethic. (FMW,
268)
105
is the 'emissary prophet' who no longer functions as God's 'vessel', but has

become instead, his 'tool'. (PESC, 113-114) With careful sobriety the

emissary prophet encounters the divine as the giver of the law. Working as

God's instrument he teaches his population to mould life in accordance with

the divine will.

The result is the ethos of `active - or wordly - asceticism, " Weber's

name for an asceticism which has turned away from a contemplative 'flight

from the world' and dedicated itself instead to 'work in the world'. (FMW,

290) Placed in the role of custodian or guardian, the active ascetic seeks to

`create the kingdom of heaven on earth, " transforming the world through the

activity of labour. With the active ascetic, then, economic activity ceases to be

a hindrance to religious life and becomes instead a sacred duty. 16

Weber maintains that the ethos of active asceticism reached its apex

in Calvinism. " It is clear from his work, however, that the roots of the

Protestant ethic predate the reformation. According to Weber, the first inklings

of the religious spirit of capitalism can be found in the monasteries of the

Middle Ages. For it is in these secluded environments where there first arose

a culture based on order, discipline and rule.

As we have seen these qualities of monastic life arise from the fact that

16In inner-wordly asceticism, the grace and the chosen state of the religiously qualified
man
prove themselves in everyday life. To be sure, they do so not in the everyday life as it is given,
but in methodical and rationalized routine-activities of workaday life in the service of the Lord.
Rationally raised into a vocation, everyday conduct becomes the locus for proving one's state
of grace. ' (FMW, 291)
17For Weber's discussion
of Calvinism as a religious foundation for worldly asceticism see

106
they structured their existence according to a new regime of time. Monks

developed a religious culture which deplored the magical and mystical

attempt to access realms that existed outside time. In place of this heretical

'escapism' monasticism insisted on a 'this worldliness' in which spiritual

fulfilment came from the management and measure of time itself. Like the

Puritans after them, they believed that 'not leisure and enjoyment, but only

activity serves to increase the glory of God. " (PESC, 157) With their

condemnation of idleness they produced an ethos in which the "waste of time

was the first and in principle the deadliest of sins. " (PESC, 157) "For,

according to the Christian ethic which Franklin would later expound "every

hour lost is lost to labour for the glory of God. " (PESC, 158) Thus, writes

Weber, it does not yet hold, with Franklin, that time is money, but the

proposition is true in a certain spiritual sense. " (PESC, 158)

It is this which allowed these cloistered communities to engineer a

culture which, by providing the kernel of the Protestant 18

ethic, managed to

spread outside the monasteries' walls. By making time bound labour a

religious imperative they provided the key to the development of active

asceticism, a temporal ethos which, according to Weber, allowed the

rationalized, divisible and quantifiable world of capitalism to prosper.

Part 2: Karl Marx and the Labour theory of value

The ProtestantEthic and the Spirit of Capitalismp.98-128

18As Weber writes, 'active self-control,
which formed the end of the exercitia of St Ignatius

107
As is well known Marx's work differs from Weber's in that his theory of

capitalism rests not on an analyses of religion but on a theory of material

production. Nevertheless, as we will see, the synthetic statement 'time is

money' plays as central a role for Marx as it does for Weber. For regardless

of their differences, these two thinkers share the fact that they have

developed theories of capitalism which are founded on a particular regime of

time.

The key to the Marxist understanding of capitalism is the labour theory

of value (which he inherited and modified from the prior history of political

economy). As the economist Joseph Schumpeter writes: The fundamental

explanatory principle of any system of economics is always a theory of value.

Economic theory concerns facts that are expressed in terms of value, and

value is not only the prime mover of the economic cosmos, but also the form

in which its phenomena are made comparable and measurable. " (TGE, 151).

Thus, it is no accident that Capital Volume One opens with a discussion of

how commodities obtain their value.

According to Marx, commodities or 'external objects' can be "looked at

from two points of view of quality and quantity. " (C1,125) Qualitatively

commodities are defined by their use value. That is, their value is derived

from the fact that they fulfil some 'human need. ' Thus, a coat, for example,

viewed according to its use value, is something someone wears to keep out

and of rational monasticvirtues everywherewas also the most importantpracticalideal of

108
the cold. As quantities, however, commodities cease to be determined by the

uses they fulfil and become instead 'the material bearers of exchange value'

(Cl, 126) The coat is no longer a garment to be wom but rather an object that

can be traded on the market place.

This switch from use value to exchange value occurs, according to

Marx, through a process of abstraction. That is to say, that the transformation

from quality to quantity requires that commodities be stripped of their concrete

use value and be determined instead by something more abstract. According

to Marx, the exchange relation necessarily takes the form of the equation x=

y (i.e. 100 loaves of bread is equal to 1 coat). What, this equation signifies, he

writes, "is that a common element of identical magnitude exists in two

different things... Both are therefore equal to a third thing, which is in itself

neither the one nor the other. Each of them, in so far as it is exchange value,

must therefore be reducible to some third thing. a (Cl, 127)

Thus, economic transactions in the form of exchange require the

production of an abstract plane in which qualitatively distinct items can be

compared. For in order to operate as a medium of exchange commodities

must be capable of being appraised according to some standard measure.

This 'standard measure', writes Marx, cannot "be a geometrical, physical,

chemical or other natural property of commodities. " (Cl, 127) since these

concrete qualitative characteristics belong to the commodity as use value

and, as we have seen, commercial exchange occurs through a process of

Puritanism. (PESC, 119)

109
abstraction in which commodities are extracted from their particular use or

function.

What the exchange relation necessitates, then, is a value determined

by a common property that all commodities share. For Marx, this common

factor is the fact that all commodities are a product of human labour.

Everything from corn to clothes to cars has been created by the hands of the

worker. It is important to note that labour is here understood not according to

its concrete manifestation (the labourer as farmer, baker, smith etc.. ) but is

seen instead as 'human labour in the abstract. " (C1,128) Thus, Marx

concurs with the conclusion of modem political economy (from Adam Smith),

that the value of commodities are determined by the quantity of abstract

labour which their production requires.

Posing the question as to how this abstract quantity -that is the

amount of labour contained in each item of exchange - is to be determined,

the labour theory of value had answered: through aggregate labour time.

The quantity of labour, ' writes Marx, Is measured by its duration, " (Capital

1,46) or, even more emphatically, the measure of labour is time" (PP, 42).

Time, then, is the means through which abstract labour is quantified. It is form

or standard which serves to calculate exchange value, and is thus the means

through which objects are transformed into commodities. To quote Marx: As

values, all commodities are defined only as definite masses of congealed

labour time. " (C1,47)

In the Marxist theory, labour time not only determines exchange value,

110
but is also the crucial use-value for industrial capitalism, and is thus the

principal of surplus value. It is this recognition which has been seen -by Lenin

amongst others - as the comer stone of Marx's economic theory. 19For it is

surplus value which, according to Marx, accounts both for the (rigorously

quantifiable) exploitation of the worker and for the (exactly equivalent)

generation of profit and wealth for the capitalist class.

According to the analyses in Capital surplus value is generated by the

fact that the capitalist makes the labourer work for more time than is

necessary for the reproduction of labour itself. The economist Boehm-Bawerk

describes the theory as follows.

Under capitalism the working day is divided into two parts. In the first
part-the 'necessary working time' -the worker produces the means
necessary for his own support, or the value of those means; and for
this part of his labour he receives an equivalent in wages. During the
second part -the 'surplus working time '-he is exploited, he produces
'surplus value' without receiving any equivalent for it. (KMCS, 16)

To quote Marx, `the fact that half a day's labour is necessary to keep

the labourer alive during 24 hours, does not in any way prevent him from

working a whole day. (C, 188) In short, "surplus value is produced by the fact

that the capitalist makes the labourer work for him a part of the day without

paying him for it". ( KCS 16) The bourgeois mode of production, then, extracts

surplus from the 'extra' time that the labourer is forced to work.

Thus, the two key features in Marx's analyses of the capitalist system,

exchange value and surplus value - are constituted through the operations
-

19 See Lenin,V. I. Marx, Engels, Marxism.Moscow:ProgressPublishers,1970.(especially p.

111
of time. This shows that though Marx is known for his commitment to

historicism, the mode of temporality that he sees at work in capitalism is not

at all historical. In his analyses of capitalist time, Marx ignores the qualitative

time of the calendar in order to concentrate instead on the homogenous,

uniform, and purely quantitative time of the clock. For according to Marx, it is

the constant ticking of the clock which as an instrument of labour discipline

- -
underlies the industrial capitalist system by equating time with money in the

form of hourly wage-rates, thus providing the universal measure of abstract

labour.

Part 3: Boehm-Bawerk The Positive Theory of Capital

The notion that the capitalist synthesis 'time is money' rests solely on

the time of the clock is brought into question by the Austrian economist Eugen

Boehm-Bawerk. Boehm-Bawerk 'positive theory of capital' challenges the

implicit bias of both Marx and Weber by focussing, as we will see, on the

crucial importance of the variations of qualitative - and ultimately intensive -

time in the constitution of capitalist production.

For our purposes Boehm-Bawerk's theory is best approached through

his book Karl Marx and the Close of his System, a work which according to

Joseph Schumpeter "will never cease to be the critique of Marx in so far as

the theoretical content of Marx's system is concerned. " (TGE, 164) The

54)
112
importance of this book in economic theory stems from the fact that it

provides a succinct account of why the labour theory of value should be

replaced by the theory 20

of marginal utility. Boehm Bawerk's stated aim is to

show that the labour theory of value is, even within Marx's own writings,

21
confused and unworkable. It's success in this regard is such that as Paul

Sweezy writes in the introduction to the text it "might almost be called the

official answer of the economics profession to Marx and the Marxian

school". (MCS, ix)

The crucial factor for us here is that Boehm-Bawerk's argument with

Marx centres on the question of time. It deals, as Schumpeter says, with "the

treatment of the time factor, which is the origin of nine-tenths of the

fundamental difficulties that beset the analytic construction of the economic

process. " (TGE, 165) For, according to Boehm-Bawerk the problem with Marx

and more generally with the labour theory of value is that it misses the overall

workings of capitalism by not paying adequate attention to the primary role of

credit (and interest rates) in the system of capitalist production.

20Schumpeter summarizes the problem with Marx's theory as follows: The essential point is
not whether labour is the true 'source' or'cause' of economic value. This question may be of
primary interest to social philosophers who want to deduce from it ethical claims to the
product, and Marc himself was of course not indifferent to this aspect of the problem. For
economics as a positive science, however, which has to describe or explain actual processes,
it is much more important to ask how the labour theory of value works as a tool of analyses,
and the real trouble with it is that it does this very badly.' (TGE, 28)

21Boehm-Bawark's main contention is that the labour theory of value as laid out in Capital:
Volume I cannot be reconciled with the average rate of profit discussed in Capital: Volume 3.
To quote from Boehm-Bawark: "Marx's third volume contradicts the first. The theory of the
average rate of profit and of the prices of production cannot be reconciled with the theory of
value. '(KCS)

113
Capitalism, according to Boehm-Bawerk, is characterized by a

switch away from direct production in which the existence of the good

immediately follows the expenditure of labour" to what he calls 'roundabout

production' in which the means of production are themselves produced.

Boehm-Bawerk explains this distinction through a variety of illustrations, the

simplest of which is the example of collecting water. In a society based on

direct production water is collected by going to the river each day. Whereas in

a system based on roundabout production a pipe is built that can carry the

water directly into one's home.

In Marxist terms this can be stated by saying that the technological

developments intrinsic to constant capital are a necessary feature of capitalist

production. Yet, though this can be phrased through Marxist terminology it is

not a statement of Marx's own position. For Marx's concentration on labour

power, coupled with his insistence that surplus value can only be generated

through variable capital (employed labour), meant that he could only view

constant capital as a mass of dead labour, a necessary but sterile weight.

Boehm-Bawerk thus departs from Marx in developing a theory in which

change in constant capital has a fundamental role both for the creation of

profit and for the circulation of capital.

For Boehm-Bawerk, then, the time of technological innovation,

research and development is inserted as a positive force in the economy. For

the crucial fact about roundabout production is that while it obtains a greater

result and yields a larger final product than direct production (it is obviously

114
ultimately more efficient to get your water from a tap than to have to go to the

river each day to collect it) it does so by sacrificing time. Roundabout

production is 'time consuming'. "The roundabout ways of capital, " writes

Boehm-Bawerk, "are fruitful but long; they procure us more or better

consumption of goods, but only at a later period of time. This is one of the

ground pillars of the theory of capital" (PTC 82) "In this loss of time which is,

as a rule, bound up with the capitalist process, " he continues, 'lies the sole

ground of that much-talked -of and much-deplored dependence of labourer

on capitalist. "(PTC, 83) The capitalist -as bearer of risk- mobilizes labour,

through credit, on the prospects of future production potentials (not merely

that of immediate extraction of surplus value). 22JosephSchumpeter explains

the theory as follows:

Workers and landlords live on what their means of production produce.

They do not, however, live on what they are at any given time engaged
in producing-their current output is of course not yet ripe for
consumption-but on products that have been produced at some
previous time. To furnish this store of means of subsistence is the
function of the capitalists-workers and landlords can be said then to
live, always and everywhere, on advances made to them by the
capitalists. (TGE, 163)23

This, however is only one side of the equation. Boehm-Bawerk's

analyses insists that credit is always coupled with interest. For it is by means

22To attempt Marx does -to calculate a 'rate of exploitation' without reference to this
-as
prospective production radically diminishes the importance of the time element in the system.
23The labour theory of value is
necessarily blind to this fundamental aspect of the capitalist
mode of production. For in determining value through duration of labour time it fails to take
into account the effects of when this labour takes place.

115
of interest that capitalism is able to profit on the sacrifice of time inherent in its

mode of production. Boehm -Bawerk's "positive theory of capital", then, rests

on twin forces of time in which the temporal delay of roundabout production is

compensated by the phenomenon of interest. "The great synthesis of these

two elements, this disengagement and combination of time and added

returns, alone makes possible a consistent theory of the role of time in

production. " (TGE, 167)

Interest, the practice of charging money for time, is founded, according

to Boehm-Bawerk, on the qualitative difference between present and future. It

rests on the fact that present goods are more highly valued than those which

become available in the future. (TGE, 174) That is, one is in general willing to

pay more for something which is available now then for the same product

which will only be available at some future date. There is then, in short, a

difference in value between present and future commodities. "Interest is

simply the price expression of this difference" (TGE, 175)

Thus, whereas the labour theory of value shows how time works as a

force in the construction of the labourer and constitution of the working day,

for Boehm-Bawerk time is itself a positive economic force. Rather than the

relation between time and money being mediated by labour time, the

situation is closer to the reverse since industrial capitalism itself develops

within the context of prospective production - 'industrial revolutions' or

technological innovations - which are anticipated by interest rates (the cost of

credit). For Boehm-Bawerk, then, it is the intensive difference between

116
present and future (a difference which is irreducable to the time measured by

clock) which ultimately accounts for the capitalist equation of time with

money.

In the previous section it was argued that the split between calendars

and clocks corresponds to an abstract distinction in the nature of time itself. It

sought to show that in the period since the Middle Ages, a process of

abstraction occurred - not in human thought but through technical invention

and engineering - which made this distinction manifest. The development of

the mechanical clock and its subsequent innovations freed time from its sole

determination in the calendar and - like the time of 'Transcendental Aesthetic'

established a new mode of temporality which is capable of acting as an

-

autonomous force.

This section followed on from this distinction and showed how the

invention of clock-time was crucial to the development of a capitalist culture.

In this sense our discussion would appear to concur with the analyses of

capitalist time made by the historians and sociologists that are mentioned

above. For the majority of these thinkers adopt the view capitalist time is

defined by `the dominance of clock time over space and society. " (NS 432)

Writing with a deep nostalgia they wam of the triumph of an abstract and

artificial time that has supplanted the 'natural' organic and concrete time of

the calendar. Capitalism is conceived as a historical event which inaugurated

the tyrannical rule of an "empty" time, 'divisible into equal, constant, and

117
nonqualitive units. (TLSD 202). With the clock, claims Mumford, "abstract

time became the new medium of existence. " (TC, 17) Alienating people from

the qualitative time of the past, it established a world in which a uniform,

continuous, and homogenous time was disassociated from the intrinsic

variation of human events.

Our investigation into the theories of Boehm-Bawerk, however, have

shown that the capitalist emphasis on clock time must be combined with an

account of how the capitalist economy relates to the qualitative time of

24
calendrics. For in equating time with money capitalism not only functions to

extract discipline, work and efficiency from the abstract time of the clock, but

also converts the variations of calendric time into direct economic activity.

Thus in the connection between Kant and capitalism, the analogies

between time in the 'Transcendental Aesthetic' and the formal temporality of

the clock must be seen as only one side of the story. This is important since,

as our discussion of the first critique made clear, the Transcendental

Aesthetic is only a single piece of the Kantian system. For intrinsic to the very

structure of the Critique of Pure Reason is the notion that intuition is blind

unless it is combined with the operations of the understanding.

In the same way, without the calendar the clock is incapable of telling

the time. For, as has already been noted, the ticking which marks the

26In the capitalist production of time, calendric temporality operates less as a marker of
astronomical cycles than it does as a dating system which distinguishes between past,
present and future. Astronomy, as we have seen, has taken on a secondary role since the
planetary revolutions are now measured by the ticking of the clock. Nevertheless, the calendar
is still used to index qualitative distinctions, (year, month, and day of the week), that are
inaccessible to clock-time and yet crucial to capitalist processes of production.
118
passage of hours, minutes and seconds can never, no matter how accurate it

becomes, calculate the day, month or year when something occurs. Thus,

clocks are 'blind' without the dates and the a. m. and p.m. markers which the

calendar provides. Telling the time is thus itself a synthetic operation which

combines the hour, minute and second with the calendric anchors of day,

month and year.

In the Kantian system the two distinct parts of critique are joined

together through the schema. Hidden in the recesses of the imagination, the

secret of the schema takes the synthetic production of time to its highest

power of abstraction. It is thus able to construct a plane which can connect

the Aesthetic with the Logic, joining the intuition of time together with the

temporal concepts of the understanding.

A transcendental reading of the sociology, economics and technology

of time reveals that the production of capitalist time operates, like the diagram

of the schema, to construct an abstract plane which can connect the two

sides of time-keeping with each other. Thus, rather than assuming that the

transformation to capitalist time occurred by replacing the calendar with the

clock, it recognizes that the development of a standardized chronometric

could only take in

place conjunction with the adoption a globalized calendar. 25

Furthermore, it sees in the universal equation of time with money, an abstract

process of production which mobilizes both the time of the clock and the time

27The fact that 'the day for all the world, begins at Greenwich' shows that GMT is not, as it
may first appear, a standardized time based entirely on the clock. In fact, Greenwich time is a
synthesis between clock time and the calendric count.

119
of the calendar into a particular synthetic regime, and thus views this equation

- or synthesis - as operating on the same plane as the transcendental

production of time.

120
2.3 History and the Transcendental

This chapter has sought to demonstrate how elements in the

transcendental structure of time can be mapped on to the temporal regime of

capitalism. The aim in concentrating on this correspondence was not to

reduce the transcendental to the status of the empirical, but rather to uncover

evidence of transcendental synthesis in the sociological, economic and

technical formations of the empirical world. The claim, then, is not that Kant's

writings are the result of the historical experience of capitalist time. For Kant's

critical work, and his discovery of the transcendental production of time,

depends, as we have seen, not on an exploration of experience but of the

underlying conditions which make experience possible. What this chapter

seeks to maintain, however, is that these abstract, synthetic conditions which

underlie experience are not restricted - as Kant believed - to the eternal inner

workings of the human subject but are also found in the technical and cultural

machines that have developed within the history of capitalism.

In an attempt to unravel this assertion, the following section turns to

the work of Karl Marx and Michel Foucault, two thinkers who maintain that

what appear as the universal structures of the transcendental are in fact

subject to change and transformation. That is, according to both Marx and

Foucault the a priori is itself historical. Thus, both provide an account -

however implicit - of how it is that the empirical history of capitalism can

coincide so closely with the a priori domain of the transcendental.

121
It soon becomes apparent, however, that Marx and Foucault differ

radically in their accounts of the relationship between history and the

transcendental. Their theoretical positions follow along two very different

lines. At stake in this divergence is, as we will see, two drastically distinct

ways of understanding history, interiority, and the agency of change.

For Marx, historical time operates as a closed system. The ultimate

force in the generation of change, it creates the a priori through the power of

its own internal dynamics. Foucault's work, on the other hand, reveals that

there are certain empirical transformations that are so dramatic and sudden

that they can only be explained through the gaps and holes that break open in

what otherwise appears as the sealed interiority of history. Foucault thus

maintains that rather than being produced inside history, the transformation of
/
the a priori impact history as a force of the outside.

In examining both these theories, the following pages explore the line

between experience and that which is independent of experience. It does so

in order to ascertain how it is that the transcendental circuits of production

manage to effect the empirical domain of history and vice versa. The

underlying aim, once again, is to reveal the interconnections between the

Kantian revolution in the philosophy of time and the capitalist revolution in the

production of time. These interconnections, as we will eventually see, leads

ultimately to the conclusion that there are certain events in the history of

capitalism which have accessed the a priori plane of the transcendental.

Though Marx's take up of Kant is rarely made explicit in his writings,

122
the Marxist critique of Kant is well known. For throughout his texts Marx

implicitly challenges the Kantian position for its ahistoricity. 1 This

argument is
found in one of its most succinct forms in the opening pages of the

Grundrisse. Though Marx focuses here on 18th century economists rather

than on philosophers, the attack he makes can be easily applied to Kant. For

the crux of Marx's contention is that by basing their analyses of production on

the individual, rather than on the forces of history, these economists

presuppose what they should be explaining. "The 18th century individual, "

writes Marx, "the product on one side of the dissolution of the feudal forms of

society, on the other side of the new forces of production developed since the

sixteenth century -appears [in these writers] as an ideal, whose existence

they project into the past. ' (G, 83) By taking the individual "not as a historic

result but as history's point of departure" (G, 83) these economists miss the

real forces at work in capitalism. For they fail to see that the bourgeois

individual is a product of capitalist production, which is itself ultimately a

product of the socio-economic forces of history. To begin with the individual is

for Marx 'among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth century' (G, 83)

1 'For Marx, Engels and Lenin, Kant's theory of knowledge was defective in three
related
ways. First, it was held to be ahistorical in its account of the a priori contributions made by the
mind in the constitution of knowledge: for Kant these fundamental concepts were universal
properties of the mind whereas Marxists have tended to understand human cognitive powers
as subject to historical transformation and development. Connectedly, whereas Kantianism
locates the a priori conditions of objective knowledge in the faculties of the mind, Marxism
characteristically locates them in indispensable human social practices which have bodily as
well as mental aspects. Finally, Engels and Lenin argued that the boundary between the world
of knowable 'phenomena' and the unknowable 'things-in-themselves' was not, as Kantianism
required, fixed and absolute but was historically relative. The potential knowability of the world
as it is, independent and prior to the human subject, was seen as essential to the empirical

123
since it takes a contingent product of a particular time and place and treats it

as an a priori condition of experience.

In that it is targeted against the economist's presuppositions rather

than their conclusions Marx's argument recalls the structure of transcendental

critique. Speaking as a true Kantian, Marx contends that theoretical

knowledge should begin not with experience but with the constitutive forces

that produce that experience. However, the content of Marx's assertions can

also be read as an example of critique "turned on its head". Thus, Marx's

historical materialism attempts to do here to Kant what it is so famous for

doing to Hegel.

Formulated in this way, Marx's attack on the 'unimaginative conceits of

the eighteenth century' can be reread as follows: Kant is said to have asked

what are the necessary conditions that produce experience. His answer

depended on a revolutionary new role for the transcendental subject. Marx

turns this question around and asks 'what are the necessary conditions which

produce the transcendental subject. ' His answer, of course, is capitalism.

Marx's contention, then is that Kant mistakes a particular and

contingent product of capitalism - the bourgeois individual - for the universal

and eternal subject of philosophy. Implicit in this contention, as we will see, is

the notion that transcendental structures are ultimately produced through the

internal dynamics of history. For according to historical materialism capitalism

world-view of Marxism! (DMT, 279)

124
is a particular socio-economic arrangement that "is itself the product of a

long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of

production and exchange. " (CM, 8)

Marxist history, as is well known, generally divides into three phases,

or modes of production, the ancient, the feudal and the bourgeois. 2 These

three phases are related dialectally such that each successive mode of

production develops out of the internal contradictions of the previous one.

Joseph Schumpeter summarized this point as follows: "The forms of

production themselves have a logic of their own; that is to say, they change

according to necessities inherent in them so as to produce their own

workings. " (TGE, 13) Thus, according to Marxist philosophy, the ancient

necessarily gave way to the feudal, and the feudal necessarily gave way to

the bourgeois. Each stage is both historically and dialectically related to the

previous one such that "higher relations of production never appear before

the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old

society. " (CCPE, 12) It is this logical unfolding of history which is for Marx the

ultimate force of production, and the real agency of change. It generates both

2 Actually Marxism usually singles out four stages of development. Note the following from a
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. in broad outline we can designate the
Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal, and the modem bourgeois methods of production as so many
epochs in the progress of the economic formation of society! (CCPE, 13) Marx believed,
however, that the first of these, the Asiatic mode, existed outside the progressive development
of history. (See Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization: his dispatches and other writings
on China, India, Mexico, the Middle East and North Africa. Edited and introduced by Shlomo
'Ivineri. Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1968) The over-simplification of a history characterized
by these three rigid stages was questioned and complicated, even by Marx himself, in later
writings. Nevertheless, it is still considered to be the basic structure of historical materialism.

125
the capitalist system and its corresponding structures of knowledge. 3

Thus, for Marx, it is no great surprise that Kant's account of the

philosophy of time should converge with changes in the technology and socio-

economics of time which have emerged under capitalism. For both,

regardless of the fact that they occur in radically different spheres, are a

product and expression of the same stage of historical development.

Transcendental and capitalist time coincide since both are the result of the

inevitable changes in modes of production which constitute the internal

dynamics of historical time.

In likening his philosophy to the Copernican revolution, Kant seems to

anticipate the Marxist contention that the discovery of the transcendental was

a fundamentally historical event. Indeed, it is only as a historical event that it

makes any sense to speak of his thought as a revolution. Nevertheless, Kant

is insistent that the discovery of the transcendental could not have been

derived from historical causes.

In the 'Transcendental Doctrine of Method', the last section of the first

Critique, Kant describes how his philosophical method relies on the

architectonic, or the "art of creating systems. " (CPR, 653) This requires the

extraction of an a priori schema or outline which lies "like a germ... hidden in

reason" (CPR, 654). Once uncovered, this a priori schema, " writes Kant, is

capable of making "a system out of a mere aggregate of knowledge. " (CPR,

3 See in particular Karl Marx. German Ideology. New York: International Publishers, 1970.

126
653)

The Critique of Pure Reason -a text so complex it could only have

been written with such a monogram or outline in mind - is Kant's

demonstration that the art of the architectonic exists. Yet, Kant is adamant

that this is an art which can never be learnt. For learning, according to Kant,

is based on the successive accumulation of facts. As such it can only add one

thing after the other, destined to remain at the level of the aggregate,

endlessly piecing parts together, it is caught by the successive temporality of

history.

Anyone, therefore who has learnt (in the strict sense of that term) a
system of philosophy... although he may have all its principles,
explanations, and proofs, together with the formal divisions of the
whole body of doctrine, in his head, and, so to speak, at his fingers'
ends, has no more than a complete historical knowledge of [that]
philosophy. (CPR, 656)

Though, Kant contends that "philosophy can never be learned, save

only in a historical fashion, " (CPR, 657) he nevertheless maintains that the art

of the transcendental necessarily eludes all such historical knowledge. For

according to Kant to be in history is to be trapped inside experience, stuck at

the level of an empirical succession. The "cosmical concept" (CPR, 657-8) of

the transcendental (which is inherently systemic and involves the production

of time itself) cannot be accessed through the interiority of successive

temporality. Thus, though Kant's Copernican revolution is dated, and thus

appears as if from history, its genesis is necessarily exterior to historical time.

For, as we have seen, Kant's is a revolution that does not occur in time but to

127
time.

Thus, in seeking to reduce the transcendental to historical forces,

Marx deliberately suppresses the radicality of the Kantian philosophy of time.

By enveloping everything within the closed system of historical development

and asserting that the a priori are ultimately a product of the a posteriori he

leaves no room for a theory of transcendental production. Moreover, in

maintaining that transcendental time is determined by historical time, it can be

argued -in a Spinozistic sense - that Marx fails to take heed of his own

materialism. Though he seeks to reformulate Hegelian idealism by sticking to

the 'real ground of history' his commitment to dialectics requires that

temporal transformations are overcoded with the transcendent logic of

historical time, whose own production can never be explained. That is to say

that Marx's historical, evolutionary or developmental philosophy which

focuses on the processes of production as they occur in time cannot also

account for the production of time itself.

For an analyses that is at once more transcendental and more

materialist we turn now to the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault's work

concentrates on the workings of power in order to map shifts in historical

regimes. Power, in Foucault, serves as a diagram for the underlying forces

governing everything from what people believe, to how bodies move, to the

128
way in which objects are produced. 4 Thus by investigating the transformations

in different regimes of power, (he focuses especially the shift from the

classical to the disciplinary regime) Foucault arrives at a theory of

discontinuities which itself underlies the rigidity of a priori structures.

According to Foucault, in the disciplinary regime power has ceased to

be in the hands of the despot. Rather than a 'privilege one might posses'

(DP, 26) power begins to operates as a 'network of relations, ' its

'dispositions, manoeuvres, tactics, techniques and functionings' (DP, 26)

circulating everywhere within the social field. No longer the type of force

which lashes out from above, the micro-physics of disciplinary power inserts

itself directly into the body, subtly articulating its motions, posture, and

rhythms. In this new 'economy' power is productive rather than repressive. It

must be 'conceived not as a property but as a strategy. ' (DP, 26) Such a

power, writes Foucault, "has to qualify, measure, appraise and hierarchize

rather than display itself in its murderous splendour. " (FR, 266)

Foucault introduces this new regime in the fist few pages of Discipline

and Punish through an examination of a prisoners time-table. Thus, we find

amongst the first signs of the transformation of power a rationalization,

scheduling and control of time. Foucault's work traces this new form of

4 For a discussion of Foucault's work on power as a diagrammatics see Deleuze's book

Foucault especially pp. 33-36.

129
control as it spreads from prisons to factories to schools. 5 To quote from an

exemplary passage:

In the elementary schools, the division of time became increasingly

minute, ..In the early nineteenth century, the following time table was
suggested for the Ecoles mutuelles or 'mutual improvement of
schools: ' 8.45 entrance of the monitor, 8.52 the monitors summons,
8.56 entrance of the children and prayer, 9.00 the children go to their
benches, 9.04 the first slate, 9.08 end of dictation, 9.12 second slate
etc.. (DP 150)

Foucault insists, however, that this maniacal ordering of time was only

the first step in the new 'economy' of power. As the disciplinary regime

unfolded monastic asceticism was replaced by a more constructive force.

The principle that underlay the time-table in its traditional form was
essentially negative; it was the principle of nonidlenenss: it was
forbidden to waste time, which was counted by God and paid for by
men... Discipline, on the other hand, arranges a positive economy; it
poses the principle of a theoretically ever-growing use of time.
Exhaustion rather than use. (DP, 154)

Thus, the role of time became crucial not only for scheduling the days

activities but also for a sort of internal articulation of the body. "In the correct

use of the body, which makes possible a correct use of time, nothing must

remain idle or useless: everything must be called upon to form the support of

the act required. " (DP, 152) In the disciplinary regime, writes Foucault, "time

penetrates the body and with it all the meticulous controls of power. " (DPI 52)

5 Disciplinary power cannot be identified

with any one institution or apparatus precisely
because it is a type of power, a technology, that traverses every kind of apparatus or

130
This is the world of Taylorism, chronometric efficiency and time and

motion studies. ' world in which the bodies of soldiers, schoolchildren and

most especially workers are subject to "a sort of anatomo-chronological

schema of behaviour. 'The act is broken down into its elements, the position

of the body, limbs, articulations is defined; to each movement are assigned a

direction, an aptitude, a duration; their order of succession is prescribed. "

(DP, 152)

The goal is to maintain 'maximum speed and maximum efficiency; by

'extracting from time, ever more available moments, and from each moment,

ever more useful forces. "(DP, 154) In a regime in which time is equated with

money, power must develop "a new technique for making profit out of the

movement of passing time. " (DP, 157) The question of the disciplinary

regime, writes Foucault, is "how can one capitalize the time of individuals,

accumulate it in each of them, in their bodies, in their forces or in their

in
abilities, a way that is susceptible of use and control? How can one

organize profitable durations? The disciplines must be understood.... as

machinery for adding up and capitalizing time. " (DP, 157)

In Discipline and Punish the shift from classical to disciplinary regime is

introduced through the contrast between two modes of punishment. In a

famous passage Foucault opposes a graphic depiction of torture with a

meticulous description of the rigid time-scheduling of prison life. "We have,

institution, making them converge and function in a new way. (F, 26)

131
then, " writes Foucault in the opening section of the book, "a public execution

and a timetable... Less than a century separates them. ' (DP, 7)

This swift passage from one form of punishment to another is often

taken to be exemplary of what Foucault called discontinuities. This concept is

introduced by Foucault in order to explain how and why at certain moments a

particular regime of power undergoes 'a global modification. '6 (PK 113)

Foucault makes use of the concept by repeatedly showing how, over the

course of history there have been moments when 'in the space of a few

years' where an entirely 'new 'regime' in discourse and forms of knowledge'

has emerged. (FR, 54)

Discontinuities, thus mark a sort of irruption that crashes into history as

"the intrusion of an outside. " (F, 87) Operating in an exterior relation to the

developmental forces of history, they appear as if from nowhere, introducing

an entirely new regime of power and reconditioning the a priori structures on

which our experience depends Thus for Foucault, as Deleuze writes, "things

are not joined together by a process of continuity or interiorization but

..
instead they rejoin above and beyond the breaks and discontinuous

(mutation). (F, 86)

The term discontinuity, however, not only designates transformations in

the operations of power but also marks a heterogeneity intrinsic to the nature

6 "My problem, " he is quoted as saying, was to pose the question 'How is it that at certain
moments and in certain orders of knowledge, there are these sudden take-offs, these
hastenings of evolution, these transformations which fail to correspond to the calm, continuist
image that is normally accredited? " (PK, 54)

132
time itself. Contained within the sentence from Discipline and Punish that is

quoted above, for example, is a distinction between various modes of

temporality, from the festive time of the torturous spectacle, through the

metric and quantitative time of the prisoners time table, to the time which

marks the passing of the century. These different time systems are radically
-
even transcendentally incommensurable. Even the supposed consistency of

historical time fails to tie them together (there is nothing in the continuity of

time (the century) that can account, for example, for the introduction of a new

mode of time as evidenced in the time-table). Thus, the concept of

discontinuity is not only used empirically to show the breaks or ruptures in

history, but is also used transcendentally to designate the lack of consistency

or continuity between radically different structures of time. ' In this way,

Foucault begins the process of constructing the conceptual tools necessary to

connect the exterionty of the transcendental production of time with the

interiority of historical variation, or the changes which happen in time.

1This notion of discontinuity connects with what Deleuze sees as Foucault's

transcendentalism. Deleuze depicts Foucault as a neo-Kantian (F, 60) by running his work
through the machinery of the first critique. He sees the Kantian division between the Logic and
the Aesthetic as transformed by Foucault into the distinction between visibilities and
statements, and views Foucaults diagrammaticism as the'analogue of the Kantian
schematicism'. (F, 82) The legitimacy of these mappings, according to Deleuze, stems from
the fact that Foucault, like Kant, is interested in the a priori conditions of experience, and like
Kant, sees in these conditions a distinction between receptivity (intuition, or visibilities) and
spontaneity (understanding, or statements) (F, 60). This analyses by Deleuze strengthens the
notion that the concept of discontinuity is introduced by Foucault in order to construct a
transcendental view of historical change.

133
Chapter 3: The Materialist Revolution: Time in Capitalism and
Schizophrenia

3.0 Introduction: Aeon, or The Plane of Consistency

In the Western classical tradition time was considered to be

synonymous with change. Manifest in the celestial revolutions, it was

measured by the cyclical processes of astronomy and felt in the patterns of

seasonal variation and the movement of day into night. What the preceding

chapters have sought to show is that - in what can loosely be called modernity

- developments in both philosophy and in the socio-economic milieu have

revolutionized this classical conception of time. More specifically, they have

focussed on the fact that in both the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and in the

time-keeping practices that have emerged under capitalism, time has ceased

to be identified with change. What these revolutions have produced instead,

is a distinction between time as an abstract grid or structure and the changes

and movement which occur within it.

The question of this thesis is how an innovation such as this can occur

to the abstract nature of time. Or, to put it another way, how are we to explain

events which happen not only in time but to time? Our response, as we will

see, requires that time be understood as an abstract process of production

which is itself open to transformative events. This necessitates a further

reformulation of the relation between time and change such that these

concepts are no longer equated - as in the classical tradition - nor

134
subordinated to a hierarchical relation - as in the modem conception but
-
rather coexist together on an immanent plane.

Both the writings of Immanuel Kant and the history of

capitalism's time-keeping systems provide some suggestions as to how such

an account might be formulated. First, we find in Kant a theory of time which

ceases to be the result of a single act of transcendent creation. No longer tied

to the realm of metaphysical speculation, transcendental time the invention

-
or discovery of the first critique - is defined as a process of a priori synthesis.

This is of crucial importance since an immanent theory of temporal innovation

requires, first of all, a conception of time that is not been transcendently fixed.

Secondly, as we have seen, the Kantian discovery of time as a process

of production, comes during a period of great historical change in the culture

and technics of time-keeping practices. The history of time under capitalism is

a story of continuous innovation, mutation and change. These changes -

which include the development of the mechanical clock, and the

establishment of global time-zones - have been so profound that it is not

uncommon for theorists to argue that at the core of capitalism as a socio-

economic system lies its unique ability to have transformed the nature of

time. '

It is far from clear, however, how material innovations in the culture

and technics of time can be linked to time as it is conceived of by

We have seen in the previous chapter that the work of the key theorists of modern
capitalism, for example Mumford, Marx and Weber can all be formulated in this way.

135
transcendental philosophy. The problem the thesis encounters then, is how to

synthesize its two sides and thereby establish a connection between the

transcendental conception of time and the technical machines (clocks and

calendars), socio-economic institutions (GMT) and cultural imperatives (time

= money) that constitute time in the capitalist world. Implicit in this problem -

as should be clear from the preceding chapters - lies a more general

question which concerns the relationship between abstract thought and

material practice. This thesis has formulated this question in the terms set out

by the transcendental philosophy of time. In doing so, it sees the link between

the philosophical and the cultural (conceived of as a particular technological

and socio-economic regime) as dependent on an immanent relation between

the transcendental production of time and empirical innovation in time-

keeping technologies and the cultural practices which surround them. The

previous chapter sought to explore the complexity inherent in trying to

establish this relation by way of a debate between the writings of Kant and

Marxist philosophy.

According to Kant, as has already been shown, the schism between

the transcendental and the empirical creates a disjunction between historical

change and the philosophical structure of time. This is because Kant

associates change with the experience of the empirical world. The

transcendental, on the other hand, is absolutely detached from the realm of

continuous movement. Transcendental time is conceived of as a 'pure

intuition' which Kant names 'the form of inner sense. ' It functions, in this role,

136
as a numerical synthesizer ordering and sequencing anything which happens

to fill it. A one dimensional linear succession which provides the underlying

format to every thought and perception, time is a constant structure or matrix

that is indifferent - and exterior - to the empirical attributes through which it is

experienced. Thus, Kant maintains, that while all appearances necessarily

occur in time "we can quite well think time as void of appearances. " (CPR,

75) This distinction between time and the changes which occur within it is
-
as has already been noted - what makes Kantian thought revolutionary. It

also, however, serves to separate the transcendental philosophy of time from

its cultural, technological, and socio-economic surroundings.

It is precisely on this point that Marxism criticizes Kant. For according

to Marx, in ignoring thoughts socio-economic context, idealist philosophy

mistakes consequence for cause and remains blind to the primary processes

of production. Historical materialism attacks the Critique through its famous

contention that philosophy is dependent upon its material conditions and that

reason's a priori structures are determined by the empirical forces of history. 2

Thus, for Marx, it is the changes which occur in time which are ultimately

responsible for the production of an abstract conception of time.

2 Note the following from The German Ideology. "In direct contrast to German philosophy,
which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say,
we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought
of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active
men, and on the basis of their real life process we demonstrate the development of the
ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process. The phantoms formed in the human brain
are also, necessarily sublimates of their material life process, which is empirically verifiable
and bound to material premises... Life is not determined by consciousness but consciousness

137
However sympathetic one might be to Marx's underlying intention, the

notion that the nature of time is a product of history is paradoxical at best. It is

unacceptable here, because it rules out the possibility of transcendental

production and thus cannot account for innovation in the abstract construction

of time. It is the strength of transcendental philosophy to show that there is a

realm, independent of experience, which is itself productive. It is this realm of

abstract production which constitutes the underlying conditions of the

empirical world. Every historical mode of production happens in time and

therefore necessarily presumes a process of production which it itself cannot -

at least straightforwardly - produce. As Kant writes in the 'Transcendental

Aesthetic', since time "underlies all intuitions" (CPR, 75) "the actuality of

appearances is only possible inside the representation of time. " In failing to

see time as a presupposition of the changes which occur within it, Marx

suppresses the exteriority of the transcendental. Slipping into Hegelian

idealism he betrays his materialist inclinations by positing the logic of

dialectical history as the everlasting structure of time.

The problem, then, remains. For neither Kant nor Marx can account for

how an event which occurs in time (and is thus empirical) can effectuate

innovation in the transcendental nature of time. Michel Foucault attempts to

address this problem with his concept of discontinuities, a concept which is

meant to designate the "rifts and instabilities" (OT )o iv) that operate to

by life. ' Quoted from 'Excerpts from The German Ideology' in Marx & Engels: Basic Writings
on Politics and Philosophy.

138
disrupt the apparent continuity of historical time. There is, then, in Foucault,

as Deleuze writes, an emergence of forces which doubles history, " or rather

envelops it, according to the Nietzschean conception. " (F, 85) These forces

are undoubtedly linked to the Kantian synthesis of the transcendental in that

the rifts or cracks they break open, mark, above all, the incommensurability of

transcendental structures. Yet the actual process through which this doubling

of history takes place is left unclear. Foucault thus shows us the fact

transcendental is at work in the generation of history, but he leaves no

account of the ways in which these transcendental disruptions operate in

themselves, nor of how they are able to connect with or act upon the

empirical matter of history. 3 It is this problem which must be surpassed if we

are to succeed in projecting a line that can connect the temporal machines of

capitalism with the transcendental production of time.

In the classical tradition time was defined in relation to the concept of

eternity. Its identity as a process of never-ending change was conceived of

negatively, in opposition to the wholeness, unity and stasis of the eternal.

Plato, as we have seen, described time as the image of eternity, a

3 In his book The Order of Things, Foucault himself admits that he focused on outlining
discontinuous change without examining either the causes of these changes or the
mechanisms through which they occur. To quote Foucault: it seemed to me it would not be
prudent for the moment to force a solution I felt incapable, I admit, of offering: the traditional
explanations - spirit of the time, technological or social changes, influences of various kinds -
struck me for the most part of being more magical than effective. In this work, then, I left the
problem of causes to one side; I chose instead to confining myself to the transformations
themselves, thinking that this would be an indispensable step if, one day, a theory of scientific
change and epistemological causality was to be constructed. (OT, xiii)

139
description which ensured that temporal change be regarded as belonging to

the realm of appearance and illusion. Despite its all encompassing nature,

time was a mirage, a shadowy mirror of the eternal nature of forms.

From the beginning this thesis has viewed the Kantian and capitalist

revolution in relation to this classical tradition. We have seen how - when

taken together - they provide us with a modern conception of time. However,

though they are successful in transforming the nature of time both leave the

concept of eternity basically unaltered. It is the contention of this thesis that to

make the connection between Kant and capitalism, and thus develop a

materialist account of the transcendental production of time, requires a

reformulation - not only of our conception of time - but also of that which

constitutes its outside (that which is conventionally thought of as eternity).

The following chapter seeks to accomplish this by drawing on the work

of Deleuze and Guattari. In particular it focuses on two main elements of their

work which - taken together - enable them to explain how cultural and

technological innovations in time-keeping practices can effectuate changes in

the abstract production of time. These two elements are:

1. A revolution that frees transcendental production from the interiority

of idealist thought.

Towards the beginning of their two volume work Capitalism and

Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari evoke the name of transcendental

140
philosophy to call for a revolution 'this time materialist' which is aimed at

transforming critical thought. 4 This 'second' revolution follows Kant in making

use of the practice of critique to replace the transcendence of creation with

the synthetic processes of the transcendental. Yet, this time, the revolution

proceeds by way of a critique of the Kantian system itself. Subtracting the

illusion of transcendence (which remains as a relic in Kant's writing) in favour

of a philosophy based on immanence, Deleuze and Guattari unshackle

transcendental production from the organized unity of the subject, liberating it

from the realm of epistemology and representation. According to Deleuze and

Guattari's 'transcendental materialism', abstract production is a material

process, not an epistemological one. Deeply influenced by Spinoza, their

work dissolves the rigid distinction between matter and thought and is thus

able to flatten cultural, technological, socio-economic and philosophical

to
events on a single plane. 5

4 In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari present this revolution as a critique of psychoanalysis.

in what he termed the critical revolution, Kant intended to discover criteria immanent to
understanding so as to distinguish between the legitimate and the illegitimate uses of the
synthesis of consciousness. In the name of transcendental philosophy (immanence of
criteria), he therefore denounced the transcendent use of synthesis such as appeared in
metaphysics. In like fashion we are compelled to say that psychoanalysis has its metaphysics
- its name is Oedipus. And that a revolution - this time materialist - can proceed only by way of
a critique of Oedipus, by denouncing the illegitimate use of the synthesis of the unconscious
as found in Oedipal psychoanalysis, so as to rediscover a transcendental unconscious defined
by the immanence of its criteria, and a corresponding practice that we shall call
schizoanalysis'. (AO, 75)
5 It is for this reason that Deleuze and Guattari are able to speak in a single breath of
vegetation and linguistic analyses, geological formations and the gothic literature of H.P.
Lovecraft, packs of wolves and Kantian theory, ticks and the philosophy of Spinoza.

141
2. A philosophy of time that replaces the notion of eternity with the

concept of Aeon.

We have seen from the start that central to Kant's Copernican

revolution is a redefinition of time. This section will show that Capitalism and

Schizophrenia's materialist revolution also involves a reinvention in the

philosophy of time, though it diverges from Kant by concentrating not so much

on the interiority of time but on the exteriority of the eternal.

In the Kantian system eternity appears in a variety of different ways. In

the Transcendental Aesthetic it is constituted as the infinity of an extensive

series, in the Deducton it is produced as the whole of time conceived of as

one, and in the doctrine of the thing-in-itself it mirrors the classical conception

of a quasi-divine transcendence. Deleuze and Guattari overturn all of these

conceptions of eternity replacing it with their own unique reformulation of the

Gnostic notion of Aeon. Thus, in Deleuze and Guattari, everlasting extension

gives way to an intensive continuum. This is held together not by a unified

identity but by the singularity of a plane populated by machinic multiplicites

whose continuous process of variation make no distinction between what

occurs in time and the production of time itself. These singularities - or Aeonic

occurrences - are not above, beyond, or segregated over and against time

but are rather flat with the production of time and constitute its immanent

142
Outside.

It is with this notion of Aeon as an immanent outside that Deleuze and

Guattari's transcendental materialism manages to close the gap between an

abstract production of time and the socio-history of time-keeping practices.

Through the concept of Aeon, they uncover the possibility of events that do

not break into time from a transcendent beyond, as is the case with eternity,

but rather constitute a plane of virtuality whose intensive variation is ultimately

responsible for the production of our experience of time.

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3.1 Transcendental Materialism: Capitalism & Schizophrenia's Critique
of Kant

For Deleuze and Guattari the world is composed of two planes, or

rather, there is a single plane which composes itself in two '

ways. The most

familiar of these, the one that seems most common or easy to perceive, they

name the plane of organization and development. On this plane the world is

governed by structure and genesis and things are determined according to

their substance and form. This is why the plane of organization has more in

common with an overall plan (the plan of divine creation) than it does with the

flat geometry of a plane.2 Functioning with a tree-like logic of evolutionary

growth, the plane of organization treats everything as a kind of organism.

Bound by arborescence and hierarchy it operates through a process of

stratification (always placing one level on top of the other in accordance with
3
a strict code). Unable to account for its own immanent production, this

stratified plane necessarily appeals to the interiority of a higher dimension as

ultimate cause. The plane of development is thus invariably hidden or elusive,

"existing only in a supplementary dimension to that to which it gives rise (n +

' These two planes are not dialectically opposed as thesis is to antithesis both because the
two planes are simultaneously and continuously under production and also because there is
always a series of complex passages between them. As Deleuze and Guattari write, "why
does the opposition between two kinds of planes lead to a still more abstract hypothesis?
Because one continuously passes from one to the other, by unnoticeable degrees and without
being aware of it, or one becomes aware of it only afterwards. ' (ATP, 269)

2 As Brian Massumi, the translator of A Thousand Plateaus points out, in french 'the word plan
designates both a 'plane' in the geometrical sense and a 'plan! (ATP, xviii)

3 Stratification as a process of production characterized by split intensities, double articulation

and relations of hierarchy is described in detail in the plateau entitled '10,000 B.C.: The
Geology of Morals' in ` Thousand Plateaus.

144
1)." (ATP, 265) This is why, for Deleuze and Guattari, the strata are

'judgments of God' and also why the plane of organization is otherwise

known as the plane of transcendence. (ATP, 265)

"Then, there is an altogether different plane, or an altogether different

conception of the plane. " (ATP, 266) Here, things escape the form,

substance, and hierarchy of the organism by partaking in intensive voyages

and by drawing lines of flight. On this, the plane of immanence or

consistency, there is no distinction between nature and artifice, matter and

thought, people and things. Populated by singularities not subjects this is a

Spinozistic conception of the plane4 in which bodies are defined by the power

of their relations. Consisting solely of collective assemblages or intensive

multiplicities, the plane of consistency is constituted by its immanent lines of

communication and connectivity. In this way, it has more in common with the

heterogeneous multiplicity of the rhizome than with the organized unity of the

tree. 5 Like a rhizome, it is flat in that it spreads vertically rather than through

the addition of stratified layers. It is a plane not a plan in that it requires

nothing above or beyond itself to act as the agent of its own production. As

Deleuze and Guattari write, "however many dimensions it may have, [the

plane of immanence] never has a supplementary dimension to that which

4 The plane of consistency or immanence is

exactly equivalent to Spinoza's understanding of
Substance or Nature as defined in the Ethics. This is why Deleuze and Guattari call the Ethics
the 'great book of the BwO" (ATP, 153)

5 This distinction between tree is used throughout the introduction to A

- and rhizome -
Thousand Plateaus.

145
transpires upon it." (ATP, 266) It is thus necessarily a force of destratification.

As the plane where "form is constantly being dissolved" it dismantles the

authority and structures of development, escapes from organization and

overturns or eludes the judgements of God

.6
Deleuze and Guattari's engagement with Kant is in large part

determined by their relation to these two different planes. This is attested to

by the fact that without this as a reference point their take up of Kant can

often appear contradictory and confused. For it is never quite certain whether

Kant should be considered as an ally or an enemy. Is his thought central or

can it be ignored? Partly, this confusion is due to the general method of

Capitalism and Schizophrenia which seems to have more in common with the

sample-based creations of digital technology than with traditional modes of

philosophical analyses. Treating texts as a DJ would tracks, Deleuze and

Guattari emphasize rhythm and style? just as much as logical argument, and

work by extracting the refrains they can use rather than through the adoption

of a totalizing or overall theory. 8

Yet, as with all good synthetic creations, Deleuze and Guattari's

6It is in a text entitled 'To Be Done with the Judgments of God' where Antonin Artaud first
creates the concept of a 'body without organs'. 'Man is sick because he is badly constructed.
We must decide to strip him in order to scratch out this animalcule which makes him itch to
death, god, and with god his organs. For tie me down if you want to, but there is nothing more
useless than an organ. When you have given him a body without organs then you will have
delivered him from his automatisms and restored him his true liberty. "To be Done with the
Judgments of God' in Antonin Artaud. Four Texts, trans. Clayton Eshelman and Norman
Glass. Los Angeles: Panjandrum Books, 1982

7 For example, in lecturing on Kant, Deleuze

advises his students not to follow every line of
"what is really a very difficult book, " but rather to just "follow the rhythm. ' (TLK, 2)

8As Foucault writes in the introduction to Anti-Oedipus, "it would be a mistake to read Anti-
Oedipus as the new theoretical reference (you know that much-heralded theory that finally

146
sampling of Kant is subject to the most rigorous criteria. Their aim - as stated

at the outset - is to embark on a revolution that will transform transcendental

idealism into a materialism. This they accomplish by discarding all those

elements of the Kantian system which serve to bind it to the plane of

organization and development, not so as to deny the importance of his

system but rather so as to remain true to the method of critique. For, as we

will see, it is this method itself which insists that the realm of the

transcendental be liberated from the structure and plan of the organism and

flattened onto an immanent plane.

In order to follow this critical revolution we will begin in the strata, as

Deleuze and Guattari advise, 9 and attempt to enumerate the various features

which organize and develop Kantian thought into an overall plan.

The Critique of Pure Reason is presented in the preface as a

comprehensive system and is intended as the exhaustive inventory of all the

possessions of pure reason. It is meant to provide "the science of

transcendental philosophy" with "a complete architectonic plan. " (CPR, 60)

"In this inquiry," writes Kant, "I have made completeness my chief aim, and I

venture to assert that there is not a single metaphysical problem which has

not been solved, or for the solution of which the key at least has not been

supplied. " (CPR, 10) So certain is he that nothing has escaped his all

inclusive structure, that Kant maintains the Critique "leaves no task for its

encompasses everything, that finally totalizes and reassures)'. (AO xii)

9'It is through a meticulous relation to the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight. '
(ATP, 161)

147
successors save that of adapting it in a didactic manner according to their

own preferences, without being able add anything whatsoever to its content".

(CPR, 13-14)

Kant's confidence in the exhaustiveness of his work stems from his

belief in the systematic unity of critique. For Kant, the art of constructing

systems consists in the ability to unite the manifold of knowledge under one

idea. Ordered by this single identity, the system is likened to an animal body

which even as an embryo, contains all its parts within the whole. Conceived of

in this manner, transcendental philosophy is complete from its very inception

and should evolve like any other organism, "growing from within, and not by

any external addition. " (CPR, 653)

As an organism, the transcendental system originates out of the mind

of the human subject. Known alternatively as the transcendental unity of

apperception, the transcendental subject, or the I think, this "pure original

unchanging consciousness" (CPR, 136) is the seed or embryo of the

architectonic. Functioning in the critique to unite the synthetic multiplicity

under a single idea it serves to provide uniformity to the manifold, synthesize

concepts with intuition, and ensure that all our experiences are our own. It is,

in short, both the cause and creator of a priori synthesis and as such forms

the structuring principle of the plan.

The ability to treat the transcendental as a systematic unity is

ultimately a result of the epistemological nature of Kantian thought. For it is

148
only when thought of as an epistemological representation that the synthetic

manifold can be organized under a single idea. It is no coincidence that in

Kant, a priori synthesis (or the abstract conditions of experience) conforms to

the principles of reason. Rather, it is because the transcendental are a mental

structure, imposed on the world through the interiority of the knowing mind

that this isomorphy necessarily exists. As Kant writes, "the order and

regularity we find in appearances we ourselves introduce". For "it is not

nature itself that is ordered in this way but only the representations of the

mind. " (CPR, 147) Composed on the plane of organization, then, Kantian

philosophy is less concerned with what the world is really like than with how

we are destined to know it.

It is through this attempt to limit the ambitions of philosophy, however,

that the Kantian system makes way for the judgments of God. Critique had

sought to restrict the domain of reason to an island. Yet, in conceiving of the

transcendental as an epistemological representation, it invariably sees that

beyond this "land of truth" is a "wide and stormy sea. " (CPR, 257) Restricted

to an interiorized world of phenomenal representations, critical thought,

cannot help but to point to a realm beyond its borders. Kant names this the

thing-in itself and seeks to banish it from his system by insisting that because

it transcends all knowledge it must remain exterior to the scope of

philosophy. 10

Yet, with the distinction between what we know and the thing-in-itself,

149
Kant aligns himself with his classical predecessors. "Limiting all that
we can
theoretically know to mere appearances" (CPR, 29) he divides the world

according to the traditional disjunction which opposes the reality of essence to

the shadowy illusion of appearances. It is this which is ultimately responsible

for the idealism of Kantian thought, and is also what allows for an element of

transcendence to permeate the entirety of his system. For, according to the

doctrine of the thing-in-itself the synthetic structures of the I think are haunted

by a transcendent or higher dimension which the subject cannot know. In this

way Kant guides thought precisely towards those metaphysical questions he

claims he is trying to avoid. Supposedly confined to epistemology, critique

seeks to limit reason but only in order to leave room for faith.

With its systematic unity, its strengthening of the subject, and its faith

in epistemology and the transcendence which this implies it may seem as

though one finds in Kant a philosopher who conforms with absolute

exactitude to the stratified conception of the plane. Surely even God could not

ask for a more uncompromising mode of development, a more strict

organizing structure or a more stringent desire for unity. Yet, nonetheless, the

Kantian system too is composed of lines of flight. For despite the apparent

rigidity of the architectonic there is a path in critical philosophy which leads

away from the form of the organism and the hierarchical structure of the plan.

On this line, transcendental philosophy appears less as a totalizing system

10'The true correlate to

sensibility, the thing in it itself is not known and cannot be
known. '(CPR, 74)

150
and more as a systematic method. From this point of view, the critical project

turns away from its organization and development and aims instead to

demolish hidden transcendence in order to discover an immanent plane.

As every student of Kant is aware, transcendental philosophy is based

on the practice of critique. "Our age", writes Kant "is, in especial degree, the

age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit. " (CPR, 9) What is

meant here by criticism is a philosophical method or tool which bases thought

on criteria immanent to the understanding. Targeting metaphysics "the Queen

of all the sciences" (CPR, 7) it denounces transcendence as an illegitimate

synthesis in order to remain on an immanent plane. Aimed at ensuring that

nothing be granted that can not "sustain the test of free and open

examination" (CPR, 9) it insists on abandoning any principles that demand

belief. In this way critique is inherently anti-authoritarian. "

unquestioning

Determined to "be no longer put off by illusory knowledge" (CPR, 9) it

"dismisses all groundless pretensions" and refuses to seek recourse in

"despotic decrees. " (CPR, 9)

Transcendental materialism draws on Kant's Copernican

revolution in that it is based on the practice of critique. Like Kant, Deleuze and

Guattari adopt the critical method in order to rid thought of the illusion of

transcendence and develop a philosophical system which adheres to

immanent criteria. In this way - though it is far from the didactic analyses Kant

11This is why the French Revolution is often seen as the political equivalent to Kant's
philosophical revolution. See, for example, Heine's Religion and Philosophy in Germany p.

151
expected from his successors - Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a strictly

Kantian text. It soon becomes clear, however, that to follow through with the

critical method so that the thought of the transcendental can reach the plane

of consistency there is much in Kant's own work which must be overturned.

The time has come for the Kantian system itself to submit to critique.

In the hands of Deleuze and Guattari, then, Kantian thought undergoes

a radical transmutation. This is done, in accordance with Kant's own

principles, not by adding anything new to the system but rather through a

process of subtraction. Yet, though they use nothing but this simple arithmetic

procedure, Deleuze and Guattari's critique nevertheless has a devastating

effect. For what Deleuze and Guattari subtract is the identity and unity of the

system, that is the one thing essential to the completeness of the

architectonic plan.

From the point of view of transcendental materialism it is the critical

project itself which requires that the system be dismantled in this way. For the

notion that the transcendental plane can be united under one idea is,

according to Deleuze and Guattari, an attempt - however surreptitious - to

"re-establish a kind of transcendence" (ATP, 109) and thus cannot be

reconciled with the immanence demanded by critique. As Deleuze and

Guattari write, "unity always operates in an empty dimension supplementary

to that of the system considered. " (ATP, 8) Thus, unity must be subtracted

from the system (n -1) if the syntheses of the transcendental are to be

108

152
flattened onto an immanent plane.

Deleuze and Guattari's assault on systematic unity necessarily involves

a critique of the transcendental subject. For in maintaining that the synthetic a

priori are processes which occur inside the mind, Kant positions the subject,

as we have seen, as the system's single organizing idea. It is in this context

that the'critique of Oedipus' found in Capitalism and Schizophrenia must be

seen. For according to Deleuze and Guattari, the subject is "the locus of an

illusion. ' (SPP, 19) Though it is merely a peripheral side effect of more

primary processes, it operates by falling back on the agents of its own

production "which now seem to emanate from it as a quasi-cause. " (AO, 10)

The subject is thus a residuum which presents itself as an original foundation,

the product of a 'miraculating machine. "2 Thus, according to Capitalism and

Schizophrenia to follow Kant in presuming the interiority of the human intellect

is a betrayal of the critical project. For the Kantian contention that we only

have access to a world that we ourselves have constructed is an illegitimate

synthesis of reason. In this way Deleuze and Guattari's critique of the subject

is strictly equivalent to Kants attack on metaphysics, since both are

dismissed for their reliance on transcendence, authority and faith.

Replacing the illusionary transcendence of the subject with a

12In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari speak of the body of capital in the same way it falls
back on all production, constituting a surface over which the forces and agents of production
are distributed, thereby appropriating for itself all surplus production and arrogating to itself
both the whole and the parts of the process, which now seem to emanate from it as a quasi-
cause. Forces and agents come to represent a miraculous form of its own power they appear
to be `miraculated" by it. (AO, 10)

153
Spinozistic lens, Deleuze and Guattari release transcendental production

from its confines in representation through the development of a non-

epistemological critique. Seeking "to determine an impersonal and pre-

individual transcendental field" (LS, 102) they strip the Kantian system from

the "error of idealism" and detach the synthetic a priori from their

containment inside the mind. Capitalism and Schizophrenia thus treats the

synthesis of the first Critique not as the operations of conscious reasoning but

as the machinic functions of a purely materialist unconscious13 which do not

represent the real but operate instead as the abstract forces which constructs

14
it.

Finally, as we will see in greater detail in the following section, Deleuze

and Guattari revolutionize Kant by finally dismantling the distinction between

essence and appearance, Acting as Spinozists, they flatten the Kantian

division between what we know and the thing-in-itself onto a continuum or

immanent plane. Kant's attempt to restrict his philosophy to epistemology

sacrifices the immanence. of criteria to a faith in transcendence. For Deleuze

and Guattari, then, Kant's claim that his work is derived from the a priori

development and organization of the architectonic plan is an attempt to

'reterritorialize' the immanence of the transcendental field. What Kant

12In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari describe the unconscious as a factory, a workshop.
(AO, 55) 'For the unconscious itself is no more structural than personal, it does not symbolize
any more than it imagines or represents; it engineers, it is machinic. Neither imaginary nor
symbolic, it is the Real in itself, the 'impossible real' and its production. (AO, 53)
13This is why the question posed by Capitalism and Schizophrenia is not'What does it
mean? ' but rather, 'How does it work? '

154
discovered when he gained access to the realm of the transcendental was not

the unity and identity of an organism but the disorganized multiplicity of a

common plane (what Deleuze and Guattari, following Artaud will call the body

without organs).

It should by now be clear that in order to engage with transcendental

philosophy the Critique of Pure Reason must be treated not as a

representational text but as a conceptual key. An approach from this

perspective, requires that we view Kant less as an enlightenment thinker and

more, to quote Deleuze, as "the analogue of a great explorer. " (DR, 135)

Seen from this perspective, the Kantian texts cease to be the colorless

accounts from the law courts of reason and become instead the record of a

'stationary voyage' which unlocks realms beneath and between the empirical

world. Underneath the rigid boundaries of appearances, transcendental

philosophy discovers the seething processes of the synthetic a priori; a plane

of production which, though it functions independently of experience, is no

less real for being abstract. In the Kantian system it is this transcendental

plane, with its continuous process of connection and combination, which

replaces the transcendence of God and of metaphysics.

That Deleuze and Guattari have followed Kant on this voyage, and are

committed to a philosophy driven by synthesis, is made clear from the very

first lines of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 'Everywhere it is machines - real

ones not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being

driven by other machines. " (AO, 1)

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To see the world in terms of a machinic production is not - as it may

first appear - to be caught in an industrialized or mechanistic vision. Operating

with post-cybernetic principles, Deleuze and Guattari define machines neither

by the form of technical integration nor by the molar manufactured

substances of transcendent technology, but rather by disintegrated molecular

production which combines (amongst others), biological, chemical, geological,

and cultural components. The machines of Deleuze and Guattari operate as

intensive multiplicities - flat or rhizomic assemblages - functioning

immanently, rather than as mechanisms controlled by a transcendent,

supplementary, or preprogrammed plan.

In equating transcendental synthesis with machines, Deleuze and

Guattari replace the Kantian emphasis on the unity of the subject and its

epistemological representations with nonhuman agents defined solely by their

ability to connect things together or drive things apart. They thus push

Kantian thought on to its most destratifying line and develop a philosophy -

true to a radically transcendental critique - which dismantles the architectonic

by transforming the Kantian plan onto a flat, intensive and immanent plane.

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3.2 From Eternity to Aeon

From the point of view of the philosophy of time, Deleuze and Guattari

depart from Kant not so much by questioning his account of time but rather

through a critique of his notion of eternity. This critique - as we will see - involves

a radical mutation in the philosophical understanding of the eternal. For, despite

the revolutionary nature of Kantian thought, his notion of eternity varies little from

the view of the eternal developed in the western classical tradition. With Deleuze

and Guattari, on the other hand, eternity becomes something altogether

different. Rather than an idealist construction (which it is for both Kant and Plato)

Deleuze and Guattari develop an account of the eternal which is fully materialist

but is nevertheless exterior to time. In this way, transcendental materialism

discovers a notion of the eternal proper to the immanence of critique. This

discovery is of such importance that just as it has been said of Kant that "all the

creations and novelties which he brings to philosophy rest on the creation or

discovery of an entirely new conception of time, " (KST 1) so too can it be said of

Deleuze and Guattari that all of their creations and novelties rest on an entirely

new conception of eternity.

In the Critique of Pure Reason, eternity is produced in at least three

different ways. It first appears in the 'Transcendental Aesthetic' as a formal

property of the intuition of time. According to Kant, time as intuition (or the form

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of inner sense) is best thought of as an extensive arithmetic sequence whose

is a one dimensional number line. ' Like a number line, the

closest analogy

transcendental form of time is an everlasting homogenous series, infinite in both

directions. Thus, in this first instance, it is the infinitude of time which constitutes

eternity.

The second place in which eternity is produced is in the 'Transcendental

Deduction'. Here, the eternal is considered to be an aspect of the transcendental

unity of apperception. For it is the unity of this subject which ensures that the

everlasting series of time be brought under a single identity. United in this way,

the eternal, in this second case, is constructed as the whole of time conceived of

as one.

The third zone in Kant's writings in which the eternal is consolidated is in

the doctrine of the thing-in-itself. Here, the eternal is evoked in opposition to the

phenomenal appearance of time. Conceived of as a divine essence, eternity, in

this doctrine, is considered to be the timelessness of a transcendent outside.

The conception of eternity developed by Deleuze and Guattari differs

fundamentally from all three of these aspects of the Kantian system. First of all,

because the kind of infinity which is aligned with the transcendental materialist

notion of eternity is not the extensive infinity of an everlasting series but rather

the intensive infinity of continuum. Secondly, though the eternal as an intensive

1To quote from the first critique: We represent the time-sequence by a line progressing to

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continuum involves the whole of time, this is not because it is united under a

single subject. Instead, for Deleuze and Guattari the eternal is the mode of time

proper to the plane of consistency. This single plane is characterized by the

continuous variation of machinic multiplicities and not by the stasis of an

unchanging identity. Finally, though the intensive time of the plane of consistency

is exterior to time, it is not conceived of as a transcendent beyond. Rather, as we

will see, eternity, for Deleuze and Guattari, is a body which constructs an

immanent outside.

Part 1. Extensive versus Intensive Time

What is this time which need not be infinite but only "infinitely
subdivisible?" It is the Aeon.
Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 61

According to Kant our intuition of appearances is comprised of extensive

magnitudes. "Appearances, " he writes, "are all without exception magnitudes,

indeed extensive magnitudes. "(CPR, 198) What Kant means by an extensive

magnitude is one whose parts are apprehended successively. That is to say, the

pure intuitions (space and time) are extensive in that they order the manifold of

appearance into a succession. This successive synthesis operates by organizing

things into parts and then gathering those parts into a whole. Thus, according to

infinity and we reason from the properties of this line to all the properties of time."(CPR, 77)
...

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transcendental philosophy, to perceive something in space and time is to

apprehend it as an aggregate. To quote from the first critique "every

appearances is as intuition an extensive magnitude; only in the successive

synthesis of part to part in (the process of) its apprehension can it come to be

known. " (CPR 199)

In the work of Deleuze and Guattari the Greek god Chronos provides the

name for extensive time. Constructed as an infinite series of extensive

magnitudes, Chronos is characterized by the "successive advance from one

moment to another" (CPR, 198) It marks the linear order of a purely metric time.

Composed entirely of "interlocking presents" (LS, 61) which follow one another

for ever, it is a time made up of homogenous units, measured instants or

cardinal beats, which serve to enclose the multiplicity of the world in between its

limits. In Kantian terms, Chronos is the temporality of experience, the form of

time in which the empirical ego is caught.

Yet, as even Kant himself is aware, our perception of the world is not

altogether captured by the temporality of Chronos. In a somewhat obscure

section of the first Critique entitled the 'Anticipation of Perception' Kant makes

clear that there is something other than intuition that is at work in the

construction of appearances. Since space and time are never perceived directly

there must be something in addition to intuition that constitutes perception. This

Kant calls the "matter of an object in general", the "real of sensation" or "realitas

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phaenomenon" (CPR, 201) and insists that instead of extensive magnitudes it is

comprised of intensive degrees. In all appearances," he writes, "the real, that is

an object of sensation, has an intensive magnitude, that is, a degree." (CPR,

201)

The difference between extensive magnitudes and intensive degrees is

perhaps most obvious in our perception of space since the same extensive

space can be filled with varying degrees of intensities. To quote from a lecture by

Deleuze, "the same space can be filled by a more or less intense red, the same

room can be filled with a more or less intense heat, the same volume can be

filled with a more or less dense matter. " (SLK 4)

Yet, the distinction between the intuition of extension and the

apprehension of intensities is just as much a temporal one. For there is a time of

intensities that differs fundamentally from the extensive temporality of Chronos.

Deleuze and Guattari name this intensive time Aeon and throughout their work

systematically oppose it to the workings of Chronos. It is these two readings of

time - time as Chronos and time as Aeon - which transcendental materialism

uses to replace the classical disjunction between the appearance of time and the

essence of eternity.

Aeon can be distinguished from Chronos, first of all, because unlike

extensive magnitudes, the apprehension of intensities does not take place

through successive synthesis. Rather than "proceeding from parts to the whole"

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(CPR, 203) intensities are instead apprehended in a single instant. To quote

Deleuze:

The apprehension of an intensive quantity is instantaneous, which is to

say its unity no longer comes from the sum of its successive parts. The
unity of a given intensive quantity is apprehended in an instant. Which
amounts to saying that when I say it's 30 degrees the 30-degree heat is
not the sum of three times 10 degrees..30 degrees is not three 10-degree
heats." (SLK, 4)

Thus, unlike extensive magnitudes, intensive degrees are not made up of

homogenous units. Rather than a temporal succession which unites the manifold

of sensation into aggregates or organized wholes, Aeon is comprised solely of

intensive quantities, each of which is itself a multiplicity. According to Deleuze

and Guattari, these intensive multiplicities "cannot increase or diminish without

their elements changing in nature. " (ATP, 31) They thus create a diagonal line

which bypasses the stratic distinctions between constant and variable, quantity

and quality and produce a time of continuous variation whose elements can not

change in size without changing in nature.

One of the essential characteristics of the dream of multiplicity is that

each element ceaselessly varies and alters its distance in relation to the
others... These variable distances are not extensive quantities divisible by
each other; rather, each is indivisible, or "relatively indivisible, " in other
words, they are not divisible below or above a certain threshold, they
cannot increase or diminish without their elements changing in
nature ...What is the significance of these indivisible distances that are
ceaselessly transformed, and cannot be divided or transformed without
their elements changing in nature each time? Is it not the intensive
character of this kind of multiplicity's elements and their relation between
them? Exactly like a speed or a temperature, which is not composed of
other speeds or temperature but rather is enveloped in or envelops

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others, each of which marks a change in nature. (ATP 30-31)

Since it is not composed of an everlasting series of homogenous units,

Aeon does not share the infinity of Chronos. Yet, nonetheless, there is an Aeonic

infinity that is greater than the whole of Chronic time. This is because the instant

in which intensities are perceived necessarily opens up onto a continuum. For as

we have seen, to say that intensities are apprehended instantaneously does not

mean that they occur inside a unit of extensive time.

Like extensive aggregates intensive quantities are multiplicities but they

are composed of intensive rather than extensive parts. They divide, but only into

themselves, in accordance with an order of envelopment whose ultimate term is

absolute continuuum V. In Kant's words, the apprehension of intensities "can

diminish to nothing (the void) through infinite gradations. " (CPR, 206) Thus the

continuous variations of intensive multiplicities provide the matter for a potential

"infinite subdivision of the abstract moment. (LS, 77) This occurs through a

process of intensive numbering that is based on ordinal sequence - of greater

and lesser rather than cardinal units. Thus, while extensive magnitudes are
-

counted as the aggregation of parts, intensive degrees can only be quantified as

more or less, as intrinsically determined by their distance from absolute

cessation ('0'), towards which each "can diminish in its degree in infinitum. "

(CPR, 207) Though they are comprised of magnitudes, intensive quantities do

not measure the successive units of an aggregate, but mark an order of

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differences - or irreducible distances - from degree-zero. It is this virtual

continuum, immanent within each instant, that constitutes the infinity of Aeon. 2

Part 2. The Unity of Eternity versus the Multiplicity of Aeon

As has already been noted, the infinity of extensive time is not the only

way in which the concept of eternity operates in the Kantian system. In fact, from

the point of view of the classical tradition, the infinitude of the 'Transcendental

Aesthetic' has more in common with the everlasting than it does with the eternal.

In the 'Transcendental Deduction', however, Kant comes closer to his classical

predecessors by presenting unity as an essential property of the eternal. In

insisting that the intuition of time be united by the transcendental subject,3 Kant

produces a notion of eternity which can be defined as the whole of time

conceived of as one.

2 This difference between the infinite series of Chronos and the infinitely subdivisible Aeon can
perhaps best be understood through the work of Georg Cantor, a 19th century mathematician
who specialized in the problem of infinity. Cantor's work shows that there are different types of
infinity. The first - and smallest kind - corresponds to Chronos in that it is characterized by any
number line extending infinitely in both directions. Cantor called this a 'countable infinity' or Aleph
null. Cantor realized, however, that there are infinitely more numbers in between two points on a
number line, if one includes the irrationals, then the infinite set of whole numbers. In other words,
there is an infinity greater than Aleph null which exists between any two points on the number line.
Cantor called this greater infinity C for continuum. It is continuum that corresponds to the intensive
infinity of Aeon.
3'There can be in us no modes of knowledge, no connection or unity of one mode of knowledge
with another, without that unity of consciousness which precedes all data of intuitions, and by
relation to which representation of objects is alone possible."(CPR, 136)

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According to the Kantian system it is a necessary and universal principle

that the everlasting series of time belongs under the transcendental unity of

apperception. This is a result of the fact that for Kant, time is ultimately nothing

more than an epistemological representation. Denied "all claim to absolute

reality" (CPR, 78) time, in Kantian language, is "empirically real but

transcendentally ideal. "(CPR, 78) That it is to say "when abstracted from its

subjective conditions time is nothing. " (CPR, 78)

Yet in a somewhat complicated twist the transcendental subject is

defined as nothing other than the constant synthesis of time. For despite the fact

that it is almost theological in scope, the Kantian subject is remarkably barren.

Devoid of all logical or qualitative characteristics its identity is a purely numerical

one. (CPR, 136) For Kant then, the I is an empty slot - defined as nothing other

than its ability to remain the same. Conceived of in this manner, the subject - as

has already been noted - becomes inextricably bound to the production of time.

First, because it is only time (which functions both as the form of inner sense and

as the secret of the schematism) which is abstract enough to organize and unite

the heterogenous elements of the system. And secondly, because as the

system's numerical synthesizer, time is essential to the subject's identity. This

bind is in fact so strong that the transcendental unity of apperception can be

seen as synonymous to the operations of transcendental time. To repeat a quote

from Deleuze "I is an act which constantly carries out the synthesis of time. "

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(KCP, viii)

Thus, in Kantian thought the infinity of temporal succession is

encompassed under a single identity whose unity is conceived of as the whole of

time. It is this unity of time which ensures that the multiplicity of the

transcendental be formed into an organized totality. It also serves to guarantee

the eternal nature - or transcendental completeness - of the Kantian system

itself.

As we have seen, transcendental materialism breaks from Kant by

viewing unity as a mode of organization produced on the plane of development.

Constructed in accordance with the hierarchical structures and tree-like logic of

this stratified plane, unity always involves a supplementary dimension. Deleuze

and Guatttari thus consider it to be a transcendent synthesis, illegitimate from

the point of view of critical thought. This is not to say that the production of unity

is not materially instantiated.; The power of the strata is real. Rather, it is to claim

that the unity of the transcendental subject, which Kant considers a necessary

presupposition, is itself the product of a contingent structuring principle which

happens to be manifested in the architectonic plan. For Deleuze and Guattari,

then, the unified subject is a stratified mode of individuation which does not

belong to the immanent plane of transcendental thought.

Deleuze and Guattari's critique of unity has important implications for the

Kantian theory of eternity developed in the 'Transcendental Deduction'. For,

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according to Deleuze and Guattari, the notion of a subject who unites the whole

of time under a single identity is not eternally given but is rather produced on the

extensive plane of Chronic time. "Chronos, " they write, is "the time of measure

that situates things and persons, develops a form, and determines a subject. "

(ATP, 262) Thus, rather than emanating from a presupposed identity, for

Deleuze and Guattari, it is the extensive units of Chronos which organize

subjects and structure their formations. Always at work dividing things into parts

and arranging those parts into wholes Chronos, as the time proper to the plane

of organization, constitutes the eternal unity of time as a transcendent illusion.

The eternal time of Aeon, on the other hand, constitutes an immanent

intensive plane that is systematically opposed to the experiential world of

extensive organization. Since this immanent undivided plane is not segmented

into parts, it cannot be unified into wholes. Thus as the time of immanence or

consistency, Aeon knows nothing of unity.

Unable to be captured under the identity of the transcendental subject,

Aeon operates with a mode of individuation that has nothing to do with unified

subjects or entities. 'There is a mode of individuation, " write Deleuze and

Guattari, "very different from that of a person, subject, thing or substance. A

season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking

nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a

subject. " (ATP, 161)

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Instead of being determined by the higher unity of subjects or things,

Aeon is populated by "machinic assemblages" or "intensive multiplicities" whose

singularity has more in common with the destratified nature of Spinozistic modes

than it does with the structure and form of identity. In Aeon, writes Deleuze and

Guattari, individuation is "a question not of organization but of composition. "

(ATP, 255) Dedicated to exploring this nonunified individuality, Capitalism and

Schizophrenia develops a cartography which maps out the two dimensions or

axis of this composition - the longitude and lattitude of the plane. Drawing on

Spinoza, they discover that these two axis can be characterized first by relations

of speed and slowness between unformed elements (longitude) and second by

the corresponding capacity for affecting and being affected (latitude). (ATP, 507)

According to the Spinozistic materialism of Deleuze and Guattari it is these two

axis which define the individuality of a body on the immanent plane of Aeon. 4

These intensive singularities, machinic multiplicities or bodies on the

Spinozistic sense are not individuals that remain consistent throughout time.

Rather they are events or Aeonic occurrences that are themselves immanent to

the very nature of time. They are becomings not beings. Comprised of

"continuums of intensities" whose elements cannot change in size without

4 In short, if we are Spinozists we will not define a thing by its form, nor by its organs and its
functions, nor as a substance or a subject. Borrowing terms from the Middle Ages, or from
geography we will define it as a longitude or latitude....The longitudes and latitudes together
constitute Nature, the plane of immanence or consistency, which is always variable and is

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changing in nature, these events are in a process of "continuous variations,

which go beyond constants and variables. They are becomings which have

neither culmination nor subject." (ATP, 507)

These becomings or intensive events are eternal in the sense that they

involve the whole of time, not by uniting it under a single identity but rather by

constituting a mode of distribution in which time is not segmented into parts. As

flat multiplicities composed on a single undivided plane, intensities fill the whole

of time to a greater or lesser degree.

For these reasons Aeonic occurrences break down the distinction

between the constant structure of time and the changes which occur inside it.

For as we have seen, the plane of consistency has no supplementary dimension

from that which it gives rise. Aeonic events do not occur in time, not because

they belong to a transcendent outside but because they are flat with the single

plane of immanence which collapses the distinction between time and that which

populates it. Equally immanent within any given moment of Chronos, in Aeon

"everything happens at once." (ATP, 297) Operating with a mode of distribution

that is incommensurable to the order of Chronos they cannot help but scramble

the linear sequence of extensive time. 5

constantly being altered, composed or recomposed, by individuals and collectivities. (SPP, 128)
5 For a good pulp fiction account of Aeon see Stephen King's book The Shining which is based
on
Jack Torrence's encounters with the Aeonic singularities that haunt the Overlook Hotel. King,
Stephen. The Shining New York: Doubleday, 1993.

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The identity of Chronos knows the world as a perpetual present. For

though the plane of organization segments time into past, present and future,

nevertheless "in accordance with Chronos, only the present exists in time. " (LS,

162) Past, present and future are known only as the present that has been, the

present that is and the present that will be. As Schopenhauer says "No man has

lived in the past and none will ever live in the future, the present alone is the form

of all life" (WWR1 278)

Endlessly decomposing itself in both directions at once," Aeon, on the

other hand, "forever sidesteps the present. " (LS, 77) Enveloping the whole of

time without unifying it, Aeon is, "already past and yet in the future, at once more

and less, always the day before and the day after"6 (LS 77) As the "indefinite

time of the event" it exhibits a power of virtuality irreducible to the actuality of

Chronic time.

Part 3. Aeon or time as thing-in-itself

According to Schopenhauer, Kants great doctrine "is the doctrine that

space, time, causality belong not to the thing-in-itself but only to the

6'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, a
simultaneous too-late and too-early, a something that is both going to happen and has just
happened.' (ATP, 262)

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phenomenon, that they are only the forms of our knowledge, not qualities of the

thing-in-itself' (WWR 1 134) As we have already noted, it is this notion of the

thing-in-itself, which constitutes the idealism of Kantian thought. It is also, for this

reason, the element of the Kantian system which comes closest to the notion of

the eternal conceived of by classical philosophy. For in distinguishing between

the world that we know and the thing-in-itself, Kant reproduces the classical

disjunction which opposes the temporality of appearances to the essence of

eternity. For, implied in the doctrine of the thing-in-itself is that beyond the

structures of the knowing subject, outside the representation of the mind, and

exterior to the world of phenomena, is another hidden plane of which time is not

a part.

In this doctrine, then, eternity is constituted as the timelessness of the

thing-in-itself. Evoked as a divine essence, Kant considers it to exceed the limits

of critique. It thus operates in the Kantian system as the relic of an older tradition

in which knowledge was based, not on the immanent principles of the

understanding, but on the transcendent authority of faith. Aware that this

contradicts the explicit aims of the critical project, Kant attempts to banish all

questions pertaining to the thing-in-itself by insisting that they are beyond the

7 To quote Schopenhauer "Whatever the thing-in-itself may be, Kant rightly concluded that time,
space, causality...could not be its properties, but could come to it only after, and in so far as, it has
become representation." (WWR1,120)

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scope of transcendental thought. Yet, from the point of view of the philosophy of

time it is already too late. Kantianism has collapsed into a Platonic vision in

which time is seen as a trap or enclosure, and eternity its transcendent outside.

It is here that transcendental materialism's revolt against Kant is most

starkly apparent. For as should now be clear, Deleuze and Guattari replace the

opposition between our capture in the phenomenon of time and the exterior

essence of the eternal with two different planes of production, governed by two

different times. In Deleuze and Guattari it is the transcendent plane of Chronos

which produces the interiority of time, and the immanence of Aeon which is its

outside. 8

This notion of an immanent outside requires that Kant's 'great doctrine'

be radically transformed. It demands that the idealism which severs what we

know from the thing-in-itself be replaced with a materialist plane of consistency

which no longer segments or divides.

Deleuze and Guattari conduct this transformation through the adoption of

the Kantian theory of intensities. The reason they give so much weight to this

particular aspect of transcendental thought is because it is here that the Kantian

system becomes fully machinic rather than epistemological. As the 'real of

8 In this sense the difference between Aeon and Chronos corresponds to the Kantian distinction
between the transcendental production of time and the empirical changes in time. Aeon, however,
can only be equated with transcendental time if the transcendental is conceived in the terms set
out by Deleuze and Guattari's materialist revolution. For Aeon, as we will see, corresponds to the

172
sensation' intensive quantities are directly effective, not representational. As

even Kant himself writes, they have a direct "degree of influence on the

senses. " (CPR, 202) A production of the real that stems neither from concepts

nor from the forms of our perception, intensities are what is left when intuition

and the understanding are stripped away.

In that it is exterior to the transcendental structures of representation,

degree zero intensity -a state which is immanent to every perception but is

nonetheless never perceived 9- is neither a cessation of thought nor a negation

of sensation but matter as an immanent abstraction. Thus at degree zero

intensity the 'matter of sensation' or 'realitas phenomenas" constitutes

abstraction as a body which substitutes for any transcendent notion of the

absolute reality of the thing-in-itself. Deleuze and Guattari call this abstraction

the "uninterrupted continuum of the BwO" (ATP, 154)

The BwO causes intensities to pass; it produces them and distributes them
in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it
in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree-to the degree
corresponding to the intensities produced. It is nonstratified, unformed,
intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity V; but there is nothing
negative about that zero, there is no negative or opposite intensities. Matter
equals energy. Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at
zero... (ATP 153)

transcendental production of time only as a body at zero degree intensity.

As Deleuze and Guattari write: You never reach the Body without Organs, you can't reach it, you

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Since an intensity is nothing but a virtual descent to zero - which

instantiates the distance, difference, or degree which it is - the zero degree body

of intensities functions as an "immobile motor, " reciprocally produced alongside

the intensive sequence itself (for it an immanent limit). 10It is this

which provides

circuit of production which accounts for both the exteriority and immanence of

the BwO. Intensities make their own plane, which nevertheless intrinsically

exceeds them, and since this plane is untranscended it can be subject to a time

beyond that which it itself is.

Thus Deleuze and Guattari's intensive mutation of critique invokes a

temporality - Aeon is the ultimate real abstraction of both time

- which at once

and the thing-in-itself: matter-time at degree-zero.

The preceding pages have sought to show that despite the revolutionary

impact that it had on the philosophy of time, Kant's transcendental idealism

retains the classical notion of eternity. For with Kant, just as with Plato, unity,

identity, being, and transcendence are all aligned with a conception of the eternal

is
which opposed to the phenomenon of time.

With the concept of Aeon, Deleuze and Guattari overturn this classical

understanding of the It
eternal. would be wrong, however, to assume that in

are forever attaining it, it is a limit." (ATP, 150)

10See Anti-Oedipus especially pp. 8-9

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ridding the transcendental of its classical ties to eternity, Deleuze and Guattari

make of it a secularist philosophy. Far from offering a crass materialism or a

naive empiricism, Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a gothic text filled with

demons, sorcerers, werewolves, and traffic with the other side. Rather than a

sad and disillusioned atheism which would discard the eternal archetype in order

to insist that only time exists and there is no outside, Deleuze and Guattari

replace the classical disjunction of time versus eternity with "two readings of

time" - time as Aeon and time as Chronos. In substituting Aeon for eternity,

however, they discard the traditional associations of unity, being, and identity

which belong to a transcendent realm exterior to time and replace it with the

multiplicity, becoming, and continuous variation of an immanent outside.

Yet though these two notions - Aeon and eternity - are in many ways

diametrically opposed - they can nevertheless be seen, from a certain

perspective, as functionally equivalent.

We have seen in the introduction that Western thought has traditionally

lamented our birth into the phenomenal world of restless matter and temporal

change. Entangled in the multiplicity of becoming the human soul is seen to have

been separated from its real eternal essence by the illusory movement of time.

Thus, the philosophical and religious quest is aimed at transcending the body

and matter, escaping the ever changing illusion of time, and reaching the truth of

eternity.

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It is clear from their continuous refrain to treat theory as creation,

concepts as tools, philosophy as invention, writing as diagrammatics and books

as assemblages that the work of Deleuze and Guattari is to be used and not

interpreted. In the preface to Anti Oedipus, Michel Foucault, recognizing this,

warns the reader that they will find neither a theory nor a philosophy in the pages

which follow. Instead, he writes, "I would say that Anti Oedipus (may the author

forgive me) is a book of ethics. " (AO, xiii) Like Spinoza's Ethics" then,

Capitalism ands Schizophrenia is best thought of as a 'How To' book, or, as

Foucault says, as a manual or guide to everyday life" (AO xiii)12 The aim of this

guide is to develop a set of practices which construct lines of flight that can

escape sequential order and the interiority of Chronos and make contact with the
13
outside, not so as to transcend matter into the world of spirit but rather to

access the destratified, unformed "Matter of the Plane" (ATP, 72), the body

without organs, and the "singular, nonsegmented multiplicities, or the intensive

continuums" (ATP, 72) that populate it.

" Spinoza's Ethics is a purely practical text in that its aim is to lay down concrete rules for freeing
oneself from 'sad passions' and to thereby map a path to an increase in power (or joyful
encounters). It is for this reason that Deleuze and Guattari's writings on Spinoza concentrate not
so much on the philosophical argument but rather on how one can 'live in a Spinozist manner."
(SPP, 123)

12On the same theme, Foucault writes: "I think Anti Oedipus can best be read as an art in the
sense that is conveyed by the term erotic art..." (AO-xii)
13 It is this accounts for the strong gothic component that runs through Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, a text that is teeming with references to secrets, sorcery, animal becomings,
werewolves, vampires, blind doubles, and Things from the 'Other Side'.

176
Chapter 4: The Aeonic Occurence

Any event is a fog of a million droplets.

Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues, p. 65

And believe me, friend Infernal racket! The greatest events they are not our
-
noisiest but our stillest hours.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 153

4.0 Introduction: Anticlimax

In the biblical tradition eternity comes at the beginning and the end of

history. The ongoing passage of time is thus framed, on one side, by the

unformed void which pre-exists creation, and, on the other, by messianic

redemption which acts as history's teleological termination point. To quote from

the Book of Revelations "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending,

the first and the last.' (Rev 22: 13) Between these twin limits of time, the eternal

impacts on history only as punctuating moments in which a transcendent God

interrupts the order of time through miracles and divine revelation. In the popular

religious understanding of the West these punctual moments have long since

ceased. The world now waits for the eternal in the form of the apocalypse, which
'
will bring about the end of time. Though most people leave the anticipation of

such a moment to fanatic cults and fiction, at the end of the second millennium a

End of time apocalyptic scenarios which feed the current cultural imagination include: nuclear
war, ecological collapse, asteroid impact, alien invasion, and nanotech or genetically engineered

177
temporal event, brought on by a computer bug known as Y2K, brought the

promise or threat of an eternal envelopment of history to the fore.

As is now well known, when understood technically Y2K stems from the

fact that until only recently computers were programmed to read only

the last two digits of the year -assuming the prefix 19. This programming

convention dates back to the early days of the computer industry when memory
2
was scarce and expensive and each line of code was a precious resource. At

that time a space saving protocol called for dates to be recorded with 6 digits

(YY/MM/DD) instead of 8 (YYYY/MM/DD). More than half a century later this

seemingly banal convention proved to have staggering consequences, since it

soon become clear that a

as result of their two digit dating system many of the

worlds computers were incapable of making the magnitude jump necessary to

register the year 2000. Instead of treating the stroke of midnight December 31

1999 as the end of a unit in a linear succession, cyberspace takes it to be the

completion of a hundred year count, the pre-programmed signal for computer

clocks to return to year zero (99 +1' 00). Incapable of recognizing the

difference between the year 1900 and the year 20003 cyberspace needed to be

'fixed' if it was to smoothly process the impending millennium.

virus and mutation.

2 Before technological advances in the early 1990's made high capacity disc storage and memory
chips affordable these were the key limitations in computer system design.

3 Since 19 is the systems cipher the year 00 is treated as 1900 and not 2000.

178
Though no one could predict the exact consequences if this "glitch" was

not dealt with in time, the fact that it was deeply embedded in a globalized

system of date-sensitive information flows meant that, in the premillennium

years, Y2K was the cause of widespread concern - even panic. The ubiquity of

network computing coupled with the hierarchized nature of technological

development (which has tended to add new applications on top of already

existing code) resulted in the fact that the target area of Y2K was practically

unlimited. As zero hour approached, it became clear that the vulnerable areas

included: worldwide finance (especially 'time sensitive' transactions such as

payrolls, pensions, insurance policies, stock options, interest and credit),

transportation networks (including air traffic control), weapon systems (nuclear as

well as conventional), hospitals, power plants and most obviously communication

lines.4 At its most extreme this two digit error in programming code threatened to

shut down planetary networks, erase large chunks of data and severely disrupt

the technological systems on which contemporary civilization depends. 5

The fact that this threat coincided with the dawn of a new millennium led

to a massive cultural investment in Y2K. What appeared from one side to be a

simple technical glitch coincidentally collided with a much older faith in

4 In the final stage of panic concern extended to embedded chips, which control everything from
microwaves to elevators.

5 Note the following 1997

quote from the Economist magazine: " Care for a thrill? Consider what
might happen if the Millennium Bug, that tendency for many of the world's computers to mistake
the year 2000 for 1900, is not eradicated in time...Could two measly digits really halt civilization?
179
eschatological history. In America, at the cutting edge of capitalism, sci-fi

scenarios fused with Christian prophecy. This produced a contemporary myth in

which Y2K ceased to be a mere programming error and became instead the

technical mechanism which would bring about the biblical Armageddon. Thus,

rather than a simple glitch which would occur within the evolutionary structure of

history, Y2K came to be associated with catastrophic empirical events that would

signal history's very ends On the intemet Y2K was designated by another

acronymic term that could capture this apocalyptic aspect of the millennium. The

end of the twentieth century was renamed TEOTWOKI (or the end of the world

as we know it).

On December 31 1999 the world watched, tense with anticipation, as Y2K

made its way across the time-zones. Yet, no matter where, when it was midnight

at the date-line next to nothing occurred. There were no nuclear disasters, no

airplane crashes, no market collapse, no power outages, no rioting, not even a

terrorist attack. Thus, though it was perhaps sufficiently masked by theatrical

gestures and elaborate firework displays, celebrations heralding the arrival of the

21st century were overshadowed by a pervasive sense of anticlimax. The most

Yes, yes - 2000 times yes! The Economist Oct 4th-10th 1997

6 Everyone is by now familiar with the most apocalyptic scenarios which included nuclear
accidents, plane crashes, major disturbances in communication and transportation lines,
shortages of food and other basic resources. These various disasters - so the story went - would
result in spirals of panic which would feed on themselves, leading to riots, martial law and general
social collapse. However farfetched, this basic narrative incited an expansion of survivalist
movements, especially in America, where many have people sold their homes in the cities and
moved to the hills with a stockpile of food, fire wood and weapons.

180
anticipated date in history was a non-event. In the days and weeks that followed
7
a sense of almost euphoric relief was mixed with a strange anger, even

contempt. Y2K, (or `apocalypse not') is now believed to have been nothing but a

hoax, a conspiracy, a myth.

Yet, it is precisely the inability to associate Y2K with any actual or

empirical incident (especially one of apocalyptic or messianic proportions) that

serves to connect this singular temporal event with the philosophy of Deleuze

and Guattari. The fact that Y2K disappointed those awaiting an inauguration of

eternity does not mean it was not flat with Aeon.

A Thousand Plateaus, the second volume of Capitalism and

Schizophrenia is composed of fifteen sections, thirteen of which are marked by a

date. Though these dates correspond to singular events (e.g. the origin of the

state, the death of Genghis Khan etc.. ) they are not to be mistaken for punctual

moments. For Deleuze and Guattari, dates do not specify points in time but

rather tag plateaus. "A plateau, " they write, "is always in the middle not at the

beginning or the end." (ATP, 21) Defined as "self vibrating region of intensities

whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point" (ATP, 22)

plateaus substitute the climactic instant for continuums of intensity8and thus

Some maintain that the immediate post-millennium market drop was a result, not of scepticism,
but of an increasing faith, (the idea being that with nothing to stop it the economy would grow too
fast resulting in an increase of interest rates).

181
operate in an exterior relation to the linear sequence of Chronic time.

Like the plateaus singled out by Deleuze and Guattari, Y2K is dated in
-
its case precisely so - and yet, as the pervasive sense of anticlimax made clear,

it nevertheless cannot be located at any particular point in time. 9 Thus the

question 'When did Y2K occur? ' is inevitably met with a certain degree of

mystification. A non-event at the time of its arrival, it is further confused by its

unconscious origins and by the fact that it is unclear whether it ever existed as

anything other than hype. The question 'when did it happen? ' thus slides into

more nebulous questions such as `what happened? '10 or 'did it actually occur? '

This ambivalence, or open-ended nature of the event, is a result of the

8 "Bateson cites Balinese culture as an example [of plateaus]: mother-child sexual games, and
even quarrels among men, undergo this bizarre intensive stabilization. Some sort of continuing
plateau of intensity is substituted for [sexual] climax, , war, or a culmination point. It is a
regrettable characteristic of the Western mind to relate expressions and actions to exterior or
transcendent ends, instead of evaluating them on a plane of consistency on the basis of their
intrinsic valuation.' (ATP, 22)
9 The attempt to locate Y2K in time leads to a series of contradictory impulses. On the one hand, it
is tempting to argue that Y2K, as an event, took place - long before anyone was conscious of it -
in the early days of computing when the two digit dating convention was first introduced. At the
time, of course, no one was aware that this mundane bit of programming code would result in an
end of the millennium catastrophe. If given any thought at all it was assumed - in accordance with
the science fiction visions of the 1950's - that the computer systems that were then being
programmed - would no longer be in use by the year 2000. It is just as plausible, however, to date
Y2K to the more recent past - around the early 1990's - when the world began to awaken to the
problem this dating convention would pose for the millennium and financial institutions, military,
security and traffic control, and companies of various kinds began to realize that the problem had
to be fixed. Yet, another possibility is to claim that Y2K - as an event - took place in 1999 when
media coverage, panic intensity and apocalyptic hype was at its strongest. Finally, it may be the
case that Y2K will only make sense as a significant occurrence in the future when 21 Stcentury
historians use it as an index for changes that are still now unclear.

10Deleuze and Guattari write of the question 'what happened' in relation to the peculiar
temporality of the novella, suggesting that the question itself is an index of Aeonic events. See
'1874:Three Novellas, or What Happened?' in A Thousand Plateaus.
182
fact that -as we will later see is the name for a machinic multiplicity. As
-Y2K

such it envelops everything from the revolutions of the planets, to messianic

prophecy, to the history of calendrics, to technological invention, to the cycles or

waves of the capitalist economy. At the most extreme one could view Y2K as

spreading throughout the entire span of history. It thus implies an intensive

temporality which exists outside the successive instants that constitute Chronic

time. Like every intensive singularity, Y2K occupies the whole of time to a greater

or lesser degree.

Y2K will never be anything other than a virtual catastrophe. Though it has

had enormous effects inside empirical history, it impacts on Chronos only as a

pure potentiality. As an immanent machinic accident" Y2K is intensive rather

than actual. As such it must be considered not as a moment extended or

unfolded in Chronos, but rather as a plateau, or, in other words, as a virtual

occurrence composed on immanent and intensive plane which constitutes the

exteriority of Aeon.

11Y2K has obvious connections with Paul Virilio's theory of the accident. To quote Virilio: "For the
Philosopher, substance is absolute and necessary, whereas the accident is relative and
contingent. So the accident is what happens unexpectedly to the substance, the product of the
recently invented technical object-In fact, if no substance can exist in the absence of an accident,
then no technical object can be developed without in turn generating 'its' specific accident: ship'
shipwreck, plane' plane crash etc. The accident is thus the hidden face of technical and scientific
progress.' Paul Virillio. Politics of the Very Worst. New York: Semiotext(e), 1999 p. 92 The
argument of this chapter, namely that Y2K corresponds to the virtual time of Aeon rather than the
transcendence of eternity, is also in some ways convergent with Virilio's notion of the accident "as
an inverted miracle, a secular miracle, a revelation" (PVW, 90)
183
4.1 Time-Mutations

Throughout this thesis it has been argued that the modern conception of

time - produced in both transcendental philosophy and by the culture and

technics of capitalism - involves a distinction between time as a formal structure

and the historical variations which occur inside it. In previous social regimes,

when calendars were dominant and temporality was inseparable from the

movements of astronomy, this distinction did not exist, and time was itself

inherently connected with the qualitative changes now associated with history.

However, both the Copernican revolution in philosophy and the capitalist

revolution in time-keeping systems have overturned this tradition by liberating

time from its age old subordination to movement. Unhinged from the cardinal

points which it had been so long destined to measure, time became autonomous

from the cyclical patterns of astronomy. There thus emerged a formal time

conceived of as a purely quantitative framework that was considered to be

separate and distinct from the'historical content which happened to fill it.

As we have seen, the culture and technics of modern capitalism emerged

in conjunction with a synthetic temporal regime which served to instantiate this

new form of time. This temporal regime - or the capitalist production of time - can

be characterized by the following features:

1. The invention and development of the mechanical clock.

184
Though sun dials, water clocks and hour glasses have been in use

throughout the long history of time-keeping' it was not until the modern period

that these devices gained any degree of technical or social autonomy. Previous

to this, the practice of time-keeping, like the philosophy of time, had been

inextricably linked to the technical and cultural traditions of a temporality based

on the calendar. Starting from as early as the 14th century, however, with the

invention of the mechanical escapement, growth in the precision, influence and

ubiquity of the clock has ensured that clock time achieve a certain independence

or autonomy from the qualitative time of calendar.

2. The synthesis of clock time with the calendar

Formal time, however, cannot be solely equated with clock-time. For in

order to tell the time, the division of the day into hours, minutes and seconds

must be synthesized with the days of the week and the months of the year. In

order to function time-keeping systems require both a beat and a count. Thus,

the ticking of the clock must be combined with the counting system prescribed by

the calendar.

3. The global standardization of time.

Given tolerable accuracy, the decision about which calendar to use is a

purely arbitrary one. Capitalism requires only that the world agree on a

See Chapter2 'The Divisionof the Dayand Time-Keepingin Antiquity'in Historyof the Hour.
185
standardized convention. As a global system from the start ,2 capitalism operates

by drawing lines of communication, trade routes and transportation networks that

criss-cross the globe. The development of a world-wide economy, however,

necessitates that the planet be unified under a universal temporal regime. As we

have seen, this regime was initially created through an international agreement

which divided the planet into a series of standardized time zones, placing the

zero meridian at Greenwich. It also required the word-wide adoption of the

Gregorian Calendar. With these two things in place capitalism was able to

synthesize the ever increasing precision of clocks with a unified dating system

which could operate as a virtual standard throughout the globe.

4. The convergence of time with money.

Disassociated from the world of empirical change and standardized

across the planet, formal time is capable of being rigorously quantified. This

allows time (and in particular duration) to be directly converted into money. This

equation, "Time' Money" is perhaps the most important synthesis in the

capitalist regime and is found at the heart of modern analyses of capitalism,

including, most famously, Weber's notion of the protestant ethic, and the labour

theory of value. It is also, as we have seen through our examination of the

2 This claim is supported by the work of historian Fernand Braudel and by world system theory.
See in particular Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism 15"' -181hcentury. London: Collins,
1981-1984, and the work of Immanuel Wallerstein.

186
economist Bohm-Bawerk, crucial to phenomena such as interest and credit, two

features that are essential to the capitalist economy and its mode of production.

These characteristic features of formal time are not static, but are rather

the result of an ongoing machinic process that produce the formalization of time.

In the capitalist regime it appears that this process (the machinic production of

time) converges with the path of technological development. Thus, in

contemporary or postmodern capitalism, formal time is considered to be

instantiated by the digitization of both time and money that takes place in

cyberspace.

In keeping with the capitalist trajectory, cyberspace time synthesizes

clocks and calendars in such a way that the length of calendric intervals are no

longer determined by the revolutions of the planets but are governed instead by

the ticking of the clock. Cut off from astronomical movements, calendars are a

pure counting convention that can be programmed into a digital system from the

start. With the digitization of time, clocks and calendars have thus become part

of the same technical machine. In cyberspace, the beat and the count, the two

aspects of time-keeping systems have become so intermeshed that it is

impossible to say, for example, whether Y2K was a glitch in computer clocks or

an error in computer calendars.

The universal nature of Y2K (no country, however "undeveloped" was

187
thought to be spared) is evidence of the ever-increasing importance of the global

standardization of time. Cyberspace, as the technological system of global

capitalism in its contemporary phase, supplements (and in part even replaces)

the previous dependence on physical trade routes and transportation networks

with a virtual web in which geographical boundaries have become redundant.

Dependent on instantaneous communications irrespective of place, this virtual

web makes the demand for a standardized time that accompanied previous

technological grids even more urgent. For cyberspace, like the capitalist system

itself, is a distributed network which can only be united by a precisely

synchronized and globalized time.

Cyberspace's emphasis on temporal precision and accuracy is primarily

due to the intimate interactive dynamics which have developed between

technology and economic systems. In cyberspace flows of capital - which are

never anything other than digital code - are continuously subjected to virtual

transactions that are sensitive to minute variations in time. As digital code, time

and money have converged on a single numerical and technical plane making

the conversion between the two ever more immediate and immanent.

All this is to say that the constitution of formal time is a continuing process

constructed in conjunction with its own historical development which it itself 'falls

back upon'. This history, however involves only a very limited conception of

change. For it is determined by an empirical advance that follows the smooth

upward curve of technological progress. The history of the clock, for example,

188
tells the story of an evolutionary growth that progresses from the mechanical

escapement, to the pendulum, to the quartz crystal, to the atomic clock. 3 As a

result of this growth curve there appears to be an underlying constancy to

change. Transformations are subordinated to development such that change

only occurs to heighten the accuracy and efficiency of the same basic device.4
Capitalism's construction of historical progress is much more than a

convenient ideology. 5 For the notion that an underlying constancy to change

produces a predictable trajectory is a necessary part of the capitalist machine.

This is primarily due to the time-lag that is inherent in capitalist production. This

time-lag, as we have seen, manifests itself in such phenomena as the

investment in constant capital for future gains (roundabout production) credit,

interest and debt. Absolutely reliant on phenomena such as these, it is essential

that capitalism treat history as a smooth upward curves6 For it is only with a story

3 The atomic clock time by the beats of a ceasium atom.- is time-

-which measures way of metric
keepings most current manifestation

4 This progressive history of technology has reached unprecedented heights with the development
of Information Technology. As everyone is all too aware, the cycles of obsolescence maintained
by the computer industry happen at an ever increasing speed. The trajectory of smaller and
smaller machines capable of processing more and more data for increasingly diminishing costs
seems itself to be continuously intensifying. For example, Moore's Law which states that
processing speeds will double every eighteenth months is itself now outdated.
5 That is to
say that the 'myth' of historical progress is not constructed in order to fool the masses
or as a mystification of underlying real value.
6 The most absurd
examples of the prevalent notion that as time passes things remain basically
the same were evident around the time of the millennium when newspapers and magazines were
filled with predictions of how are lives would be improved by a series of technical inventions
-
intelligent clothes, robotic vacuum cleaners etc - that would undoubtedly be in place for the year

189
such as this that the difference between the present and the future can remain

open to rigorous quantification.

The problem with this particular construction of the passage of time,

however, is that it hides the fact that capitalist history is discontinuous, based

more on "ruptures and limits" than on the smooth continuity of empirical

advance. Underneath the mask of evolutionary development lies a series of

radical innovations. As Fernand Braudel writes "is it not in the nature of

capitalism, a sort of rule of the game, that it thrives on change, drawing strength

from it". (CC, 620) Capitalism, then, produces the appearance of a continuous

history while simultaneously feeding off unplanned, uncontrolled, unconscious

mutations. '

For Deleuze and Guattari social formations are defined not by modes of

production but by'machinic processes', (ATP, 435) and machines work, " they

write, "only by breaking down. "(AO, 8) Crises, ruptures, accidents and anxieties

are misunderstood when one regards them as threats. In order for a machine to

function "it must not function well". (AO, 151) Abandoning the rigid form of the

finely tuned, well oiled, mechanisms of a previous age, Deleuze and Guattari - as

3000. Surely Bill Joy, the CEO of Sun Microsystems is much closer to the mark when he wams of
the inevatibility of unpredictable mutations arising from a convergence of Artificial Intelligence,
nanotechnology and genetic engineering.
7 As Deleuze writes: 'Those
who continue to have recourse to History and protest against the
indetermination of a concept such as 'mutation' should bear in mind the perplexity of real
historians when they have to explain why capitalism arose at such a time and such a place when
so many factors could have made it equally possible at another time and place ."[F, 21]

190
we have seen - define machines through the principles of a post cybernetic

abstraction. No longer dependent on the smooth functioning of clearly

distinguished parts, cybernetic machines learn and adapt through their mistakes.

Feeding on their own misfirings, they "operate only by fits and starts, by grinding

and breaking down, in spasms of minor explosions". (AO, 151) Capitalism, an

intelligent social machine, has learnt this rule. As Deleuze and Guattari write,

"The more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the

American way. " (AO, 15)

Yet these accidents, ruptures and mutations are more than just breaks in

the linear order of developmental history. For as we have seen in our discussion

of Foucault, real discontinuities are mutations not only in time but to time.

Evolutionism," write Deleuze and Guattari, has been challenged in many

different ways (zigzag movements, stages skipped here or there, irreducible

overall breaks)" (ATP, 429) Capitalism and Schizophrenia's anti-evolutionism,

however, relies on none of these challenges. Instead it presents a `contingent,

singular, ironic, and critical' version of "universal history" (AO, 140) in which the

great social formations - the primitive machine, the state, and capitalism itself -

do not evolve in time but coexist together as Aeonic virtualities. Each formation

is thus haunted by the others. These "stages" are mutually entangled by

191
8
strategies of anticipation and warding off. The linear narrative that bases itself

on the building blocks of history (successive instants or moments) is thus

replaced with a story of flows and their blockages, convergent waves and

cybernetic processes that defy linear causation. To quote from A Thousand

Plateaus:

Physics and biology present us with reverse causalities that are without
finality but testify nonetheless to an action of the future on the present, or
the present on the past, for example the convergent wave and the
anticipated potential, which imply an inversion of time. More than breaks
and zigzags, it is these reverse causalities that shatter evolution. (ATP,
431)

For Deleuze and Guattari, history is constituted by the extensive time of

Chronos. Its tendency towards evolutionism, teleology and an internal dynamic

advance is a result of the fact that it is necessarily subordinated to a one

dimensional time-line - whose subjectivity is the states - that progresses

successively from one moment to the next. Yet this successive, extensive

temporality belongs, as we have seen, solely to the plane of organization and

development, which - though it presents itself as transcendent cause - operates

through the stratification of an immanent plane of consistency. The

'In a sense,' write Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism has haunted all forms of society, but it
haunts them as their terrifying nightmare, it is the dread they feel of a flow that would elude their
codes.' (ATP, 431)
9According to Deleuze
and Guattari, 'history is always written from the sedentary point of view
and in the name of a unitary State apparatus... ' (ATP. 23) In A Thousand Plateaus they oppose
this state centred narrative to a'nomadology, the opposite of a history. " (ATP, 23) Though this
topic relates to many of the themes of the thesis it is far too complex to be dealt with in detail here.
For a complete discussion see '1227: Treatise on Nomadology: -The War Machine' and '7000 BC:
Apparatus of Capture' in A Thousand Plateaus.

192
developmental structure of history, then, like the plane to which it belongs,

masks its reliance on an underlying temporality that is intensive in nature. "The

system in extension is bom of the intensive conditions that make it possible, but

it reacts on them, cancels them, represses them, and allows them no more than

a mythical expression. " (AO, 160)

For Deleuze and Guattari, then, the production of Chronic time is

generated through the capture of Aeon. "All history does", they write, Is to

translate a coexistence of becomings into a succession" (ATP, 430) In

Capitalism and Schizophrenia's anti-evolutionism lines of flight, flows and

thresholds of intensity and the continuous process of Aeonic becomings "have

replaced history, individual or general." (ATP, 162)

The great geographical adventures of history are lines of flight. it is

..
always on a line of flight that we create... This primacy of lines of flight
must not be understood chronologically, or in the sense of an eternal
generality. It is rather the fact and the right of the untimely: a time which
is non pulsed, a haecceity like a wind which blows up, a midnight, a
midday... (D, 135-36)

The unexpected line' or 'imperceptible rupture' of the untimely - what

Nietzsche called "the vaporous region of the unhistorical" (UM, 63) - constitute,

in Deleuze and Guattari's terms, singularities, machinic multiplicities, or Aeonic

events that populate, and mutually draw the plane of consistency. It is on this

plane - however suppressed - that histories take place and extend themselves.

History is made only by those who oppose history (not by those who insert
themselves into it, or even reshape it)... The dividing line passes not
between history and memory but between punctual 'history-memory'

193
systems and diagonal or multilinear assemblages, which are in no way
eternal; they have to do with becoming; they are a bit of becoming in the
pure state; they are transhistorical. There is no act of creation that is not
transhistorical and does not come up from behind or proceed by way of a
liberated line. Nietzsche opposes history not to the eternal but to the
subhistorical or superhistorical; The Untimely which is another word for
haecceity, becoming, the innocence of becoming (in other words, forgetting
as opposed to memory, geography as opposed to history, the map as
opposed to the tracing, the rhizome as opposed to arborescence). "The
unhistorical is like an atmosphere within which alone life can germinate
and with the destruction of which it must vanish... What deed would man be
capable of if he had not first that vaporous region of the unhistorical? "
Creations are like mutant abstract lines that have detached themselves
from the task of representing the world, precisely because they assemble a
new type of reality that history can only recontain or relocate in punctual
systems ... (ATP, 296)

History seeks to dismiss Y2K as an accidental incident. For in

accordance with the capitalist investment in the production of developmental

time, it was necessary to present Y2K not as a mutation but rather as a glitch, an

error, an accident, a bug. In the post-millennial period even this has been

questioned. Yet, while history may remember Y2K as nothing but an over hyped

mistake, on the plane that underlies history Y2K has always been much more.

Imperceptibly interrupting developmental time with a singular mutation, it

introduced a break in the predictable trajectory of technological advance. This

break was itself a temporal event made even more powerful by the fact that

existed primarily as a virtual catastrophe. Like the reverse causalities that

Deleuze and Guattari evoke, it operated on the virtual plane that haunts history,

empirically realized as a future that acts on the present and a present that acts

on the past.

194
In so far as it was ever present, Y2K manifested itself most strongly in the

years and months leading up to the millennium. Yet even at that time, Y2K was
-
at least when understood abstractly - primarily a challenge to the past. An act of

calendric insurgency, Y2K threatened the authority of the Gregorian calendar by

replacing it with cyberspace's own cyclical count-10 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. Yet, though it contested the past, it functioned most effectively when it was

thought to be in the future, incurring massive costs even as a pure potentially.

As has already been noted, capitalism is a distributed network united not

by the dominance of a particular region, culture or ideology but rather by the fact

that is enveloped under a single and standardized time. This global temporal

standard is, as we have seen, a synthesis between clock time and the world-

wide adoption of the Gregorian "

calendar. The fact that computers were

10 Put most
simply, the problem with Y2K was that it threatened to replace the year 2000AD with
the year 00. This threat, though ultimately unrealized, was an unprecedented challenge to the
authority of the Gregorian calendar. For, as year 00, Y2K indexes the fact that cyberspace, rather
than reinforcing the temporal regime of modem capitalism, had surreptitiously installed a calendar
of its own. Thus, while human culture and nation states had all agreed on the Gregorian calendar
as a secular convention, until it was'fixed' cyberspace had not. It is the discrepancy between
cyberspace's own calendar and the calendar developed by Pope Gregory XIII reforms that is
signaled by the sign Y2K. From the point of view of a radical calendrics, then, the attempt to
achieve 'millennium compliance' was not merely the reversal of a technical glitch but a geo-
political strategy aimed at the imposition of the Gregorian calendar on cyberspace. Fixing' Y2K
required the abandonment of an existing calendar, one that had worked successfully around the
globe for half a century.

11Having achieved this

standard, the regime of capitalist time insists that it is universally imposed.
Thus, by the turn of the millennium there was not a single act or location that could escape this all-
encompassing envelopment No matter how obscure, all local, religious and culturally specific

195
operating - however imperceptibly - with a calendar which challenged this

standard, resulted in a virtual time-bomb that threatened the entire global

temporal order. Thus Y2K - at least as a potentiality - achieves the dream

parodied in Conrad's Secret Agent. A timer so perfected that the timer is the

bomb, it operates as if aware that the vulnerability of the system comes from its

underlying unity and constructs itself as a sort of retrochronic bomb aimed

directly at capitalism by targeting the pre-established order of time.

As a temporal mutation - or reverse causality that "shatters evolutionism"

- Y2K not only exemplified an effect of the present upon the past, but also -

and even more starkly - an operation of the future on the present. This is most

evident in the instability it introduces into the equation of time and money, an

instability generated by the exposition of the pseudo transcendence of Chronos.

In modem capitalism, whether it be in Marx's labour theory of value, Weber's

protestant ethic or Boehm-Bawerk's analyses of round-about production, the

equation `time = money' is inevitably associated with duration. The cost of Y2K,

however, was only indirectly determined by how long it would take to fix. For the

amount spent on labour time and upgrading technology was continuously

measured against the potential cost which would result from an error or

discrepancy in the semiotic system which marks the date. By revealing that a

time-keeping practices are regularly converted into the Gregorian count. In this way the production
of capitalist time concretely implements the Kantian assertion that *different times are but parts of
one and the same time" (CPR, 75)

196
date - even as a virtuality - has immense economic consequences Y2K indexes

something that is apparently new in the economy of formal time. For what is

crucial in the convergence of time and money on the digital plane is not only the

immanence and speed of quantitative conversion but also the increasing

importance of systems and transactions that are hypersensitive to the date.

Thus, far from operating as a transcendent grid, Y2K makes clear that the

dating system - or formal expression - of capitalist time is a component of the

socio-technical apparatus that is itself in need of constant construction. It thus

interrupts the apparent stability and continuity of Chronos by conflating the

history of time (as technological development) with the variations intrinsic to

time's own production.

As early as 1997 it was clear that Y2K was going to be "the single most

expensive accident of all time. " 12irrespective of what did or did not occur on

midnight December 31 1999. What makes this so critical for the abstract

production of capitalist time is not only how much money was spent but the fact

that it was spent on 'fixing' the date. For in introducing the date as an accident -

or positive force - in the capitalist production of time Y2K constitutes itself, not

only as a historical, but as temporal mutation.

12 The World in 1998. Economist Publications,

p. 135

197
4.2 Dates and the Semiotic of Aeon

We have already noted in chapter two that there exists an extremely

tight mesh between calendric convention and cultural tradition. Far from a

neutral device in the technology of time-keeping systems, calendars have

consistently been aligned with a particular type of centralized control. This is

why they have been traditionally managed by the priests and by the guardians

of the state. For unlike clock time, all the elements of calendrics - the type of

numeracy involved, the length and structure of the cyclical patterns, the

astronomical revolutions which are chosen to be emphasized, the dates

which are ritualized and the determination of when to start the count -

inevitably upholds and consolidates a particular cultural tradition.

It is no surprise, then, that there was an attempt by the Christian

religion to claim the date 2000AD as their own. Yet, though this attempt was

in many ways successful', it nonetheless inevitably led to a series of revealing

confusions. For though it is true that Pope Gregory's reforms emerged from

within the Christian tradition, according to the calendar he developed midnight

of December 31st 1999 does not coincide with any particular festival, has no

specific commemorative relevance and does not (as Gregorian year MM)

even mark the beginning of a new millennium.

The most radical, but nevertheless extremely pervasive, attempt to

1This is evident, for example, by the case of the religious section in London's 'millennium
dome' which, though it was primarily funded by a Hindu family, nevertheless took pains to
emphasize the Christian religion.

198
fuse the end of the twentieth century with Christianity involved as we have
-
seen - treating Y2K as the mechanism through which the prophecies foretold

in the Book of Revelation would come to be realized. This required the

creation of a contemporary myth in which the coming of the second

millennium as a moment in a calendric count was consistently confused or

interchanged with the notion of the millennium as found in Christian theology.

This latter signifies an eternal battle at the end of time when Satan is chained

and sealed in the Abyss and Christ is able to rule on earth for a period of a

thousand years. (Rev-XX). Needless to say, the idea that Y2K is the sign of

the programmic fulfilment of these prophecies has no doctrinal basis, nor is

there anything in the Revelation th at is even remotely suggestive of the year

2000AD.

Less fervent - or imaginative - believers sought to claim the connection

between religion and the date by insisting that the millennium was a

commemorative sign for Jesus 2000 year birthday. Though many people the

to
world over seemed accept this as a valid assertion it has no historical,

calendric or religious legitimacy. For even if one accepts the dubious claim

that Jesus birth coincides with the starting point of the Gregorian calendarz,

still the only defensible date for the two thousandth anniversary of Christ's

birth is Christmas day 2001.

The tendency to conflate New Years with Christmas seems to occur

2There is a great deal of debate over the exact year of Jesus birth. The dates that are most
commonly accepted, however, is either. 04 B.C., or 12 B.C.

199
because they follow each other so closely in time. The Christian religion,

however, attributes no particular significance to this temporal proximity. The

move to place January Ist as the first day of the year was amongst the

amendments introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in his attempt to improve the

accuracy and precision of the Julian calendar. Yet these gains in accuracy

were made at the expense of religious significance. It is in the Julian

calendar, that New Years is a much more commemorative date since it falls

on March 25th, 'Annunciation day' which celebrates God's revelation to Mary

that she would give birth to Jesus.

More serious, however than the confusion between New Years and

Christmas is that to celebrate the year 2000AD as the dawn of the second

millennium depends upon the arbitrary conversion of Roman numerals into

Hindu-Arab ones. The Gregorian calendar is originally based on a system of

alphabetical numerals developed by the Romans and derived from archaic

tallying systems. 3 The most crucial feature of this system, from a

contemporary point of view.. is that since it was developed before the

-
European acceptance of the decimal system - it does not have zero sign or

function. Lacking a year zero, the Gregorian calendar moves directly from I

BC to 1 AD and thus marks the passage of two thousand years on January

1st 2001 (MMI). The current system of dating which synthesizes the

is
Gregorian count with elements of decimal numeracy4 relatively recent. '

3See Georges Ifrah The Universal History of Numbers, p. 196.

The decimal aspects of the contemporary use of the Gregorian calendar include the adoption

200
European culture and in particular the church was extremely resistant to

Hindu-Arab numeracy and it was only due to their obvious superiority in

precision, accuracy and efficiency that they were finally, reluctantly, absorbed

by the western world. 6 More than anything else, it is this adoption of the

Hindu-Arab numerals, that is celebrated in the date 2000.

These systematic confusions between the calendric millennium and

-

millennialist beliefs, between New Years Day and Christmas, and between

the Roman and Hindu-Arab number systems - suggest that the massive

investment in the millennium was more about the date as such than it was

about anything that the date was purportedly meant to represent. As Y2K

starkly dramatized, the sign 2000AD had much more to do with the techno-

social apparatus involved in the global standardization of time than it did with

upholding any particular religious, cultural or calendric tradition. 7

All this is to say that what many believed to be a celebration of the date

as representative sign - in this case one that signals the apocalyptic end of

of the Hindu-Arab numerals, and the emphasis on decades, centuries and millennium.
5 The Arabs had introduced decimal numeracy to Europe as early as the ninth century. The
development of the Gregorian calendar, however, makes clear that up until as late as the
sixteenth century the church still preferred to use the - much less efficient - numeracy of
Rome. See The Universal History of Numbers p. 537-543

6 Ifrah writes how resistance to Hindu-Arab numeracy was based on a class dynamic. For the
'infinitely complicated use of the classical (Roman) counter abacus' (UHN, 577) allowed
knowledge of arithmetic to be confined to a privileged class who could afford the long and
intricate training necessary to master such a baroque numerical system. Faced with a number
system that could not fail to make arithmetic more democratic, the ruling classes derided it as
a diabolical heresy and refused to engage with it for centuries. See The Universal History of
Numbers pp 571- 581

7The threat of Y2K was completely indifferent to any specific cultural belief or time-keeping
practice. Any given nation or state could insist on their distance from the Gregorian calendar
but this made no impact on their immunity to the danger of Y2K. Cyberspace thus ensured

201
history - served to mask an unconscious cultural investment in the date as

number.

As the illegitimacy of any particular cultural claim to the year 2000

made clear, the libidinal energy that accompanied the millennium was

inspired primarily by decimal neatness of the numeral 2000 and by the

substantial - if unconscious - cultural sensitivity to the zero sign. Millennial

excitement, then, had less to do with the Gregorian calendar or the religious

events prescribed by the Christian tradition than it did with a decimal delirium

indifferent to creed. What was celebrated at 00hrs. 01/01/00 was the instant

when the numbers change. To quote from Time magazines "Commemorative

Issue":

Many cultures celebrated despite the fact that most follow completely
different calendars, and despite the fact that too many people were
pointing out that the millennium doesn't really start until next year and
that our system is all messed up anyway, because Jesus was born
2,004 years ago. They celebrated because the most famous
odometer mankind has ever created was displaying three zeroes. It's
exciting enough when it happens to your own car; when it happens to
the world, it makes you downright giddy. (Time. January 1 2000, p 26)

According to Deleuze and Guattarri, the plane of consistency has its

own particular semiotic. Intensive multiplicities, immanent machines, or

singular occurrences are, for them, marked by a very specific use of signs.

Two of the most crucial components of this semiotic are the proper name and

the date. 8There is, of course an 'extensive usage' of names which belongs

that the millennium was, unquestioningly, a world-wide event.

202
to the plane of organization and development. On this plane, names function

as common nouns "ensuring the unification of an aggregate they subsume. "

(ATP, 27) On the plane of consistency, on the other hand, names function

intensively. Tagging singularities rather than unifying aggregates or indicating

subjects they "designate something that is of the order of the event, of

becoming or of the haeceity. " (ATP 264)9

Dates too, are sometimes used as if they mark points in an extensive

temporality. Yet, as we have seen, this is only when they have already been

captured by Chronic time. In relation to Aeon, on the other hand, dates are

the intensive markers for threshold events or singular becomings, and thus do

not indicate a moment in time but index instead a plateau or continuum of

intensity. 10

Y2K as a sign, is a remarkable condensation of this semiotic. With just

two letters and a numeral it operates intensively to produce an 'asignifying

semiotic' 11that is at once both a proper name and a date. What this sign

6 The other components are the indefinite article and the infinitive verb. The latter is
particularly relevant because, as Deleuze and Guattari write, it "expresses the floating,
nonpulsed time proper to Aeon, in other words the time of the pure event or becoming, which
articulates relative speeds and slownesses independently of the chronometric or chronological
values that time assumes in the other modes. (ATP, 263)
9 'It is the military men and meteorologists, write Deleuze and Guattari, who hold the
secret
of proper names, when they give them to a strategic operation or a hurricane. The proper
name is not the subject of a tense but the agent of an infinitive. "(ATP, 264)
10In this way, they act as nomad numbers which populate a smooth space without dividing or
segmenting it.
11In the plateau'587 B.C. D. On Several Regime of Signs' Deleuze and Guattari speak
-A. of
the coutersignifying semiotic which `proceeds by arithmetic and numeration. " (ATP, 118) as
the semiotic system of the nomad war machine.

203
designates is an event that is neither technical nor culturalt2 but machinic.

Singular and immanent, virtual but not at all vague, abstract and creative,

here and now, real yet nonconcrete, actual yet noneffectuated, A (ATP, 511)

Y2K, as a date and a name, is the index of an abstract machine. 13

According to Deleuze and Guattari, abstract machines cut across

Chronos, the time in which experience is caught, as a "leap in place, an

incorporeal transformation occurring at a zero hour". Instantaneous and

immediate they interrupt the development of history with transformations that

are recognizable by "the simultaneity of the statement expressing the

transformation and the effect the transformation produces; that is why [these

machines] are precisely dated, to the hour, minute, and second and take

effect the moment they are dated. (ATP, 81) "The abstract machine does not

function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is

yet to come. Thus when it constitutes points of creation or potentiality it does

not stand outside history but is instead always 'prior to' history. " (ATP, 142)

This is why - as Deleuze and Guattari write, - 'history will never be rid of

dates. (ATP, 81)

12Y2K has both a technical and cultural dimension in the sense that, on the one hand, it
concerned the incompatibility of calendric systems (a purely cultural concern), and, on the
other, a technical glitch in computing code. It is It is for this reason that Y2K should be
considered as a machinic syndrome, a term which is precisely meant to avoid the
segmentation between technical and cultural systems.
13Abstract, singular and creative, here and now, real yet nonconcrete, actual yet
noneffectuated -that is why abstract machines are dated and named (the Einstein abstract
machine, the Webern abstract machine, but also the Galileo, the Bach, or the Beethoven,
etc. ). Not that they refer to people or to effectuating moments; on the contrary it is the names
and dates that refer to the singularities of the machines and to what they effectuate (ATP, 511)

204
As an abstract machine, Y2K puts a (virtual) end to the arbitrariness of

signs. For though it is entirely semiotic it has a direct and instantaneous

effects. Occurring at a zero hour it 'takes effect the moment it is dated'

mobilizing the worldwide economy in an event that is no different from its

date. 14 Y2K thus brings an end to the assumption that the numbers which

' It can be argued that the importance of Y2K stems from the fact that it indexes the 'year
zero' of cyberspace time (a claim whose legitimacy can only be tested in the future). It seems
plausible, however, that Y2K will be remembered as a time-marking index of this kind, both
because in the years leading up to the millennium when Y2K hype was at its strongest
- -
there was a huge expansion in the world -wide use of the Internet, and also because Y2K was
directly responsible in ensuring that billions of dollars were spent in the pre
-millennium years
to ensure that cyberspace - and in particular cyberspace time- was fully in order for the dawn
of the new millennium.
The most obvious characteristic of cyberspace time is its speed or miniaturization.
For just as the clock divides the day (the smallest unit of the calendric time) into hours,
minutes, and seconds, so the computer divides the second (the smallest unit measured by the
clock) into a series of gradations (the nano- second, the pico-second etc... ) that are - at least
potentially - infinitely subdivisible.
Yet, just as it would be a mistake to reduce the distinction between calendric-time and
clock-time to a difference in scale so too would it be inaccurate to presume that cyberspace
time is no different from clock-time with the exception of being more finely articulated. For, as
we have seen, on the intensive plane where time is produced changes in size do not occur
without simultaneous changes in nature.
It thus becomes possible to say, that Y2K inaugurated - what will later be seen - as a
fundamentally new regime in the production of time. However, as Foucault maintains, radical
discontinuities are necessary accompanied by a certain degree of blindness. For there is an
inevitable failure to see that which is conditioning one's own experience of the world. For this
reason it is unavoidable that a degree of uncertainty surround questions of what cyberspace
time is and what it will eventually become. Any outline of the contours of this new'postmodem'
time, however, must take into account following characteristics:
First, cyberspace time can no longer be considered in any way human. For not only
does it follow the clock in ceasing to measure 'natural' rhythms of the organisms, but it also
operates with speeds that are below the level of human perception. It is for this reason that
cyberspace time appears instantaneous.
Second, cyberspace time has less to do with a clockwork universe and more to do
with machines of simulation. (It is because of its power to simulate other devices that Turing
called the computer the 'universal machine'). This link between simulation and time has
already led to some surprising experimentation. For example, in the summer of 1999 a group
of international financial institutions simulated time-travel -a practice that until then existed only
in the realm of science fiction - in order to arrive in the future and ensure that their systems
were millennium compliant.
Third, since cyberspace is nonlocalizable, cyberspace time must be considered as
transglobal or. postglobal rather than as operating with a globalized standard which co-
ordinates various localities in space.
Fourth, cyberspace time constitutes an immanent machinic culture in which time
measures nothing outside its own inner workings. (Crucial to this is the correspondence
between processing speeds - measured in Hertz or cycles per second - and the ever-

205
mark the time are nothing but an empty representation. A statement no

different from its effect, Y2K marks a singular occurrence which operates on

an immanent plane in which the distinction between the formal expression of

time and the events which happen to fill it has been dissolved. No longer an

expression independent of its content, Y2K operates on a plane of exteriority

which eradicates the difference between quantity and quality, content and

expression, constant and variable. On this exterior plane, the plane of

consistency, body without organs, or Aeon the transcendental nature of time

can no longer be separated from the empirical nature of change.

increasing subdivisions of the second). This machinic immanence is evidenced by syndromes

such as Y2K which, as we have seen, are in themselves neither technical nor cultural, and
which constitute events flat with the production of time.

206
PAGE

NUMBERING

AS ORIGINAL
S. Conclusion

In its most general terms, this thesis aims to connect abstract

philosophical thought to concrete material practices. It does so by concentrating

on the convergence between, on the one hand, one of the most abstruse areas

of philosophy, that is the transcendental analyses of time and, on the other, on

the actual or concrete changes in the technology of time-keeping systems (and

the socio-cultural and economic transformations that necessarily accompany

these shifts). However, despite obvious isomorphies and interlinkages between

these two 'spheres' the topics are rendered irreconcilable by a process of

reciprocal interiorization that opposes the nature of time (conceived of as an

epistemological subjectivity) with the innovations or changes which occur within

history (understood as a narrative unity).

Thus to connect the transcendental philosophy of time with the socio-

technics of time-marking processes requires the disorganization of both terms

onto a plane of exteriority - or absolute immanence - where change occurs not in

time but to time. This involves the reanimation of a systematic philosophy of

abstraction which is drawn primarily from the work of Deleuze and Guattari. This

systematic abstraction is a materialist philosophy, not in the sense that it is a

theory about matter but rather due to its practical or pragmatic orientation which

treats concrete material events as the instantiation of abstract machines which

are themselves 'philosophical' in nature.

The thesis begins by outlining the discussion of time found in Immanuel

208
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. It seeks to show how, through the discovery of

the transcendental, Kant constructs an account of the abstract production of time

which is freed from its ties to variation and movement. Time thus becomes a

formal structure which is constant and exists in an exterior relation to the

changes which occur inside it.

In the second chapter this notion of transcendental time is linked to the

temporal transformations which have occurred under capitalism by way of the

invention of the mechanical clock. It does this by mapping the Kantian notion of

formal time onto the quantitative and homogenous time of the clock, a time

which is characterized by its autonomy from the calendar, its standardization

throughout the globe and its rigorous identification with money.

Yet, despite obvious parallels, the socio-history of capitalist time and

Kant's critical philosophy remain separate and opposed. This separation

corresponds to the fundamental distinction - which both sides insist upon -

between historical change and the epistemological structure of time, an

opposition which results in each side seeking to envelop the other by way of its

own superior unity (which on one side is constituted by the transcendental unity

of the subject and on the other the unity of the historical process)'. Linking them

together, thus always seems to occur at the expense of one side or the other,

(whether this be through the subordination of the nature of time to historical

1 For Marx this unity culminates in the universality of proletarian class consciousness.

209
variation or vice versa).

Nonetheless, both Kantian thought and the production of capitalist time,

involve - perhaps despite themselves the dissolution of this distinction, or

-

relation of mutual transcendence. For both are aspects of a singular event, or

revolution, which occurs not in time but to time. Thus, though they appear as

revolutions in history, they are not in themselves historical. For in altering time

itself, both have accessed an abstract realm which conditions experience, and

which impacts the smooth succession of history only from the outside. Thus, the

Kantian and capitalist revolution introduce a mutation or radical discontinuity in

both the thought and the material practices of time.

In the classical western tradition the only thing capable of changing the

very nature of time, was the exterior and transcendent power of the eternal.

Since it is eternity which is ultimately responsible for the production of time,

changes in the nature of time - if they were ever possible - could only be

transcendentally produced. Restricted to initiations and terminations, these

changes were a matter of faith not reason. For they occurred only as the

divine revelation.2
apocalyptic or miraculous events which accompany

Both critique and capitalism, however, are intrinsically opposed to

transcendent impositions. Though they push aside any explicit engagement with

the question of eternity, they nevertheless reject this classical conception of the

2 In Christianity the intrusion of the eternal in history is ultimately realized through the incarnation
of Jesus, or the idea of the Word made flesh.

210
exteriority. Operating with consistent circuits of abstract and effective production

they tend to the construction of immanent systems which obsolesce structures of

faith, essentialized authority, and arbitrary and supplementary dimensions.3

Dedicated in their principles to an immanence of criteria, both imply however

-
implicitly - the necessity for an immanent production of time to replace the faith

in transcendent creation.

However, due to the stratified distinction4 in both, between, on the one

side, an idealist structure of time (whether that be the logic of historical

development or the universality of a priori synthesis) and on the other, the

variations which occur in time, neither Kant nor the social history of capitalist

time can provide the conceptual immanence which their principles require. In

retaining the notion that the interiority of temporal variation is constituted by the

intrinsic unity of a higher and more primary structure, they dismantle the

traditional faith in eternity but nevertheless leave a quasi transcendence in place.

Incapable of conceiving of a variation that is flat with the construction of time,

and that abstract synthesis are consistent with the multiplicity and becomings of

material innovation, they deny the very possibility of time mutation. Blind to the

implications of their own respective revolutions they thus conceal the intensive

3 Capitalism's tendency to monetarize power differentiates it from other social systems, in which
power is based primarily on coded and territorial structures of organization. According to Deleuze
and Guattari capitalism is defined by these processes of decoding and deterritorialization, and it is
this which is responsible for its great affinity with immanence.
4 As has already been noted, stratification acts as double pincer, operates through double
articulation, and constitutes the world through binary distinction. (See A Thousand Plateaus esp
p. 40)
211
plane on which time is immanently produced.

In order to uncover this plane, the thesis turns to the writings of Deleuze

and Guattari whose work Capitalism and Schizophrenia calls for a materialist

revolution in the name of transcendental thought. Pushing the Kantian system

further in the direction of immanent critique, Deleuze and Guattari manage to

dismantle the distinction between conceptual abstraction and material

innovations. Though they retain the exteriority of transcendental synthesis they

cease to locate these syntheses inside the mind of the knowing subject and see

them instead as the operations of abstract machines. Deleuze and Guattari thus

discover a plane of consistency on which the nature of time is flat with the

variations and mutations that are intrinsic to its own production.

A philosophy based on the immanent production of time requires, as we

have seen, not only a reformulation of the nature of time but also of the relation

between time and eternity. To reach the plane of consistency the implicit faith in

transcendent exteriority must be replaced with the participation of an immanent

outside. Deleuze and Guattari thus substitute the division between time and

eternity with the difference between two modes of temporality; the extensive time

of Chronos and the intensive time of Aeon. While Chronos corresponds to the

stratified nature of time (with its division between structure and change), the

temporality of Aeon is constituted by becomings, intensive variations, machinic

multiplicities and singular events which do not differentiate between the abstract

212
production of time and material innovation (which is generally considered to

occur in time).

Composed on the plane of consistency or immanence, Aeon does not

transcend, interrupt or break into time in the same way that eternity does.

Rather, as we have seen, it constitutes the virtual field upon which Chronos is

continuously being constructed. Functioning in this way, Aeon is not to be

understood as an eternal or abstract generality. Instead the virtuality or

abstraction of Aeon can only be accessed through the singular events out of

which it is composed. The final chapter of this thesis thus explores the concept

of Aeon by focusing on one such singular event, the dawn of the third

millennium, a fundamental juncture in the passage of time and in time-keepings

socio-technical apparatus. This event has come to be known by the sign Y2K.

Post millennium cynicism is such that it seems absurd to even mention

Y2K, never mind speak of it as an event of fundamental philosophical

importance. For it is now generally agreed that, though it was hyped to

apocalyptic proportions, Y2K if

was - anything -a non-event. Though glitches

in
were reported - even such crucial areas as stock exchanges, transportation

networks, emergency services, and credit card companies - each of these was

easily dealt with on an individual basis and did not seem to add up to anything

significant (certainly it was nothing like the global catastrophe that was

predicted). As an event, Y2K was so diffuse, so quiet, so inconsequential that its

213
very existence has been retrospectively called into question. After all, despite

months and even years of anticipation January 1st2000 seems to have been just

another day.

The real nature of Y2K still remains a puzzle. No one is sure whether the

hundreds of billions of dollars spent were wasted or whether they were crucial in

the prevention of a catastrophe. While some maintain that the risk was wildly

exaggerated, the few 'glitches' that did occur are sufficient to give evidence that

there was indeed a problem. Yet, the fact that countries which appeared to do so

little to fight the bug (i. e. Russia and China) encountered no more disturbances

than countries like United States and Britain which reacted early and poured

huge resources into ensuring 'millennium compliance' makes the conclusion that

the problem was fixed highly improbable. The alternative, however, that Y2K was

a vast conspiracy by the computer industry, is even more preposterous.

The confusion which - even now -surrounds Y2K is a result of the fact that

- though entirely real - it was an event that never seemed to actualize. Y2K was,

and always will be, a virtual catastrophe, a pure potentiality, a non-event. The

final chapter of this thesis argues that the virtual nature of Y2K - which allowed it

to be entirely effective (as a potentiality) and yet never empirically manifest, -

suggests that it cannot be understood through the successive temporality of

Chronos. Rather, Y2K is a sign - which operates as both a name and a date -

for an event composed on the intensive plane of Aeon. This, as we have seen is

evidenced by its efficient nonsignifying (numerical) semiotic, its resilient virtuality,

214
its disorganization of linear succession, and its dissolution of such stratified

distinctions as content and expression, quantity and quality, constant and

variable, and technics and culture.

It is as an Aeonic event that Y2K makes the connection between the

transcendental philosophy of time and the socio-economics of capitalist time-

keeping practices. Flat with an exterior plane of machinic abstraction, it dissolves

the distinction between time and the materiality of time-keeping systems. For this

reason, Y2K has been used as an exemplary event in addressing the central

problematic of this thesis.

There is no question that despite the pervasive sense of anticlimax, Y2K

was a crucial event in the history of capitalist time. For though it acted only as a

potentiality, it had concrete material consequences whose effects can be

measured in billions of dollars. As a technological 'glitch' in cyberspace time,

Y2K moblized the global economy in an unprecendeted fashion. Operating within

the context of an ever-increasing convergence of time and money, it turned the

date that marked the end of the second millennium into the most expensive

accident the world has ever experienced.

What makes Y2K crucial to the philosophy of time, however, is that it is

also a near perfect example of systematic abstraction. The word abstraction

means to extract, remove or withdraw from any particular concrete instantiation.

It thus involves a process through which a particular dimension or aspect of any

given context is subtracted and made autonomous. To quote from Deleuze:

215
The way people talk about abstraction is absolutely amazing, they have
absolutely no idea what it is. Philosophy has a kind of technique or
terminology like mathematics. Generally the word abstract is used for
things in which there is no abstraction. The problem of abstraction is how
can I make two things out of what only exists as one in my
representations. It's not difficult to make a thing into two when I have two
representations, but when I say the back of the piece of paper, I am not
abstracting at all since the back is given to me in a representation which
itself exists. When I say a length without thickness, there I am abstracting
because I am separating two things which are necessarily given in each
other in my representation. (TLK, 5)

Y2K functions as a model of abstraction in that it subtracts the first two

digits from the date. Through this subtraction, it serves to extract the decade,

making it autonomous from the interiority of the century. It thus separates out

two things from what - until then - had appeared only as one (rupturing the

apparent unity of historical time). Y2K - like every abstraction - is a schism. By

fracturing the semiotic expression of dated time, it abstracts a scale of time from

the history within which it is previously embedded (the year 00, for instance,

could belong to any century whatsoever). The anticlimactic character of Y2K

only confirms its nature as an abstract event, through which time has escaped

from the concrete interiority of history.

As this thesis has argued the tendency of capitalist chronometrics - from

its inception - has been affined with the transcendental in its trend towards the

ambiguous 'liberation' of time from the measurement of change (thus

establishing the autonomy of the clock in relation to the calendar). In this respect

Y2K figures as a culmination, although a paradoxical one, since it machinically

216
extracts an abstract temporality from dates themselves. With Y2K, dates cease

to function solely as the expressions of celestial cyclicity and implicit historical

unity. Instead they are activated as numerical indices for pure - or Aeonic -

events, marking absolute historical schisms which correspond to thresholds of

innovation in the abstract production of time.

Lecturing on the Critique of Pure Reason, Deleuze maintains that

fundamental to Kant's discovery of the immanent plane of the transcendental is

that "true lived experience is an absolutely abstract thing... once you have

reached lived experience, you reach the most fully living core of the abstract. "

"Nobody, Deleuze continues, "has ever lived anything but the abstract. " (SLK, 5)

This thesis has focussed on transcendental philosophy in order to

investigate the abstract nature of time. What it has discovered, is that this most

obscure and seemingly distant topic is encountered in the technology or socio-

economic practices of contemporary life. For the nature of time is not some

eternal given that has descended from above, but is rather a process that is itself

continuously under production, though not - as Kant believed - in the interiority of

thought, but rather on the exteriority of an unconscious, immanent, and material

plane of machinic transformation.

217
Appendix

Table I

synthetic a analytic a priori synthetic analytic a posteriori

priori a posteriori

Transcend- logic experience n/a

ental

Table 2

Judgements Category Schematism

1. Quantity
(Time Series) Universal Unity Number
Particular Plurality Number

Singular Totality Number

II. Quality Affirmative Reality Being in time
(Time Content)
Negative Negation Not being in
time
Infinite Limitation Intensive
degree

III. Relation Categorical Of Inherence and Permanence

(Time Order) Subsistence in time
Hypothetical Of Causality and Succession
Dependence

Disjunctive Of Community Coexistence

(reciprocity between
agent and patient)
IV. Modality Problematic Possibility- Determin-
(Scope of Time) Impossibility ation at some
time or
another
Assertoric Existence- Existence in
Nonexistence some
determinate
time

Apodeictic Necessity- Existence at

Contingency all time

218
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