Non-simultaneity

The phrase "the non-simultaneity of the simultaneous" (die 'Ungleichzeitigket' des Gleichzeitigen) was first used[2] by the German art historian Wilhelm Pinder in his 1926 book Das Problem der Generation in der Kunstgeschichte Europas ("The Problem of Generation in European Art History").[3]

Bloch's principal use of the term "non-simultaneity" was in an essay from 1932 which attempted to explain the rise and popularity of Nazism in Germany in the light of the capitalist economic crisis of the Great Depression[4] and which became a chapter of his influential 1935 study Heritage of our Times[5] (Erbschaft dieser Zeit[6]). The essay's central idea is that heterogeneous stages of social and economic development coexist simultaneously in 1930s Germany. Because of uneven modernization, Bloch argues, there remained in Germany, "this classical land of non-simultaneity",[7] significant traces of pre-capitalist relations of production:

"Not all people exist in the same Now. They do so only externally, by virtue of the fact that they may all be seen today. But that does not mean that they are living at the same time with others.

Rather, they carry earlier things with them, things which are intricately involved. One has one's times according to where one stands corporeally, above all in terms of classes. Times older than the present continue to effect older strata; here it is easy to return or dream one's way back to older times. [...] In general, different years resound in the one that has just been recorded and prevails. Moreover, they do not emerge in a hidden way as previously but rather, they contradict the Now in a very peculiar way, awry, from the rear. [...] Many earlier forces, from quite a different Below, are beginning to slip between. [...]

Over and above a great deal of false nonsynchronism [non-simultaneity] there is this one in particular: Nature, and more than that, the ghost of history comes very easily to the desperate peasant, to the bankrupt petty bourgeois; the depression which releases the ghost takes place in a country with a particularly large amount of pre-capitalist material. It is important to ask whether Germany is not more undeveloped, even more vulcanic than, for instance, France, in terms of its power. Certainly it has not formed and evened out capitalist ratio nearly as synchronously.[8]"

The text signals that to some extent these ideas derive from Marx's Critique of Political Economy, and in particular his notion of "the unequal rate of development",[9] or "uneven development". Marx had also used the term "simultaneity" (Gleichzeitigkeit) in his explanation of the concentration of production processes under the demands of commodity production in the first volume of Das Kapital (see below). But Bloch's argument is also an attempt to counter simplistic interpretations of Hegelian and Marxist teleology, by introducing what he terms "the polyrhythm and the counterpoint of such dialectics",[10] a "polyphonous", "multispatial" and "multitemporal" dialectics,[11] not in order to deny the possibility of proletarian revolution, but in order to "gain additional revolutionary force from the incomplete wealth of the past":

The still subversive and utopian contents in the relations of people to people and nature, which are not past because they were never quite attained, can only be of use in this way. These contents are, as it were, the goldbearing gravel in the course of previous labor processes and their superstructures in the form of works. Polyphonous dialectics, as a dialectics of the "contradictions" which are more concentrated today than ever, has in any case enough questions and contents in capitalism that are not yet "superseded by the course of economic development".[12]

This argument touches on the need to understand the spatial dynamics of capitalism that would be taken up in the 1960s and 1970s by Marxist urban philosopher Henri Lefebvre, with his analysis of the dialectics of (urban) space, and his work on "rhythmanalysis".[13] It also anticipates the study of the subaltern's "contradicted" relationship to Western modernity undertaken by subaltern studies and postcolonial theory (see below).

Although often attributed to "Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to its Dialectics", the phrase die Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen ("the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous" or "the synchronism/synchronicity of the nonsynchronous") — i.e., a reversal of Pinder's "non-simultaneity of the simultaneous" — is not explicitly used in this work. Bloch elaborates instead the idea of synchronous and nonsynchronous contradictions with "the Now".[14] By "synchronous contradiction" he means those forces of contradiction (to capital) that capitalism itself generates, principally the contemporary industrialized proletariat (as analysed by Marx). "Nonsynchronous contradiction" refers to the atavistic survival of an "uncompleted past which has not yet been 'sublated' by capitalism"[15] as discussed above.

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After the posthumous publication of Marx's Grundrisse in 1939, it became clear that a dialectic of simultaneity and non-simultaneity had been implicit in Marx's thinking on the spatiality and geography of capitalism.[16] Das Kapital (1867–94) had argued on the one hand that the money form had arisen in order to allow for non-simultaneous or delayed exchange of commodities (as opposed to face-to-face bartering), and on the other that "simultaneity" (Gleichzeitigkeit) was a requirement of (and a phenomenon produced by) the demands of commodity production (the capitalist has to be able to synchronize the disparate activities required to manufacture a product).[17] The powerful spatio-temporal effects of the dual demands of exchange and commodity production were summarized in the Grundrisse with the concept of "the annihilation of space by time",[18] i.e. with the imposition of simultaneity or synchronicity over spatial separation and geographical diversity:

The more production comes to rest on exchange value, hence on exchange, the more important do the physical conditions of exchange — the means of communication and transport — become for the costs of circulation. Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus the creation of the physical conditions of exchange — of the means of communication and transport — the annihilation of space by time — becomes an extraordinary necessity for it.[19]

At the same time, Marx showed himself to be acutely aware of the resistances to this overcoming of spatio-temporal barriers, and, more importantly, to the fact that capitalism itself generates its own resistances, or contradictions, to the universalization of its mode of production:

But from the fact that capital posits every such limit as a barrier and hence gets ideally beyond it, it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it, and, since every such barrier contradicts its character, its production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited. Furthermore. The universality towards which it irresistibly strives encounters barriers in its own nature, which will, at a certain stage of its development, allow it to be recognized as being itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, and hence will drive towards its own suspension.[20]

Due to the late publication of the Grundrisse, Bloch would not have been acquainted with these precise words at the time of the writing of "Nonsynchronism", although the similarity of concepts relating to the way in which capitalism posits its own (simultaneous and non-simultaneous) contradictions to production ultimately derives from Das Kapital as discussed above.

• Ernst Bloch
• Uneven development
• Ungleichzeitigkeit
• Time-space compression