Non-simultaneity

Non-simultaneity or nonsynchronism (German: Ungleichzeitigkeit, sometimes also translated as non-synchronicity) is a concept in the writings of Ernst Bloch which denotes the time lag, or uneven temporal development, produced in the social sphere by the processes of capitalist modernization and/or the incomplete nature of those processes. The term, especially in the phrase "the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous", has been used subsequently in predominantly Marxist theories of modernity, world-systems, postmodernity and globalization.

The phrase "the non-simultaneity of the simultaneous" (die 'Ungleichzeitigket' des Gleichzeitigen) was first used 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").

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 and which became a chapter of his influential 1935 study Heritage of our Times (Erbschaft dieser Zeit). 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", significant traces of pre-capitalist relations of production:

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", 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", a "polyphonous", "multispatial" and "multitemporal" dialectics, 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":

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". 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". 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" 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. 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). 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", i.e. with the imposition of simultaneity or synchronicity over spatial separation and geographical diversity:

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:

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.

The problematic of simultaneity/non-simultaneity and synchronism/nonsynchronism was taken up in the work of post-Second-World-War Marxist sociologists and philosophers, such as Theodor Adorno, Nicos Poulantzas, Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar.

As structural Marxists, Althusser and Balibar were concerned to understand how "the problems of diachrony" in the transition from one mode of production to another could be related to the overall structure or "synchrony" of production. In Reading Capital (1970), they argue, in similar vein to Bloch, that the succession of different modes of production as theorized by Marx is not a teleological process driven by "the forward march of the productive forces", but that instead periods of transition are marked by "the coexistence of several modes of production":

For the Greek political sociologist and structural Marxist Nicos Poulantzas, forms of socio-cultural difference such as "territory and historico-cultural tradition [...] produce the uneven development of capitalism as an unevenness of historical moments affecting those differentiated, classified and distinct spaces that are called nations". In State, Power, Socialism (1978), he argues that such differences are in fact a precondition for global capitalist development.

Althusser and Balibar's contemporary, Henri Lefebvre, was sharply critical of what he saw as these writers' fetishization of a fixed, abstract and purely structural notion of "general" synchronic space subsuming diachronic or historical processes. By contrast, Lefebvre's own "turbulent spatiality" which "would restore geography to history, history to geography", together with his rhythmanalysis, shares at least a common vocabulary with Bloch's multispatial and multitemporal dialectics. Lefebvre was also one of the first commentators to link uneven development to the production of space on a global scale: "The law of unevenness of growth and development, so far from becoming obsolete, is becoming world-wide in its application — or, more precisely is presiding over the globalization of a world market".

Meanwhile, Belgian Marxist Ernest Mandel was developing, at the same time as Lefebvre, a characterization of "late capitalism" which also refuses the idea that (global) capitalism produces homogeneity. Instead, he argues, capitalism must produce "underdevelopment" in order to maximize the production of surplus profit:

Thinkers as diverse as Immanuel Wallerstein, with his world-systems theory, David Harvey with his analysis of the Limits to Capital (1982) and time–space compression, and Harvey's erstwhile student Neil Smith with his Uneven Development, can all be seen to develop one or other aspect of this line of Marxist thought. The early work of Anthony Giddens and in particular his concept of "time-space distanciation", e.g. in his Critique of Historical Materialism (1981), has also been influential in this area.

Perhaps the most famous use of Bloch's terminology to date is that made by the Marxist cultural critic Fredric Jameson when describing the economic basis of modernism in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991):

Jameson goes on, however, to argue that with the advent of postmodernity and its attendant postmodernisms, the "uneven moment" of modernity has been completely replaced by the mass standardization and homogenization of the third, multinational, phase of capitalist development:

Subaltern studies and postcolonial theory, however, tend to maintain that the idea of a globally homogenized space, even under postmodernity, is undercut precisely by Bloch's "nonsynchronous remnants" and diverse temporalities. Homi K. Bhabha, commenting on Jameson, claims that

Postcolonial anthropologist Arjun Appadurai makes a similar point in his book Modernity at Large (1996) via an implicit critique of Wallerstein: "The new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models (even those that might account for multiple centers and peripheries)".

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