[1] 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.
[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]).
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.
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.
[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).
[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.
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,[21] Nicos Poulantzas, Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar.
[26] 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.
Instead, he argues, capitalism must produce "underdevelopment" in order to maximize the production of surplus profit: The entire capitalist system thus appears as a hierarchical structure of different levels of productivity, and as the outcome of the uneven and combined development of states, regions, branches of industry and firms, unleashed by the quest for surplus-profit.
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): Modernism must thus be seen as uniquely corresponding to an uneven moment of social development, or to what Ernst Bloch called the "simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous," the "synchronicity of the nonsynchronous" (Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen): the coexistence of realities from radically different moments of history — handicrafts alongside the great cartels, peasant fields with the Krupp factories or the Ford plant in the distance.
Everything is now organized and planned; nature has been triumphantly blotted out, along with peasants, petit-bourgeois commerce, handicraft, feudal aristocracies and imperial bureaucracies.
[34]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.
[35]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)".