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David C. Durst
To cite this article: David C. Durst (2002) Ernst Bloch's Theory of Nonsimultaneity, The
Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 77:3, 171-194, DOI: 10.1080/00168890209597867
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THE GERMANIC REVIEW
DAVID C . DURST
specific to the Central Powers, such as Prussian militarism and Austrian clerical-
ism. Third, I wilt take up a discussion of Bloch’s I924 review of Lukacs’s His-
tory and Class Consciousness, entitled “Aktualitat und Utopie,” in which Bloch
uses his philosophical understanding of the concrete nonsimultaneous contradic-
tions of modem society for a critique of Lukacs’s conception of the all-encom-
passing totality of capitalism. Fourth, I will show that it was not until Heritage
of Our Times (1934) that Bloch would ground his own theoretical approach sys-
tematically in a more open, multilayered, materialist dialectics of nonsimultane-
ity. Fifth, I will then analyze how Bloch’s theory of nonsimultaneity informs both
his conception of fascism in Germany and his defense of genuine expressionism
and surrealist montage against realist critics, such as Lukics. Last, I will trace the
unpropitious fate of Bloch’s theory of nonsimultaneity in the second half of the
1930s. On the one hand, Bloch’s understanding of German fascism was not only
heavily criticized by representatives of the official party line in Moscow, such as
Hans Gunther; it was also overshadowed by the Frankfurt School’s own theory
of fascism. On the other hand, the outcome of the Expressionismusdebatre was
dictated less by theoretical argument than historical circumstance; namely, that
the strength of the party line in Moscow generally supported the realists and the
collapse of the avant-garde movement in the face of the harsh political realities
of the late 1930s.
bourgeois art, others such as Kurt Heynicke or Ludwig Rubiner made expres-
sionism into a gospel of salvation that pleaded for a new humanity of peace, love,
and friendship.
Although written during World War I, The Spirit of Utopia was not published
until the end of 1918 and appeared in a second, revised version in 1923. Bloch
himself would later state of his first major philosophical work that it embodied
the expressionistic impulse and the “contemplative” predilection prevalent at the
time (HT239). It is not only the title of Bloch’s book that reflects the “hope in
humanity and the belief in utopia,” which for Kurt Pinthus was so characteristic
of German expressionism.’ In revolt against the self-effacing style of traditional
academic writing, Bloch’s prose is anti-mandarin through and through. The Spir-
it of Uropiu is written in a passionate, highly metaphorical style, whose tempo,
Adorno once noted, reflects a completely altered approach to philosophical in-
quiry.’ The tremors of World War I that shook the self-understanding of the sub-
ject also ring clear in Hloch’s writing; it is as if it wants to express the struggle
of youth to flee from a world grown old to a utopian realm of unforeseen possi-
bilities of uninhibited human expression. And the themes of The Spirit of Utopia,
such as the priority of self-encounter over system, or dreams of the utopian “not
yet” over scientific knowledge of facts, are no less typical of the expressionistic
trend.
But The Spirit of Uropia does not just reflect one of the most salient examples
of the impact expressionism had on philosophy at the time; it may also be read
generally as a politically motivated philosophical defense of expressionism in art
and its utopian strivings. Indeed, a fundamental objective of Bloch’s book is to
show just how the utopian energy of art (and religion) is indispensable for the so-
cialist cause. According to Bloch, revolutionary socialists have for too long ig-
nored the utopian surplus of modern art and culture, a blind spot he says is a re-
sult of the one-sided economism of historical materialism. In prioritizing the role
of the dialectic of the forces and relations of production in historical develop-
ment, Marxism has become a theory that tries to “deduce the spiritual from the
economic” (SU 243). This economic reductionism has a twofold consequence:
On the one hand, it inhibits a proper appreciation of the central role sociopoliti-
cal superstructures play in sustaining relations of subordination. Here, even Marx
174 DURST
is not above reproach. By focusing the revolutionary thrust “only against capi-
talism-a relatively recent, derivative kmd of decadence-and not also against
the ceaseless, primordial locus of enslavement, brutality and exploitation: against
militarism, feudalism,” Bloch writes, Marx “reduced, misdirected and trivial-
ized” the age-old socialist movement (SU 244). And, on the other hand, by re-
ducing history to a dynamic of economic relations beyond the grasp of individ-
ual volition, orthodox Marxism deadens the revolutionary spirit of the oppressed
and underestimates the revolutionary potential of what Hegel called the absolute
spirit, namely art, philosophy, and religion. Marxism’s general mistrust in the
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power of ideas thus serves to attenuate its own revolutionary energy, because
without the fire of utopian ideas sparking human action it remains a theory inca-
pable of praxis, something like a Kantian “critique of pure reason, for which a
corresponding critique of practical reason has not yet been written” (SU244).
In contrast to orthodox Marxist and other sociological models of economic de-
terminism, Bloch insists on the “socially unsublatable problematic of the soul”
(SU 246). That the utopian strivings of the human spirit are more than just an
epiphenomena1 reflection of socioeconomic tendencies is a fundamental convic-
tion of Bloch’s utopian philosophy; as we will see, it consistently informs the
moves he makes on the philosophical playing field, from his preference for
Kant’s inwardness and subjectivity over Hegel’s system, to his defense of the dis-
crete, different, and discontinuous against the Lukicsean conception of an all-
embracing totality. But the grounds Bloch offers to validate his position are
evolving; indeed, it is not until the late 1920s and 1930s that he is capable of ar-
ticulating in more systematic terms his own materialistic justification of the
utopian surplus of culture. In The Spirit of Utopia, Bloch’s arguments remain for
the better part sporadic and inchoate.
Despite these limitations, in his chapter on “The Philosophy of Music” Bloch
sets the notion of Ungfeichzeitigkeit to work in an attempt to explain the irre-
ducible utopian dimension of art. Echoing Nietzsche, Bloch argues that the true
artist is unzeitgemass, or out of season, for his individual genius is clearly “some-
thing different from what circulates among people, what unites people in mere
contemporaneity” (SU 40). This is especially true for music, which-in quota-
tion of Nietzsche-“rings like the language of a vanished age into an astonished,
modern world, and comes too late” (SU 40). Music’s “deep historical non-
simultaneities,” however, cannot be grasped simply and solely by recourse to SO-
cioeconomic determinants, such as those proffered by sociology. Although
Bach’s music, for instance, can be comprehended “on some lower level” in terms
of seventeenth-century Germany’s delayed development over against the West,
all this “explaining” from the outside remains ultimately superficial, and does not
make Bach’s total manifestation, his profound historical isolation, his sociological-
ly uninvolvable level of existence comprehensible. [. . .] [Bach’s] music, so very
young, a persistent syncope even in modern history, quite clearly obeys another
rhythm than that of its correspondingly morphologically, sociologically given cul-
tural whole. (SU 40f.)
ERNST BLOCH’S THEORY OF NONSIMULTANElTY 175
however beneficial an economic perspective might be in all other cases, or any such
perspective, whoever would totalize it in respect of music, errs. [. . .] Whoever dis-
agrees, and would like to harness the greatest variety to the same historical-socio-
logical pace, in order to be able to drive a larger team, and to harness non-simulta-
neous, indeed spherically incomparable elements within one epochal unity, will
become more superficial. (SU4 1f.)
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ism’s “total economistic conception of history” is not merely “the most lifeless
materialism,” but, he now adds, only further reinforces its predilection to “pre-
liberal, reactionary methods of domination” (KnK 515). It thus comes as no sur-
prise that in revolutionary Russia the Marxist mistrust of ideas, such as freedom,
individuality, human rights, and mysticism, has given rise to a new form of au-
tocratic oppression. The “total socialist dictatorship” in Bolshevik Russia is the
unavoidable result of a revolutionary abolition of capitalism without simultane-
ous elimination of Russia’s age-old authoritarian state. Led by Lenin, whom
Bloch, at the time a cntic of Soviet policy at Brest Litovsk, caustically called the
Red Tsar, Russia was on its way to creating a form of state socialism void of
human rights and dignity.I0
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But what is true for revolutionary Russia is no less true for war-tom Germany.
Anticipating later scholarship on “the belated nation,”” Bloch uncovers how the
war and with it the fate of the modem German state must be explained by re-
course to the nonsimultaneity of “das verspatete Deutschlad’ (KnK 433, 517).
In contrast to the Western Entente Powers, modem Germany (and its ally the
Austro-Hungarian or Dual Monarchy) has not embraced the liberal ideals of the
French Revolution. Germany is characterized by a “nonsimultaneous situation”
(ungleichzeitigen Zustund), in which modem capitalism was wedded to a “pre-
capitalist form of domination of Junker theocracy” (KnK 5 17). The grounds for
Germany’s particular political belatedness extend back to the Reformation. For
Luther, the revolutioniq defense of inward freedom against the oppression of
papal authority was achieved only by capitulation of outward freedom to the in-
controvertible will of the prince; here, the autonomy of the human spirit is com-
promised by blind obedience to the political powers that be (KnK 565). Failed
were the German Peasant Wars of the 1520s that Bloch identifies as the early pre-
lude to a German revolution.l*And as a result of the Thirty Years War, the more
free-spirited medieval city culture in Germany was dealt a serious blow. What
follows for Bloch is the ascending influence of the “Prussian mentality” over
Germany as a whole, with its “masochistically” servile peasants and burghers
and “sadistically” inhumane aristocrats. Long before capitalism held sway, the
German will to freedom succumbed to the Prussian “virus of servility,” a self-ef-
facing sense of duty, and aggressive militarism; here, in this “grave of freedom,”
the destiny of the modern German people was sealed (KnK 83).
Following Johann Wilhelm Muehlon (1878-1944), a former director at Krupp
turned pacifist and the author of the antiwar book Die Verheerung Europas (The
Destruction ofEurope, 1918), Bloch thus argued that the most fundamental prob-
lem facing modem Germany concerned the reactionary tendencies inhibiting true
democracy. A peaceful end to the war and subsequent successful integration of
Germany into the league of democratic states could not be expected so long as
the hegemony of Prussian militarism and its circles of power remained intact
(KnK 261f.). As a consequence, the question of war guilt was for Bloch far more
than simply one of financial reparations; it was above all a vital precondition for
the overall moral regeneration of the German people, something on which he be-
I78 DURST
lieved the eventual reconciliation of Germany with the rest of the world would
depend. Germany must, Bloch exclaimed, “become its own judge; only the
atonement, the elimination of the seeds of the crimes committed, of the blindness
rampant amongst the people can act as a motor for the ethical renewal of the peo-
ple and state” (KnK 520). Unfortunately, those words of warning went unheeded
in the Weimar period. As Alfred Rosenberg points out, in the decisive phase of
revolutionary upheaval following the end of the war, the heads of the Weimar Re-
public could neither critically confront the German military nor ultimately break
the power of the Prussian aristocracy; in its dependence on the military to restore
domestic order and in its failure to introduce needed land reform, the new polit-
ical leadership was capable neither of decisively undercutting the power base of
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the reactionary forces in Germany, nor of winning over the working class and the
peasantry east of the Elbe to the cause of democracy. l 3
Bloch was convinced, however, that “if the Prussian mentality in this war re-
mains unbroken, then even the future socialist revolution cannot bring true free-
dom and democracy” (KnK 198). Drawing lessons from the fate of the Russian
Revolution, Bloch warned against a socialist revolution that sought to circumvent
the achievements of 1789. As a socialist, Bloch formulates a conviction later to
resurface in Natural Law and Human Digniiy:I4 “First, political liberty, the de-
mocratic minimum, must be brought to a close everywhere, and this especially in
the Central States; only then can social liberty, the economic-social democracy,
the democratic maximum, truly be and remain freedom” (KnK 502, 540). Ac-
cording to Bloch, political freedom can be secured only by overcoming dictator-
ship, regardless of color or revolutionary zeal. The naked will-to-power must be
replaced first by the democratic “rule of law.” Not lastly, this also helps to explain
Bloch’s pro-Westem or more specifically pro-Wilsonian stance during the war;
at the time, he was of the opinion that the American president Wilson was pro-
moting the political ideal of liberalism not only internationally in the war against
Germany’s military autocracy but also domestically in his struggle against the
vested interests of U.S. monopolies and trusts (KnK 501f.).
The democratization of Germany was not to be achieved, however, simply and
solely by ratification of a liberal constitution. For Bloch, a new democratic struc-
ture of feeling must also emerge to replace the Prussian mentality so prevalent in
belated Germany (KnK 111). If true German freedom, which he identifies with
the tradition of German idealist philosophy, suffered under Prussian militarism,
then Bloch is convinced that contemporary art can play an important role in over-
coming the debilitating “discrepancy between the authoritarian German state
structure and the humanistic German culture” (KnK 471f.). Echoing Schiller’s
Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Bloch asserts that the path from the
brutish nature of belated, Prussified Germany to the human liberty of true so-
cialism, based on liberal political freedoms, leads through the realm of art and
culture; they share responsibility in the mission of surmounting the often pemi-
cious syncope of German history by fostering the ideals of a utopian Cleichzeit-
igkeit or simultaneity of maximal political and economic freedom. Yet in contrast
ERNST BLOCH’S THEORY OF NONSIMULTANEITY I79
and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” Lukacs reveals how the totality of
commodity relations leads to the creation of dichotomies whose fixed, reified
character confronts the consciousness of each individual as quasi-eternal laws of
nature; the task of historical materialism is thus to break capitalism’s spell over
human consciousness by showing how the seemingly eternal antinomies of bour-
geois society are but the historical consequence of universal capitalist expansion
and its fetishism of commodities. It was in this context that Lukacs criticized
Bloch’s utopian philosophy for its reproduction of just the kind of fixed bour-
geois antinomies that Marxist theory sought to dialectically dissolve.lYBloch’s
attempt to deepen the “merely economic outlook of historical materialism” by re-
course to the utopian not-yet-found, for instance, in religion and art, Lukfics ar-
gues, “bypasses the real depth of historical materialism. When he then conceives
of economics as a concern with objective things to which soul and inwardness
are to be opposed, he overlooks the fact that the real social revolution can only
mean the restructuring of the real and concrete life of man. He does not see that
what is known as economics is nothing but the system of forms objectively defin-
ing this real life.”2oAs in the case of Thomas Munzer, whom Bloch praised,
utopian thought is incapable of offering concrete proposals for the historical re-
alization of its own abstract ideals. Hence, when left unmediated by comprehen-
sion of capitalism’s contradictory development, as was allegedly the case with
Bloch, the utopian visions found in art,religion, philosophy, or mythology mere-
ly reproduce in imagination the seemingly irresolvable antinomies of bourgeois
society. In short, Bloch’s utopian philosophy was not a solution to but a symp-
tom of the crisis of modem culture.
Without a doubt, it would have been impossible for Bloch not to have felt the
damage done to his own position; Lukfics’s arguments delivered his utopian phi-
losophy a serious blow. Utopian ideals remain empty without scientific knowl-
edge of the means by which to make them real, that is, without the organization
capable of linking theory to practice. But it was not long before Bloch respond-
ed with a review of History and Class Consciousness, entitled “Actuality and
Utopia” (1924), which contained his own critical rejoinder to Lukfics. Bloch’s re-
view was not without a strong measure of praise: Not only did he commend the
fact that Lukfics had revealed the vital importance of Hegel’s dialectical thought
ERNST BLOCH‘S THEORY OF NONSIMULTANEITY 181
for Marx and defend Lukics’s Hegelian Marxism against likely critics in Com-
munist Russia (AU 601), but he also saw in Lukics’s belief in the realization of
the Subject-Object-Identity of history through the proletariat’s revolutionary ac-
tivity a metaphysical grasp of things “fully conforming” to his own vision of the
Self- and We-Encounter expounded in The Spirit o j Utopia (AU 620).
At the same time. however, Bloch was wary of what he termed “the homoge-
nizing tendency” in Lukics’s concept of totality. Bloch’s insight into the limits
of Lukics’s theoretical undertaking here can be explained not only by recourse
to his concrete historical understanding of the nonsimultaneous character of
modem art and politics; what is more, Bloch must have read Lukics’s Hegelian
critique of Kant in Histmy and Class Consciousness as the polar opposite of his
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out a doubt vague; and it is perhaps no accident that in the second, revised edi-
tion of the book published in 1923 Bloch edited out much of what he had writ-
ten on the topic of spheres with reference to Kant and Hegel. Nevertheless, in
Bloch’s 1924 review of History and Class Consciousness the concept of spheres
assumes central importance in his criticism of Lukics’s notion of totality. Just as
Bloch had found the “poverty of the Hegelian Spirit” rooted in its “scholastic re-
alism,” so too does he criticize the Hegelian Lukics for a “simplistic tendency to-
wards homogenization” that lacks a proper understanding of the “deep dimen-
sions of being” (AU 618). And just as Bloch wanted to let the openness of
Kantian subjectivity shine through Hegel’s closed system, so too will he argue
that Lukks’s notion of totality must be made more complex through the concept
of the sphere.
In his review, Bloch defines a “sphere” more precisely as the expression of dif-
ferent temporal and spatial subject-object levels of societal reality. History, he
states, is a “polyrhythmic formation,” whose differing spatial and temporal
spheres, especially those at the dianoetic level like art,religion, and metaphysics,
cannot be reduced to economic or “social matter” (AU 618). Thus, Lukics’s ten-
dency to homogenize reality by tracing appearances of the fragmented spheres of
bourgeois society back to the essential economic contradictions of contemporary
capitalism can neither adequately grasp “Life nor Nature,” nor especially “dia-
noetically related processes of communication” that are “almost always of ec-
centric content” (AU 618). Spiritual phenomena, such as religion, cannot find ful-
fillment in social reality, and political ideals, such as natural rights, appear on the
historical scene as “tasks, as problems or paradigms” yet to be realized. Further-
more, the “entire complex of physical nature” can in no way be said to have been
historically managed, for the social sublation of nature as its underlying reality
is not yet complete. In sum, all these eccentric contents of the historical process
demand their own space or in other words “the complication of totality through
the notion of the sphere,” in which the new and the not-yet conscious have still
to appear (AU 619f.).
Bloch’s disagreement with his erstwhile friend touched the core of LukBcs’s
philosophical project, but the former’s arguments remained abstract and incon-
clusive. The concept of spheres could not bear the weight of its critical inten-
ERNST BLOCH’S THEORY OF NONSIMULTANEITY I83
tions; when compared with Lukhcs’s own elaborate theory of reification, Bloch’s
vague talk of spheres and the irreducibility of the hidden in history must have ap-
peared to Lukhcs as simply more of the same abstract utopian profusions that he
earlier rejected. It was not until the late 1920s and 1930s that Bloch was capable
of articulating a materialistically based dialectics of nonsimultaneity that would
function as a viable, alternative Marxist approach to the problems of modernity.
appeared in the feuilleton section of the Frankfurter Zeitung. In this short piece,
later republished with alterations in the second, extended version of Erbschajl
dieser Zeir (1962), Bloch takes a first step towards elaborating a materialistical-
ly based dialectical theory of the nonsimultaneous character of modem (German)
society. And although Lukhcs is not mentioned by name, the article may also be
read as a further development in Bloch’s critical exchange with the author of His-
tory and Class Consciousness.
Bloch’s colleague at the Frankfurter Zeitung Joseph Roth once wrote in
melancholy of the loss of nature in the Ruhrgebiet. In the endlessly extending in-
dustrialized zones where the end of one city marks the beginning of the next, it
was for Roth, this chronicler of loss par excellence, “as if there were no more
spatial destinations here: only temporal destinations like the certain, inexorable
and final death of the last patch of earth.”22Although Roth’s despondent impres-
sions must have been seen to support a Lukhcsean view of the all-encompassing
totality of commodity relations, Bloch insisted on the limits to this capitalist ex-
pansion in contemporary Europe. But in contrast to The Spirit of Utopia and “Ac-
tuality and Utopia,” Bloch now becomes more concrete in Marxist terms. He
aborts his vague discussion of dianoetic spheres; in exchange, he points to the
“incomparable simultaneity” (unvergleichliche-Zleic~) of the present that in-
volves phenomena standing “completely outside” of the dominant contemporary
Ratio of modem bourgeois society, incapable of being homogenized. What Bloch
is referring to here are first and foremost the social classes or groups whose so-
cioeconomic standpoint and cultural world view remain unincorporated in con-
temporary capitalism. Belonging to this “catalogue of the omitted” are not only
the prostitutes and pimps or criminal and destitute, who remain undefined or un-
derdefined in bourgeois terms, but also the peasantry and nobility:
even the peasants are not marching in rank and file, in their sobriety which is none,
in their property which is not capitalist and thus is not overturned. The nobility is
even less a thing of the past, overrun by the bourgeoisie in linear terms, but the Rine-
teenth century is still a scuffle between prevailing forces, not the least of wkich was
and remains the restoration. even within the bourgeoisie. (HT 35Jf.)
But it is not just man’s relation to man that is “U&nished” in modernity; it is also
184 DURST
the vast realm of nature that remains hidden to the cunning and exploitative ad-
ventures of modem capitalism. “The ‘natural barrier,”’ Bloch writes, “is by no
means surmounted as capitalism would wish. [. . .] The mere causal nexus, on
which our life, our encounters and destinies commencing from them depend,
does not look like a concrete production budget which surmounts the rank
growth of ‘nature”’ (HT 356). And even within the field of technology, it must be
admitted that the uncontrollable continues to erupt in the form of accidents, ex-
plosions, and collisions confronting man with the fragility of his rational hold on
life. In short, a “vast otherness” (ungeheuere Anderheit) in nature, technology,
and society continues to stand in stark juxtaposition to the “growing common de-
nominator” of capitalist modernization. In contemporary society, Bloch con-
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cludes, “the mover of human destiny is unknown, even the mover of hunger and
the economy as well, all the more so the subject of ‘culture,’ of all the illusions
and also glittering images of a varyingly adequate consciousness in which the
genuine one is hidden” (HT 356f.). Man remains a world-Odysseus who is still
obscure to himself, a subject without a face, still Nobody to himself as his name
admits.
Bloch is thus convinced that the nonsimultaneous tendencies of contemporary
reality cannot be reconciled by a turn of the conceptual dial; on the contrary, they
“block an all too quickly or prearrangedly collecting concept” (HT 357). Faced
with the undeniably diverse character of concrete socioeconomic and cultural el-
ements of modernity, such an overly “homogenizing” understanding of the con-
cept is too abstract and illegitimately omits “what does not fit” into its bourgeois
frame of reference. The indirect reference to Lukics is unmistakable.
But Bloch’s breakthrough to his own alternative conception of the dialectical
enterprise did not come until later. In “Non-Simultaneity and Obligation to its
Dialectic,” the central theoretical chapter of Heritage of Our Times, written in
May 1932, Bloch offers his first systematic account of a multitemporal and mul-
tispatial dialectics of the nonsimultaneous and simultaneous contradictions col-
lected in his day. Bloch begins with the seemingly paradoxical claim that “not all
people exist in the same Now” ( H T 97). Rather than synchronized with the pre-
vailing economic and cultural set of circumstances of contemporary capitalism,
Germany contains a “particularly large amount of pre-capitalist material” that
has not yet been thoroughly formed by the “capitalist Ratio.” Numerous strata of
German society therefore carry with them an earlier element that contradicts the
“capitalist Now”; social groups, such as youth, and economically weakened stra-
ta, such as the peasantry and newly impoverished middle class, reflect a contra-
dictory situation in which “impulses and reserves from pre-capitalist times and
superstructures are at work, genuine non-simultaneities therefore, which a sink-
ing class revives or causes to be revived in its consciousness” (HT 106).
In light of this broken character of the present, a number of consequences fol-
low for a proper understanding of dialectics and history in the age of monopoly
capitalism. The appearance of functionally independent societal subsystems can
no longer be considered a mere epiphenomenon of the underlying laws of capi-
ERNST BLOCH’S THEORY OF NONSIMULTANEITY 185
tal accumulation, and the crisis of modem culture can no longer be grasped in the
Lukhcsean fashion as an expression of the essential contradiction between the
ideology of individual freedom and state-organized c a p i t a l i ~ mSuch
. ~ ~ an overly
“idealistic” conception of the social totality does violence to the particular, non-
simultaneous zones of nature and human relations by reducing them to but sub-
altern moments in the “uninterrupted, panlogical connection” of modem capital-
ist development (HT 1 IS). And because it does not penetrate to the particulars in
their concrete historical character but imposes an abstract conception of totality
on them from the outside, the dialectical totality found in Lukhcs’s philosophy of
praxis paradoxically reveals itself in the end to be “contemplative”; it inhibits
rather than promotes true revolutionary action. Seen in this light, Bloch is capa-
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ble here of subtly reversing the critique of contemplation that Lukhcs once lev-
eled against his utopian philosophy: The homogenizing conception of totality is
but an abstract possibility without the concrete knowledge of historically nonsi-
multaneous phenomena required for the effective organization of revolutionary
forces.
As an alternative to Lukhcs’s homogenizing dialectic of capitalist synchronic-
ity, Bloch proposes a “multi-temporal and multi-spatial dialectics” that more ac-
curately reflects the complex constellation of nonsimultaneous societal forces at
work in the contemporary world. Instead of a flat dialectical concept that passes
over the nonsimultaneous, Bloch’s conception of a “multi-voiced dialectics”
bears witness to the open and unfinished, the spatially and temporally “hetero-
geneous contradictions” of modem capitalism (HT 114ff.); it is a dialectics of the
concrete “‘contradictions’ collected today” that have not yet been “overtaken by
the course of economic development” ( H T 116). Against this backdrop, Bloch
maintains that his own conception of the “dialectical totality” is “critical, non-
contemplative, and practically intervening” (HT 115). Not only can an under-
standing of the heterogeneous contradictions of modernity function as a needed
remedy to the homogenizing tendencies in contemporary Marxism; moreover, by
remaining open to “the polyrhythmics and the counterpoint” of the present, his
materialist dialectic of the nonsimultaneous totality can unearth the “non-past,
because never wholly become, and hence lastingly subversive and utopian con-
tents in the relations of human beings to human being and to nature” that are use-
ful in the struggle against the reactionary forces of the present (HT 1 lSf.).
In more general theoretical terms, Bloch distinguishes between two major
types of dialectical contradiction, both of which assume a subjective and objec-
tive form. In modern European capitalist societies we find on the one hand “non-
simultaneous contradictions’’ existing between outdated societal strata and the
capitalist system itself. By virtue of its oppressive nature, a nonsimultaneous
contradiction manifests itself subjectively as an individual’s “suppressed, dull
rage capable of being distracted”; taken in objective terms, it represents the “un-
resolved past” (HT 108ff.).In opposition to nonsimultaneous contradictions,
there are also “simultaneous contradictions” at work in those sectors of society
that have for the most part overcome all precapitalist forms of production and
186 DURST
an entity advancing along a single line, in which capitalism, for instance, as the final
stage, has resolved all the previous ones; but it is a polyrhythmic and multi-spatial
entity, with enough unmastered and as yet by no means revealed and resolved cor-
ners. Today not even the economic substructures in these corners, i.e. the obsolete
forms of production and exchange, have passed away, let alone their ideological su-
perstructures, let alone the genuine contents of not yet defined Irratio. (HT62)
This is especially true for modern Germany, which Bloch calls “the classical land
of non-simultaneity” (HT 106). Drawing on his earlier political writings, Bloch
explains that in contrast to England and France, Germany had managed no bour-
geois revolution up until 1918. In what he sees as a “gigantic, a seething con-
tainer of the past,” Bloch explains that Germany throws up
unsunnounced remnants of older economic being and consciousness. Ground rent,
large landed property and its power, were almost universally integrated into the cap-
itaiist economy and its political power in England, and differently in France; where-
as in I O R ~backward and even longer diverse Gemany the victory of the bourgeoisie
did not even develop to the same extent economically, let alone politically and ide-
ologicdby. Tbe “unequal rate of development” [. . .] thus prevented the clearly dom-
haskg infkreRce of capitalist thinking, and hence of simultaneity, in the economic
kienmky af forces. Witk Eaet Elbian feudalism a whole museum of German inter-
scLb.8 wos preserved at plry rate, an machrcmistic superstructure which however
bc8116epca))y sqema- aad in need of stlpport it may be, nevertheless prevails;
w d d lrisbory was ceEtainl.y not h a y s urban history in Germany. (HT106)
ERNST BLOCH’S THEORY OF NONSIMULTANEITY 187
easily not just the “impoverished petit-bourgeoisie,” but also the “organized pro-
letariat” and “lumpenproletariat” could be won over to German fascism. At the
time, however, what struck Bloch most was how easily German youth were in-
toxicated by Hitler’s “powerfully suggestive nature” and “fanaticism of vision”
(VKW 344). According to Bloch, the grounds allowing for German youth to
change political allegiances, often from the radical left to the radical right, must
also be sought in the fact that both “here as there the capitalist-parliamentary
state is negated, here as there dictatorship is demanded, the form of obedience
and command, the virtue of decision instead of the cowardices of the bour-
geoisie, this eternally discussing class” (VKW 345). To work against Hitler’s
“revolutionary sect,” Bloch maintained, one must drive out the false conscious-
ness of the masses by strengthening the proletariat’s concrete strivings for revo-
lution and the humanization of life.
But Bloch was not just one of the first to take seriously the Nazi movement;
he stood alone among Marxists of the period in that he viewed fascism not so
much as the unavoidable superstructural expression of monopoly capitalism as
what Anson Rabinbach has called a “cultural synthesis” of nonsimultaneous ele-
ments in modem Germany.25In November 1930, at a time when the National So-
cialists were rapidly gaining ground, Bloch returned to the phenomenon of fas-
cism in his article “On the ‘Third Reich,”’ printed in the Frankfurter Zeitung and
later appearing with alterations under the title “Amusement Co., Horror, Third
Reich” in the first edition of Heritage of Our Emes (1934). The article can be
read as a critique of the German Communist Party’s strategy of struggle against
fascism, whose naive optimism in the course of history Bloch clearly sees as an
unconscious reflex of its overeconomistic habit of thought.26 Bloch censures
Marxist propaganda in Germany for its “premature hope” in the progressive rad-
icalization of the masses for the socialist cause, for it leads to complacency in the
fight against the Nazis over the rightful inheritance of revolutionary ideals.
Rather than writing off the archaic-emotional remnants of Nazi rituals and beliefs
as the mere “dark fanaticism” of backwardness and irrationality, Bloch claims
that one must acknowledge the “serious” character of the National Socialists’
“energy.” “The fanatical-religious strain which does not merely stem from de-
spair and stupidity, the strangely roused strength of faith,” he believes, “could in
I88 DURST
fact, like every recollection of ‘primitiveness,’ also have turned out differently, if
it have been [. . .] dialectically transformed, on the ‘enlightened’ side, instead of
merely being abstractly cordoned off’( H T 60f.). As an example Bloch refers to
the revolutionary origins of the myth of the Third Reich, which the Nazis had co-
opted for their reactionary cause. Rather than surrender such myths, laden with
legitimate utopian impulse, to the enemy without a fight, Marxists must finally
come up with an alternative ideology capable of inspiring the hearts and minds
of the masses, including the increasingly destitute middle class. Directing his
comments to the German Communist Party, Bloch asserted that an essential ob-
jective in the struggle against fascism must be “the winning of the impoverished
centre” and the activation of its “non-simultaneous contradictions to capitalism”
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( H T 62). To this end, not only must there be an overhaul of the very language of
communism, whose “totally contemporaneous” character was focused only on
those proletarian elements of society caught up in the contradictions of the most
advanced economy (HT 105); what is more, as Anson Rabinbach aptly puts it,
the Left must activate its own “revolutionary fantasy” out of the “explosive tra-
dition of mystical and romantic anti-capitalism’’ composed not merely of “irra-
tional and archaic myths but [also] dynamic and active components of the pre-
sent.”*’ Otherwise, it will remain an accomplice of its own defeat.
merkungen zur Erbschaft dieser Zeit” (1936), Bloch shows with justification
how Gunther fails to confront the truth of fascism. Like Heinrich Heine’s Rabbi
from Bacharach, who on arrival in a non-Jewish city exhorts his beautiful young
wife Sarah to shut her eyes to its colorful images, Gunther admonishes his read-
ers to ignore an uncomfortably kaleidoscopic reaIity.js Yet despite his powerful
self-defense, the damage to Heritage of Our Times had already been done. The
same could be said for Bloch’s position in the Expressionismusdebatte. In spite
of what seems to constitute arguments in favor of Bloch and many others who
supported a more differentiated approach to the cultural legacy of the bourgeois
world, the party line prevailed at a time when the historical avant-garde in the
West was in disarray; in this sense, Bloch sought in futility to back a movement
already to a great extent defunct.
Bloch’s exile from fascist Germany and Stalinist Russia was compounded at
the time, however, by a third factor:36the lacking reception of Erbschaft dieser
Zeit by the Frankfurt School. Of the dozens of works reviewed in the Institute for
Social Research’s Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung during the 1930s, Bloch’s is
conspicuously absent.37Apparently, the grounds for this were both political and
professional. Not only was Bloch’s support for the Moscow show trials in
1937/1938 a potential source of embarrassment for the Institute at its new loca-
tion in New York; what is more, in 1937, after finding Bloch’s unpublished man-
uscript on Das Materialismusproblem to contain a “certain irresponsibility of
philosophical improvisation,” Adorno recommended to Max Horkheimer, direc-
tor of the Institute for Social Research, against the official cooperation for which
Bloch had once hoped.3s
Perhaps more important, however, is that Bloch’s theory of fascism contra-
vened the Institute’s own analysis. Representative of its position at the time is
Herbert Marcuse’s article “Der Kampf gegen den Liberalismus in der totalitiken
Staatsauffassung,” published in the 1934 issue of the Zeitschrift fur Sozial-
forschung. In the article, Marcuse argues that the fascist state is above all a con-
sequence of the historical transformation of liberal competitive capitalism to mo-
nopoly capitalism: “the total authoritarian state offers the organization and theory
of society which corresponds to the monopolistic stage of capitali~m.”’~ In Re-
actionary Modernism, Jeffrey Herf has pointed out how misdirected the Frank-
ERNST BLOCH’S THEORY OF NONSIMULTANEITY 191
furt School was in its analyses of National Socialism, something especially true
for Marcuse, whose narrative saw liberalism and fascism as historically inter-
twined. What for Herf was missing in the Frankfurt School at the time was a
proper appraisal of the weakness of the enlightenment and its tradition of politi-
cal liberalism in Germany, not its destructive dialectic.40But what is true for the
Frankfurt School is not valid, or is less valid, for Bloch: not valid, on the one
hand, to the extent that 13loch’s political and philosophical writings around the
beginning of the Weimar Republic not only expose the supra-economic grounds
for Germany’s reactionary political tendencies but also express the conviction
that “political freedom is an irreplaceable stage on the path to economic free-
dom” (KnK 516); less valid, on the other hand, to the extent that Bloch’s grow-
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ing sympathies for Soviet Communism beginning in the mid-1920s led him to
underplay the importance of political liberties in favor of the real andor alleged
economic liberties enjoyed in the Soviet Union, for him the sole bulwark against
fascism, only to return to this topos with renewed energy in his work on Natural
Law and Human Dignity that began in the late 1930s.
It is at any rate unfortunate that in his excellent study Herf does not take up an
in-depth analysis of Bloch’s (political) writings>’ which throughout the period
stressed the particularly reactionary political tradition of a nonsimultaneous,
overly “Prussified Germany.” In contrast to the Frankfurt School’s attempt to ex-
plain the fascist state as an organizational form corresponding to monopoly cap-
italism, Bloch sought to develop a theoretical approach capable of critically ex-
plaining the rise of fascism as a cultural synthesis that went beyond all economic
reductionism. In Heritage of Our Times, Bloch maintained a position almost pre-
cisely opposite to that of Marcuse; namely, that “capitalism had no other choice
than that which it has excellently made with fascism up till now; yet it would cer-
tainly prefer old liberalism to romantic ‘anti-capitalism’ (without which business
could admittedly no longer be done in Germany). The blood myth, and intoxica-
tion as a whole, is not the most desirable servant of capitalist reason” (HT 55).
Seen in this light, it is not surprising that the Frankfurt School at the time chose
not to undertake a systematic evaluation of Bloch’s writings. As fate would have
it, Bloch and his theory of nonsimultaneity remained out of season.
ABBREVIATIONS
References are to the following English and German editions of Bloch’s works:
AU “Aktualitiit und Utopie. Zu Lukhcs’ Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein,” ed.
Ernst Bloch, Philosophische Aufsutze zur objektiven Phantasie (Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp, 1969). (All translations are mine.)
DW Durch die Wuste. Friihe kritische Aufsurze (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1964).
(All translations are mine.)
HT Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville Plaice and Stephen Plaice (Cambridge:
Polity, 1991).
192 DURST
KnK Kampf, nicht Krieg. Politische Schrijien 191 7-1919 (Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp, 1985). (All translations are mine.)
LE Literary Essays, trans. Andrew Joron et al. (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998).
SU The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nassar, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford
UP, 2OOo).
VKW Viele Kammem im Welthaus. Eine Auswahl aus dem Werk (Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp, 1994 ). (All translations are mine.)
NOTES
1. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, 01; The Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke
UP, 1991) 307.
2. In “Reflections on the Brecht-LukBcs Debate,” Jameson writes in a similar vein: “In
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history of aborted revolutions also helps to explain his intense interest in the theologian of
the peasant revolts Thomas Munzer, about whom Bloch published a study in 1921. See
here Ernst Bloch, Thomay Miinzer als Theologe der Revolution (Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp, 1976).
13. Arthur Rosenberg, Cc~chichteder Weimnrer Republik (Hamburg: Europaische Ver-
lagsanstalt, 199 I ) 34.
14. For a discussion of Bloch’s earlier work on Natural Law and Human Dignity
(1961), while in exile in the United States, see Vincent Geoghegan’s Ernst Bloch (Lon-
don: Routledge, 1996) 134.
15. Rainer Traub und Harald Wieser, eds., Gespriiche mit Ernst Bloch (Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp, 1975) 32.
16. Traub and Wieser, Gcsprache 32.
17. The most notorious evample of Bloch’s undiscerning loyalty is his support for the
Moscow show trials. For Bloch’s arguments, see “Kritik einer Prozesskritik (1937) and
“Bucharins Schlusswort” in Ernst Bloch, Vim Hazard zur Katastmphe. Politische Auf-
siitze aus den Jahren 1934-1939 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1972) 195-205 and 351-58.
18. Georg Lukics, “The Old Culture and the New Culture,” Marxism and Human Lih-
eration (New York: Dell, 1973) 3-19.
19. See Georg Lukics, Pcditical Writings, 1919-1929: The Question of Parliamentari-
anism and Other Essays (London: NLB, 1968) 15.
20. Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 197 1) 192-94.
21. Georg Lukics, The Theory of the Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1971) 135.
22. Joseph Roth, “Triibsal einer Strassenbahn im Ruhrgebiet,” Panoptikum Gestalten
und Kulissen (Koln: Kiepenhauer und Witsch, 1983) 19.
23. In History and Class Consciousness, Lukics states more precisely that under mod-
em capitalism “the whole of society is subjected, or tends to be subjected, to a unified eco-
nomic process, and that the fate of every member of society is determined by unified
laws” (Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness 91-92. My italics).
24. Quoted in David Frishy, Fragmente der Moderne (Rheda-Wiedenbriick: Daedelus
Verlag, 1989) 263.
25. Anson Rabinbach is nght to assert that “Ernst Bloch stood practically alone amid
his Marxist contemporaries by taking seriously the power of fascism as a cultural synthe-
sis” (Rabinbach, “Unclaimed Heritage” 5 ) .
26. See here Rabinbach’s “Unclaimed Heritage” 6.
27. Rabinbach, “Unclaimed Heritage” 6.
28. Georg Lukacs, “Realism in the Balance,” Aesthetics and Politics ed. Ronald Taylor
(London: Verso, 1977) 3 1.
29. Lukics, “Realism in the Balance” 3 I .
194 DURST
30. Ernst Bloch, “Discussing Expressionism,” Aesthetics and Politics ed. Ronald Tay-
lor (London: Verso, 1977) 22; see also HT 246.
3 1. Emst Bloch, “Bemerkungen zur Erbschaji dieser Zeit,” Vom Hazard zur Katastro-
phe. Politische Aufsatze aus den Jahren 1934-1939 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1972)
6043.
32. See here Rabinbach’s “Unclaimed Heritage” 5f.
33. Hans Giinther, “Erbschaji dieser Zeit,” Internationale Literatur, 3 (1936): 101.
34. Giinther, “Erbschaji dieser Zeit” 96f., 101.
35. Bloch, “Bemerkungen zur Erbschaji dieser Bit” 43f.
36. Anson Rabinbach speaks of Bloch’s double exile: “from a Germany with fascism
in power and from a Stalinism powerless to comprehend it” (Rabinbach, “Unclaimed Her-
itage” 5).
37. In his history of the Frankfurt School, Rolf Wiggerhaus remarks: “The Institute [for
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Social Research] never published anything by Bloch, [and] did not allow any of his books
to be reviewed in the Journal [for Social Research]” (Rolf Wiggerhaus, Die Frankfurter
Schuie [Miinchen: Hanser Verlag, 19861 216).
38. For a discussion of Bloch’s relation to the Institute for Social Research in the late
1930s, see Wiggerhaus, Die Frankfurter Schule 2 16.
39. Herbert Marcuse, “Der Kampf gegen den Liberalismus in der totalitaren Staatsauf-
fassung,” Kultur und Gesellschaji I (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1965) 32.
40. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984) 10f.
41. In Reactionary Modernism, Herf refers only in one short passage to Bloch’s more
differentiated view of fascism (Herf, Reactionary Modernism 230).