Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics

Author(s): Ernst Bloch and Mark Ritter

Source: New German Critique, No. 11 (Spring, 1977), pp. 22-38
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/487802
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Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics*

by Ernst Bloch

A. Early State of Affairs

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. Cer-
tainly, a person who is simply awkward and who for that reason is not up to the
demands of his position, is only personally unable to keep up. But what if there
are other reaons why he does not fit into a very modern organization, such as
the after-effects of peasant descent, what if he is an earlier type? 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. The strength of
this untimely course has become evident; it promised nothing less than new
life, despite its looking to the old. Even the masses flock to it since the unbear-
able Now at least seems different with Hitler, who paints good old things for
everyone. There is nothing more unexpected, nothing more dangerous than this
power of being at once fiery and puny, contradicting and nonsynchronous. The
workers are no longer alone with themselves and the bosses. Many earlier forces,
from quite a different Below, are beginning to slip between.

* This essay was originally written in 1932 and published as part of Erbscbaft dieser Zeit
(Zurich, 1935). The present translation appears with the permission of Suhrkamp Verlag
which reprinted Erbscbaft dieser Zeit; in the series Bibliothek Suhrkamp 388 (Frankfurt am
Main, 1973).
Translator's Note: Here I am following my previous practice of translating (un)gleicbzeitig
as "(non)synchronous" (see Oskar Negt, "The Nonsynchronous Heritage and the Problem
of Propaganda" in issue 9 of NGC). I am not certain that it is any more precise than "con-
temporaneous," but it is certainly less confusing than "simultaneous." Furthermore, "syn-
chronous" has the only nominalization that could (hopefully) withstand the frequent use
in this article without grating on the nerves. Ungleicbzeitigkeit should have been previously
translated as "nonsynchronism" not "nonsynchronicity." I see no reason to follow German
in piling suffixes onto the stem of a word, unless it is absolutely necessary.

22

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 NONSYNCHRONISM & DIALECTICS 23

B. Nonsynchronisms, Reported

A type always begins from the beginning. For the most part, Y
away from the day that it has. It is a day that the young do not h
their dreams do not come only from an empty stomach. They are
as materially by an empty condition of being-young, which is not o
Youths without work can easily be paid and seduced by the Right
bourgeois origins, but without any bourgeois prospects, invariabl
Right, where they are promised a future. But it is still significant
stands in the middle today; there is no twenty-year-olds' busines
twenty-year-old condition is rather turned towards a different l
reified one of today. Of course, there is no youth in itself, or no
grow up as uniformly, as independently of the times just as all y
beards in all times. But as different as this condition is in different classes and

times, as much as the words to describe it today differ from those of yesterday
it is also clear that earlier bodies emerge in the Now and send a bit of prehistori
life into it. If it is true that little boys bring back the past with bows and arrow
it is also true that youths easily become cliquish, seeking friends and above all a
father, which their own one often was not. This happens more easily to bour-
geois then to proletarian youth, not only because they are bourgeois, but also
because they are more degenerated and consequently more open to games
and enthusiasms. Continually preoccupied with the self, considering themselve
to be of supreme importance, these young people show with their swing to th
romantic Right how external their bad contemporary and material gesture was.
The sharp wind of youth makes fires on the Left burn brighter, if they are
burning; but if a "renewal" is under way on the Right, then the youth from
bourgeois and other vulnerable circles is more vulnerable than ever: the blood
line, the organic youth is fertile soil for the Nazis. Bands in a very old style
spring up from it, blood-bound, tangible life in small groups with a know
leader, not numbers, at the top. The taste of this youth is very sensitive to wel
developed masculine qualities, to strength, openness, decency and purity, where
by this "decency" belongs to healthy boys and does not wish to be one of firm
prices. Positions assumed have a stronger impact than do teachings; rousin
words seem more precise than analytical ones; folk dress seems more beautifu
than cities: thus, the economic motive that drives bourgeois youth into past
dreams connects itself to organic unrest and one's own primeval light. Now,
when present life has become too unconvincing to whet one's horns on, that
which had earlier blustered and gushed emptily now stands uninhibitedly apar
in the beautiful old. The young who are out of step with the barren Now retreat
more easily than moving beyond the Today in order to get into the Tomorrow
This will remain true as long as the different time they experience does not shif
towards tomorrow.

Another type comes from way back by virtue of its being rooted. It still lives

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24 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

almost exactly like its forebearers and does the same things they did. It is th
peasantry: there are faces in the country which are so old, for all their youth
that even the oldest people in the city no longer resemble them. Even if misery
or greater opportunity drives them into the factory, there is still the peasan
saying: "a job is no good if you have to obey a whistle" (Arbeit taugt nichts,
zu der man gepfiffen wird). The small farmer thinks this way, even if he ha
previously not lived much better than his hired hand. Granted, the peasant is
shrewd in calculating: he has given up his traditional costume, furniture and
many old-fashioned ways, and by no means under compulsion. But even if the
peasant responds to economic problems with refreshing sobriety, even if the
home-spun sayings he uses are not all from native soil, the sobriety he has is
still not from today, and the peasant still wears his old costume wherever silenc
and denseness, wherever traditional customs and beliefs hold sway. He
stubbornly defends his economically obsolete position and is more difficult to
replace by the machine than was the artisan a hundred years ago. He is more
difficult to replace simply because he controls his means of production, using
agricultural machinery only as an aid within the old framework of the farm and
the fields belonging to it. Here we find no industrialist introducing the mechani-
cal loom and the like, which only the capitalist can possess, against economically
weak artisans. This continued communal form of production also makes it
difficult to mobilize the economic contradictions within the peasantry.
There are subsistence farmers (Zwergbauern) living in misery, small farmers,
middle-sized farmers and large farmers, and these very disparate property rela-
tions certainly prevent one from taking the peasantry as a uniform "class." The
subsistence farmer still does have property, even if it is pitiful and completely
debt-ridden, and the large farmer helps out, plays the active patriarch: the
disparate property relations do not produce in and of themselves any struggle
between exploiter and exploited (only a propaganda quite different from the
proletarian type will catch hold here). Thus the peasantry feels itself, if not
like a uniform class, then like an "estate" (Stand) that has remained relatively
uniform. Beyond this, the peasants have another nonsynchronism aside from
their possession of the means of production: that tenacity to take root which
comes from the material that they work and which directly holds and nourishes
them; they remain attached to the old soil and the cycle of the seasons. Thus, it
is not only the agricultural crisis which drives peasants to the Right, where they
feel supported by tariffs and where they are promised an exact return of the
good times. Their bound existence, too, the relatively old form of their produc-
tion relations, of their customs and of their calendar life in the cycle of an
unchanged nature counteracts urbanization and binds them to reaction, a re-
action which is founded on nonsynchronism. Even the sobriety of the peasants
is old and sceptical, not enlightened, and their alert sense of property (for the
soil, for a debt-free farm) is more rooted in things than the capitalist one.
Sobriety as well as property sense and peasant individualism (property as an

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 NONSYNCHRONISM & DIALECTICS 25

instrument of freedom, the house as castle) come from pre-capitalis

production relations which already demanded division of the land
were not yet any individual citizens running businesses. Thus, the f
spite of all capitalist forms, in spite of all its ready-made clothes a
is still gothic in plan and aura. One could easily put the abandoned
furniture back in their old places without it seeming pseudo-antiqu
in the city. Isolated places are especially instructive here, for they
underground water, which only lies deeper elsewhere. Chests are st
today for married couples by the village carpenter in gothic form w
date-not as an imitation, but as they were made by their fathers
grandfathers and even older forebears. In spite of radio and news
are couples living in the village for whom Egypt is still the la
princess pulled the baby Moses from the river, not the land of the
the Suez Canal; it is still viewed from the Bible and the Children o
than from the pharaoh. Konnersreuth once again: the ecstatic vir
Neumann, who sweat blood there, against the will of the much m
porary bishop, indicates another bit of gothic in Germany. The F
and the connected regions of the Spessart and Black Forest ca
things; if these mountains are no longer as sinister and haunted as
Hauff's day, raftsmen, glass blowers, ghosts and robbers would sti
appropriate scenery around such peasant gothic even today.1 Econ
ideologically, the peasants, in the midst of the flexible capitalist
situated in an older place. This is so no matter how much capitalism
landed property, a pre-capitalist element; no matter how much it h
the peasants and furnished them with its commodities; no matter
most remote village is connected to the "juste milieu" by radio. T
retain a distorted remnant. They feel better represented by feud
by the suspicious city-so long as the difference in time between
try is not erased in a much broader Tomorrow than the present urb
As we know, the urban type, too, has been learning to lag behind
few years. An immiserated middle class wants to return to prewa
when it was better off. It is immiserated and hence susceptible to r
its work is wide of the mark and its memories make it completely
with the times. Insecurity, which produces only homesickness for
as a revolutionary impulse, sets characters into the middle of the
have not been seen for centuries. But here, too, misery does not in
or not everything; rather, it only divulges something, namely, no
which was long latent or seemed at most to be from yesterday, b
refreshes itself beyond the Yesterday in an almost mysterious St
Older types of being thus occur right in the city, older ways of

1. Wilhelm Hauff (1802-27) was a late romantic writer, who is best known for
tales and fairy tales, including Das Wirtshaus im Spessart.

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26 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

objects of hate as well, such as the image of Jewish usury as exploitation itself.
The infringement of "interest slavery" (Zinsknechtschaft) is believed in, as if
this were the economy of 1500; superstructures that seemed long overturned
right themselves again and stand still in today's world as whole medieval city
scenes. Here is the Tavern of the Nordic Blood, there the castle of the Hitler
duke, yonder the Church of the German Reich, an earth church, in which even
the city people can feel themselves to be fruits of the German earth and honor
the earth as something holy, as the confessio of German heroes and German
history. This sort of patriotism, this foam at the mouth and dimming eye with
which people honor Germany in Germany, is not merely a substitute for the
lost sense of station. "The power and honor of the land" is not merely a dream
(a very convenient dream for the arms industry), which with its collective
feelings compensates the individual petty bourgeois for his factual powerlessness
and degradation. This is not just a transfusion of the "chosen people" to a
Germanic, completely idolatrous object; rather, the obvious excesses recall a
primitive-atavistic "participation mystique," the ties of primitive man to the soil
which contains his ancestral spirits. More than ever, the petty bourgeoisie is the
moist, warm humus for ideology. But it is also clear that the ideology spreading
today has long roots, longer than the petty bourgeoisie.
Peasants sometimes still believe in witches and exorcists, but not nearly as
frequently and as strongly as a large class of urbanites believe in ghostly Jews
and the new Baldur. The peasants sometimes still read the so-called Sixth and
Seventh Books of Moses, a sensational tract about diseases of animals and the
forces and secrets of nature; but half the middle class believes in the Elders of
Zion, in Jewish snares and the omnipresence of Freemason symbols and in the
galvanic powers of German blood and the German land. The white-collar worker
lashes out wildly and war-like; he still wants to obey, but only as a soldier,
struggling, believing. The desire of the white-collar worker not to be proletarian
intensifies to orgiastic pleasure in subordination, in magic civil service under a
duke. The ignorance of the white-collar worker as he searches for past levels of
consciousness, transcendence in the past, increases to an orgiastic hatred of
reason, to a "chthonism," in which there are berserk people and images of the
cross, in which indeed-with a nonsynchronism that verges on extraterritoriality
-Negro drums rumble and central Africa rises up. The reason: the middle class
(in distinction to the proletariat) does not directly take part in production at all,
but enters it only in intermediary activities, at such a distance from social
causality that with increasing ease an alogical space can form in which primal
drives and romanticisms, wishes and mythicisms come to the fore. Even the
directly economic content of middle-class fascism is nonsynchronous or has
become so since freedom of trade and industry has benefited only the large
entrepreneurs and destroyed the small ones; parliamentary democracy is in this
way the hated guarantor of free competition and its corresponding political

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 NONSYNCHRONISM & DIALECTICS 27

form. Instead of free competition, the corporative state wish

economy back to the level of the early capitalist small enterprise;
itself to big capital as an instrument against the class struggle, to t
precisely as its salvation and the up-to-date, romantic expression
synchronism. Likewise, the middle class cannot hold out ideologic
"rationalization" and sacrifices ratio that much sooner, the more it
to the middle class only in hostile form, doubly hostile. That is,
mere late capitalist rationalization and as a subversion of traditio
values-equally late capitalist, but understood as "Marxist-Jewish."
man, the blond beast, the biographical cry for the great man, th
witches' kitchen, of a time long past-all these signs of flight from
nihilism, which had become the stuff of educated discussions in th
educated upper classes, became genuine political land in the catast
middle class. It is, to be sure, still occupied only by employees, n
savage it seems; its houses are those of the family and "clean" bu
the pre-war era, be it of the corporative state; and the benefits go
poly capitalist upper class, which utilizes gothic dreams again
realities. Certainly, mysteries never had to endure such intense c
philistines either, so much malice, meanness and refractory prov
much Edda done in wood-burning, so many heraldic mottoes in S
Nevertheless, here, in the anger of millions, in the landscape aro
has become archaic, there are fields of a different irratio. Living
revived nonsynchronisms, whose content is genuine, whose appea
along heathen crudity and panic nature. Revolutions against civili
demonic form were previously known only in the Orient, above
hammedan world. Their fanaticism still benefits only the White
country as well, and will continue to do this as long as the revolu
occupy and rebaptize the living Yesterday. With the demise of H
synchronous will perhaps also seem weaker; it remains, however, as
the ground for the national socialist as well as every future h
surprise. National Socialism has shown us enough demonized p
people; their ridiculous, frightening image ought not to be forgot
go unused.

C. Synchronism and Nonsynchronism, Philosophically Considered

Many of these people only lagged behind in the Now. They lagged behind its
march only because they were hampered, although they otherwise belong
completely to today. Therefore, one ought not to claim to see an older type
where it is simply a retarded one, one which stands on a bad footing with Today,
but nevertheless belongs to it.
The little man, for instance, has lost money and wants to have it back. While
seeking this he can become like a brute and dream. He is on the wrong track

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28 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

mentally, but still in the Now. If his situation improves, the dreamy and bruta
aspects will end in any case. If it does not improve, and if Hitler, once in power
is disappointing, then the proletarians who went along with him or just gave him
a try, will jump off to the Left anyway, where they are expected; however, th
petty bourgeois will at least no longer believe in ghosts. There is much that is
only falsely nonsynchronous, that would rather return to the drawing-room
today than wait till tommorow, that has a "sound" mind with anger and cliches
and refuses to dance the St. Vitus' dance. It fills itself with pretty words, lou
play, flamboyant nonsense, and, at the bottom of all this drunkenness, really
only wants to be a domestic animal again. Therefore, if one does not want to
underestimate a movement (what does not appear to be only a recent occurenc
with people) then one ought not to paint it garishly everywhere either. Believing
obeying, struggling, are those the fascist virtues?-perhaps, but, for many
obeying is the best virtue they have. Order and hierarchy, do they make up the
fascist architectural style?-perhaps, but many are looking for quiet in the orde
for a job in the hierarchy. Yes, national-socialist agitation has been called an
appeal to the inner scoundrel in man, and rightly so. No negative remark can be
more up to date. The images of a quieter inwardness are something else. If many
of them were not so cheap, one would see that they cannot be more than thirty
years old and are stale from it. Here the little man just does not notice where h
is, although he definitely is in the Now, in a minor and stupefied way. Many of
these cloudy situations, then, are unexpected and strange, yet not old.

D. The Genuinely Nonsyncbronous Remainder

But all the same, not everything here is a little man who deceives himself.
Besides daybreak produced by musty surroundings, necessity also brings genuin
daybreak which has to be taken into account. There are those huge seven-league
boots of misery today which lead as far back into past times as the seven-league
boots of good fortune in the fairy tale. If misery only afflicted synchronous
people, even though of different positions, origins, and consciousness, it could
not make them march in such different directions, especially not so far back-
wards. They would not have such difficulty "understanding" the communist
language which is quite completely synchronous and precisely oriented to the
most advanced economy. Synchronous people could not permit themselves to
be so largely brutalized and romanticized, in spite of their mediate position,
which keeps them economically stupid, in spite of all the semblance that has a
place there. Certainly middle class people also rebel differently than the prole
tariat against becoming a commodity because they are only indirectly involved
in production. Also because the white-collar worker, at least until recently, was
not so annulled, not so alienated in his work, not so unassured in his position;
besides, unlike the proletarian, he had a few individual possibilities of getting
ahead. But, if even now, after complete proletarization and insecurity, after the

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 NONSYNCHRONISM & DIALECTICS 29

decline of a higher standard of living and all chances for a career

white-collar workers are not joining the communists, or even th
crats (quite the contrary), then obviously, forces are reacting w
conceal the commodity reification of humans (Ware-Werden) su
ideologically (as alone was the case for the non-radicalized middle
war), but do so in real terms, that is, precisely from real nonsync
motives and reserves from precapitalist times and superstructures
nonsynchronisms, take effect, which a sinking class brings to life
to life in its consciousness.

Here, after all, not only peasants and little people, but also high-class gentle-
men have kept themselves fresh, that is, old. The street that capital opened up
through the land of "organic" tradition shows, at least in its German form, many
by-ways and ruptures. It had already become evident in the war that Germany
was not only a monopoly capitalist country and the Junker caste not merely
window dressing. All of this mixed even older causes and contents into the
imperialist war as the "mutiny of the productive forces against the form of their
exploitation in national states." (German social democracy had recognized
this at the time, without, however drawing revolutionary consequences from
it-namely, struggle first against the domestic Junkers and automatic militarism;
the value of this nonsynchronous perception is not cancelled by the fact that the
consequences were not drawn.) Germany in general, which did not accomplish
a bourgeois revolution until 1918, is, unlike England, and much less France, the
classical land of nonsynchronism, that is, of unsurmounted remnants of older
economic being and consciousness. Ground rent, large landed property and their
power were rather completely integrated into the capitalistic economy and its
political power in England, and in a different way, in France. On the other hand,
given the long retarded and even longer heterogeneous conditions in Germany
the victory of the bourgeoisie did not develop itself economically, much less
politically or ideologically to the same extent. The "unequal rate of develop-
ment," which Marx ascribes to material production in relationship to artistic
production in the introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, existed
here long enough on the material level alone and hindered in this way the
clearly dominating influence of capitalist thinking in the hierarchy of economic
powers, that is, synchronism. Along with East Elbian feudalism, an entire
museum of German interactions maintained itself, an anachronistic superstruc-
ture which still prevails-no matter how obsolete and shoddy. World history was
not always just urban history in Germany. It is not a question here of whether
Prussian Junkerdom itself has displayed quite artificial, even rationalistic traits
since days of old (unlike the genuine Boyardom, which is rooted in the people):
the Prussian pillar of the Holy Alliance was, if not the most "modern," in any
case not the weakest. At present the Junkers are half dissolved or dependent
upon German-national "people's parties" or even National Socialism. But the

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30 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

Marxist revolution, which wants to "overthrow the old world with its own gre
arsenal of means" does not only run up against monoply capital in the capitalis
republic. Rather, it runs up against new reactions of nonsynchronism, against t
Weimar Republic's blunted "contradiction" to capital and sharpened one
Marxism. Over and above a great deal of false nonsynchronism there is this on
in particular: Nature, and more than that, the ghost of history comes very easi
to the desperate peasant, to the bankrupt petty bourgeois; the depression whic
releases the ghost takes place in a country with a particularly large amount o
pre-capitalist material. It is important to ask whether Germany is not more un
developed, even more vulcanic than, for instance, France, in terms of its powe
Certainly it has not formed and evened out capitalist ratio nearly as synchro
nously. Just this relative chaos rolled "things out of season," nonsynchronou
things from an even "deeper" retardation, from barbarism, to National Social
ism; and it would not have taken a Nietzsche in Germany to make the antithes
of blood against mind, savagery against morality, intoxication versus reason in
a conspiracy against civilization.
Needs and elements from past ages break through the relativism of the gener
weariness like magma through a thin crust. Indeed, the nihilism of bourgeois lif
this becoming-a-commodity, becoming alienated from the entire world, show
preserved nonsynchronisms in a doubly "natural" way and preserved "nature" i
a doubly magical way. And so campfires and sacrificial smoke burn in th
people's (volkisch) hall. Trumpet blasts announce the Fiibrer in a more th
Wilhelminian manner; the thin little gardens of ideology that falsify the myt
become materially overheated and spring up-in a frenzied middle class-into a
jungle. The pancake craters of nature, which otherwise steamed in the parlor
become genuine volcanoes. That means not only mud volcanoes but also those
of the darkest primitivization, of a completely nonsynchronous, even disparate
insanity. One is reminded of the St. Vitus' dancers and latent child murderer
who shout "Stop, thief!" when they accuse Jews of ritual murder. One is re-
minded of the tune "When a Jew's blood drips from the knife," which has bee
spreading among the SA troops like a swastika in music. One feels the dream of
preserved insanity, of preserved overcompensations from puberty in this sort o
National Socialism. One senses the use of sensationalism to exploit the Indian
murder sects and Chinese secret societies, the whole creeping, whispering fores
of earlier sensational literature (with the Elders of Zion or the Caves of the
Freemasons in the interior of the mountain). One encounters age-old sadism
even at funerals, vows of revenge, or the rites of rage (Wutzeremoriell) at th
"memorial." Thus, there are uncanny elements enough in the entire "awaken-
ing"; it is not only simple "rejuvenation" nor merely the struggle for survival b
beastly means. Under the threshold of submerged stock quotations, beneath a
intoxication that by daylight often contains nothing but a bit of disturb
pseudo-antiquity, beneath a false nonsynchronism, which only appears as

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 NONSYNCHRONISM & DIALECTICS 31

volcanic island to the extent that it is not in the vanguard of the

all these bad anachronisms there is a genuine one of such a kind
one guess. Its acts are to be determined in the following, but its
wild confusion of unsold history, prehistory too. The fact that th
is alien to the times makes possible the deceit as well as the path
tion" and reaction at the same time.

E. The Logical Constitution of Nonsynchronous Contradictions

Distress is in need of food, and, in the middle strata, in need of something

higher as well, something which it can no longer find in life nowadays, which
indeed, it has long been missing in the barren land. What has been customarily,
ultimately "psychically," missed likewise contradicts the Now, just as strongly
as missing food and not only economically. Furthermore, every upsetting contra
diction, even its semblance, has two sides: an inner one so to speak, which some-
thing does not suit, and an outer one, in which something is amiss. Then the
immiserated middle strata, by and large not part of today, contradict the Now,
which lets this group fall further and further, with torpidity on the inward level,
and outwardly with remnants which are alien to the Now. Thus the contradic-
tory factor here is inwardly or subjectively a torpid remnant, but at the sam
time externally or objectively, it is an alien, a leftover, in short, a nonsynchro-
nous remnant. As a simply torpid not wanting of the Now, this contradicting
factor is subjectively nonsynchronous. As an existing remnant of earlier time
in the present it is objectively nonsynchronous. The subjectively nonsynchro-
nous, having been for a long time merely embittered, appears today as pent-u
anger. In calm times it was the peevish or contemplative side of the German
petty bourgeois, who withdrew cursing or reticently from a life with which he
could not keep up. The fallen branches of duty, education, and "estate" of the
middle strata, in a time that no longer knows a middle, are subjectively non-
synchronous in the meager sense, but tinder in the face of anger. Correspondin
to this is the objectively nonsynchronous as the after-effect of older relation
and forms of production and older superstructures, no matter how thwarted
they may be. The objectively nonsynchronous is that which is far from and alie
to the present; it includes both declining remnants and, above all, uncomplete
past, which has not yet been "sublated" by capitalism. The subjectively non
synchronous contradiction activates this objectively nonsynchronous one, so
that both contradictions come together, the rebelliously distorted one of pent
up anger and the objectively alien one of left-over being and consciousness. Here
are elements of the old society and its relative order and fulfillment in th
present disorderly society, and the subjectively nonsynchronous contradiction
revives these in a way both negatively and positively surprising. House, soil and
people are examples of such objectively delineated contradictions between the
traditional and the capitalist Now, within which they are increasingly being

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32 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

destroyed and not replaced. They are both contradictions of the traditiona
with the capitalist Now as well as elements of the old society which are not yet
dead. They were contradictions even in their origin, contradictions to pas
forms, which never did realize the intended contents of house, soil or people.
Therefore, they were already contradictions of unfulfilled intentions ab ovo,
quarrels with the past itself: not on the spot, like the divisions of the synchro-
nous contradictions, but through the whole of history as it were so that here
contradictions even to history, namely, to uncompleted intentional contents
of the past themselves join the rebellion if the occasion arises. Certainly, the
past is beautified by the petty bourgeoisie today. In opposition to the Now, it
places its unfulfilled condition, mixed with that which was relatively better i
the past. Thus, pent-up anger has its nonsynchronous contradiction not so much
against the meager inheritance of the past as against a Now in which even the las
inkling of fulfillment has disappeared.
But the subjectively nonsynchronous contradiction would never be so acute,
nor the objectively nonsynchronous one so visible, if there were not also an
objectively synchronous contradiction, specifically, that which is posited and
growing in and with present-day capitalism. Anachronistic savagery and recollec
tion are only discharged by the crisis, and answer to its objectively revolutionary
contradiction with one that is subjectively as well as objectively reactionary, that
is, nonsynchronous. Only, the nonsynchronous contradiction, even if it is set
free by the growing immiseration, disintegration and dehumanization in the
bosom of late capitalism, by the intolerability of its objectively synchronous
contradictions, is at first, as a nonsynchronous contradiction, not dangerous to
capitalism. On the contrary, capital uses that which is nonsynchronously con-
trary, if not indeed disparate, as a distraction from its own strictly present-day
contradictions; it uses the antagonism of a still living past as a means of separa-
tion and struggle against the future that is dialectically giving birth to itself in
the capitalist antagonisms. Throughout the entire 19th century, "the interests
of two classes mutually cancelled each other out" (Marx) in the petty bour
geoisie. In addition to this cancelling process there are today harmonizing
images of the past which merely seek to retract or to subordinate to themselves
the excesses of capitalism. They fill nihilism-this eminently synchronous contra
diction in the retinue of late capitalism, this ideological parallel to the commod-
ity reification of all people and things-with hybrid structures, such as the war
spirit of 1914, with romantic theories of the state and their feudal anti-capital-
ism, with Prussianism and socialism or other ideologies as premature solutions o
social contradictions. The nonsynchronous contradiction is in this way the
opposite of a driving, exploding contradiction; it does not stand with the prole-
tariat as today's historically decisive class. It does not stand in the battlefield
between proletariat and monopoly capital as that space of today's decision
After all, the nonsynchronous contradiction as well as its contents broke loose

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 NONSYNCHRONISM & DIALECTICS 33

only in the general vicinity of the capitalist antagonisms, and in th

an accidental, at least a warped difference so that a hiatus exists
nonsynchronous contradiction and capitalism, a fissure, which ca
or filled with clouds. Above all, the nonsynchronous contradictio
merely declining pasts, which themselves are not completed, canno
change into a new quality, no matter how great its quantity. The
line of knots in which the contradiction eventually becomes entang
point and drives with leaps for the revolutionary solution, can ta
in keeping with synchronous contradictions, which themselves ar
child of the Future or of Being-different, not with nonsynchrono
as historical contradictions have their greatness behind them and
adventure of their quality. Even the possible late ripening of wha
incompleted in this past can never turn into a new quality of its o
that is not already known from the past. That end could be serve
an alliance, which liberates the still possible future from the past o
both in the present. Nevertheless, there is a reality in the nonsync
tradiction, which-as the terrible example shows-is not simply sw
subsumed by the synchronous. In a resolution about fascism f
communists it was once said that it contains within itself both the offensive of

the ruling class and the elements of its dissolution; in short, that it reflects the
contradictions of late capitalist development and thereby its own demise. This is
completely correct, but does not exhaust the nonsynchronous contents which
express themselves remotely enough in pent-up anger and left-over ties.
The distress that is born solely of today, that of the workers, has much easie
means of defending itself. Here the synchronous contradiction is alone. It is in
the Today, in possession of it, also completely tangible or the winning cause
itself. Its subjective manifestation, its subjective factor is not pent-up anger, bu
rather the class-conscious revolutionary proletarian. Its objective manifestation,
its objective factor is not a perishing remnant nor even an incompleted past, bu
rather the impeded future. It is the existence of the proletariat itself, the dispro
portion between the productive forces unleashed by capitalism and the relations
of production-the crisis. Recognizing himself as a commodity, the worke
reveals at the same time the commodity character of capitalist society, a state
as raving as it is ghostly. He does this-as the new class-and cannot be mistaken
for the old, and also his "humanity" or his "life," which he opposes to reifica-
tion, cannot be historically determined at any point. The proletarian as the self
dissolution of bourgeois society, indeed, of all class society, is the subjectively
and objectively incarnate contradiction of synchronous society itself, and his
revolution-as the fruit of dialectical knowledge of synchronous contradictions
does not take exception to any figures or memories, nor in the first instance, t
any contents from the past. Rather, it activates purely the future society with
which the present one is pregnant and towards which the nihilisms and anarchi

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34 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

of present society seek to transform themselves. But that does not prevent the
synchronous contradiction's being driven in part by the same material that the
nonsynchronous one also misses in the present and which it seeks, with such
distortion, in the past. The forms and contents of the past naturally do not
attract the class-conscious worker at all. If so, only at a few revolutionary
points, with which he feels an elective affinity. And yet, the relatively more
lively and intact nature of earlier human relationships do become clear to him
These relationships were still relatively more immediate than those in capitalism
They carried with them more "substance," both in the people among whom
they existed and in the environment upon which they worked. To be sure, this
immediacy was only seemingly closer in earlier forms, only relatively better
determined. And yet, this "relative" not only serves, in a reactionary way, to
hold up against the present a past as something which in part is genuinely not
dead. It also positively delivers in places a part of that matter which seeks a life
not destroyed by capital, indeed, which, leading in a proletarian way, but just as
"generally," rebels as the alienation (Entausserung) of "human beings," as the
tearing up "of life." We called the nonsynchronous differentness warped, and it
rebellion, as a much older substance, peripheral. But, ultimately, it turns out
that a part of this very substance of nonsynchronous contradictions has long
supplemented the synchronous ones. The substance of synchronous contradic-
tions is not only that which is very much present, namely of the liberated force
of production, but is also that most extreme force of negativity which "from
there" overturns the present-day conditions. The alienated individual or prole-
tarian, alienated work or commodity fetishism, the emptiness of nothingness-
these negativities have something dialectically positive within themselves, to be
sure, even the sublime. But it is only there as something rebellious missing from
within the synchronous contradiction and its matter-missing from the whole
man, from non-alienated labor, from the earthly paradise. To be concise, in the
rebellion of proletarian and reified negativity, there is ultimately also the mater
ial of a contradiction that rebels from "productive forces" which are not un-
leashed at all, from intentional contents of a still nonsynchronous type. This
positivity does not only touch-in the deepest sense-the subversively utopian
"of mankind," a "life" which never received fulfillment in any age and is hence
the final spur to every revolution, indeed, still the brightest space of every
ideology; it also touches, beyond this hidden generality, those positivities which
were recalled very early against capitalism, precisely because they are forms and
contents of older matter. Not only bourgeois revolutionary positiva, such as
Rousseau's "Arcadian Nature," belong here, but also those mixed with restora-
tive tendencies, or even abdications of the revolution: the middle ages of roman-
ticism, the rebirth of a world set up organically and qualitatively out of the
empty spaces of the "problem of the thing in itself," and other mirages and
picture-puzzels-treasures of a not quite completed past. The factors of th
nonsynchronous contradiction, which are-as was shown-incapable of "over-

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 NONSYNCHRONISM & DIALECTICS 35

turning" present-day conditions, nevertheless already recalled, s

or romantically, that wholeness and liveliness from which comm
genuine material against alienation. In addition to communism, t
things which thrive off this in confusion such as barbarism, atta
land, arcadian and dionysian "nature." They thrive as creatures n
as Menetekels and witnesses which at least make the problem of
wholeness an obligation for dialectics, which is too bound up on
capitalism alone. Marxism is not itself radical like destructive ca
omissive like the latter's abstract calculation. It is not half-enlig
but rather, completely revealing and superior. It is least of all a
the claims of "Nature"-this antiquary shop of unresolvedness. Th
be such setbacks, much less any problem of the "heritage" in th
its last stage were the only one on which dialectics has to stand
tion to happen. The foundation of the nonsynchronous contr
unfulfilled fairy tale of the good old days, the unresolved myth
being or of nature. Here there is a past which, in places, is not
in terms of classes, but not even completely redeemed materially.

F. The Problem of a Multi-level Dialectics

Thus, it is our task to extend the agitated Now. First, one mu

the falsely from the genuinely nonsynchronous contradiction,
the synchronous contradiction, and then, in both of them, the o
subjective factors of the contradiction. The subjectively nonsynch
diction is pent-up anger, the objectively nonsynchronous one is
the subjectively synchronous one is the proletariat's free revoluti
objectively synchronous contradiction is the impeded future con
Now, the impeded technical benefaction, the impeded new societ
the old one is pregnant in its productive forces. The basic facto
tively synchronous contradiction is the conflict between the colle
of the productive forces developed within capitalism and the priv
their antipathy. The increasing socialization of labor is no longe
with the private capitalist property relations, with the bourgeois
industrial labor grew up. This is the objectively synchronous contr
times or its exact class antithesis: productive forces and propert
two essential parts of an equally synchronous unity. Only this ex
decisively revolutionary for the times. Nevertheless: it is not the
The other antithesis, that between capitalism and the nonsynchro
erated classes, lives alongside the synchronous anthithesis, even t
diffuse way. Thus it produces fear and pent-up anger in the cla
bourgeoisie which "lacks a history." Nor does it allow for an elabo
class-consciousness of its own. For that reason it makes the thrust of the conflict

external and blunt, directed only against the symptoms, not against the core of

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36 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

exploitation; the content of the conflict itself is romanticially, more or less

archaically anticapitalistic.
It is our task now to locate within contradiction a possible force even when it
does not go beyond the nonsynchronous rift. The latter remains favorable to
the Now of capitalism only as long as the nonsynchronous people lack th
leadership, or even the magic spell spurring them to march into the present-da
battlefield. The task is to extrapolate the elements of the nonsynchronou
contradiction which are capable of antipathy and transformation, that is, those
hostile to capitalism and are homeless in it, and to refit them to function in a
different context. Consequently, what remains is the "triple alliance" between
the proletariat and the immiserated peasants and the immiserated middle class
under proletarian hegemony. The genuinely synchronous contradiction has th
job of being concrete and total enough to detach even the genuinely nonsyn-
chronous contradictions from reaction and to bring them to its own tendency
Of themselves the older contradictions do not become a problem on the grounds
of proletarian being. Revolutionary dialectics remains exclusively one involvin
the contradictions set by late capitalism, not the ruptures it sets free, which the
Hitler movement exploits. But precisely this proletarian hegemony in the over-
due triple alliance cannot be managed, especially if the hegemony is to be un-
diluted and secure unless dialectics also thoroughly "masters" the material of
genuine nonsynchronism and its heterogeneous contradictions.
False consciousness and abstract romanticism must be exorcized at every
point, and an understanding that is not abstractly omissive must likewise take
into its house the subversive and utopian elements, the repressed matter of that
which is not yet past. It is said, and certainly correctly, that it is the essence of
fascist ideology to incorporate the morbid components of all cultural phases.
But it is incorrect to say: "only the morbid ones" and thus to imply that the
healthy ones would not be accessible to the ideology of decay at all. Such a
summary judgment incorporates in a completely abstract-negative way even the
specific opposition of nonsynchronism because of its murkiness into the rotten
magic and nothing else. Therefore, in the final analysis, fascism is supported;
that is, the difference between the nonsynchronous contradiction and fascist
deception of it is denied, denied and plastered over this time from the vulgar
Marxist side. Fascism, however, has exploited long enough whatever peasant,
petty bourgeois, or nonsynchronous opposition of any kind which made itself
felt. Thus, in order for one to become master of the nonsynchronous, the pro
blem of a multi-level dialectics emerges. Obviously, the entirety of earlier de-
velopment is not yet "sublated" in capitalism and its dialectics. World history,
as the bourgeois revolutionary Ludwig Borne has said, is a house that has more
stairways than rooms. And, if Marx himself emphasizes the relatively more
bearable aspect of the precapitalist condition, if even he characterizes Greek art
and epic as "in a certain respect the norm and unattainable ideal" (introduction

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 NONSYNCHRONISM & DIALECTICS 37

to the Critique of Political Economy), then this "social childho

is a barely dissolved attraction for him or, in any case, capitali
house in history that could be dialectically inherited. Having
past, in infinite polyphony as it were, without a dominant voic
cism. Applying typically identical, at least formally ident
"laws" to all that is past is mere sociologism. Marxism, on the
not find its dialectics to be the same everywhere as they app
It varies them concretely according to individual social conditio
it tries to maintain for its dialectics, even with the continuin
in capitalism, that totality which is proper to the dialectical te
opment-not at every stage, but at every mastered stage. Multis
temporal dialectics, the polyrhythm and the counterpoint of s
in this way precisely the instrument of the mastered last sta
not of any and every stage of course, but of the critical, nonc
that intervene practically.
This totality must be critical so as not to load itself down wi
being and the doubly false consciousness that is a consequence
What history has not yet managed to do with that which
namely, to make it hopeless and nothing more than the burial
memories, is completed positively through a materialist analysis
false consicousness by dissolving its semblance and unmasking
mirages. Therefore, for the sake of those very elements in the
past and continue to be effective, for the sake of the genuine
have yet to give birth to a star), totality will not encumber i
pseudo-nebulae, with unclear constellations that have long sin
final form, even though these may resemble the nebulae as c
cliche resembles the new earth or the Third Reich, the future
must furthermore be critical in order that it not fall from its
to the capitalist dismemberment of all relations of life into a f
idealistic "totality," which is a mere totality of the system (sp
single idealistic principle and its uninterrupted, panlogical con
indeed is a derivative of myth (the belief in the great unbroken
And the totality must not only be critical, but above all, no
only in this way does it reach the point of not letting the
uncorrected in the past remain there; instead, the concealed co
past and the revealed one to the present mesh in the dialectic
Hegel's dialectical totality was still merely a totality of recoll
and was monadic as well, in which "no link was not drunk" but in which each
could still be content in its place because it was equipped "with the complete
wealth of the spirit." Of course, Hegel likewise viewed the following stage as the
intended higher truth of the preceding one and the totality more and more
precise in the respecitvely last link; indeed, he has the contradiction to the

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38 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

entirety of the entire thing as the driving basic contradiction in the individual
contradictions (and even in the individual reconciliations). Here, dialectics is not
only unity of contradictions (as for Schelling), but unity of unity and of contra-
dictions.

If, however, the Hegelian truth of the last stage is to be put into practice as
well as the "self" that "has to penetrate and digest this entire wealth of its
substance," then the penetration can only be a non-contemplative one, or one
that possesses the wealth of the substance, not in gilded pasts, but in the actual
heritage of its end in the Now-in short, one that gains additional revolutionary
force from the incomplete wealth of the past, especially if it is not "sublated"
in the last stage. 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 gold-
bearing gravel in the course of previous labor processes and their superstructures
in the form of works. Polyphonous dialectics, as a dialectics of the "contradic-
tions" 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." The proletarian voice of synchronous dialectics
remains decidedly the leading one; but both above and below this cantus firmus
(fixed hymn) run disorderly emissions which can only be related to the cantus
firmus (fixed hymn) by its relating itself to them-in a critical and non-contem-
plative totality. And multispatial dialectics proves itself above all in the dialecti-
zation of still "irrational" contents which are, in terms of their still critical
positivum, the "nebulae" of the nonsynchronous contradictions.

Translated by Mark Ritter

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