Post-development, Temporality and a ‘Critical Theory of Hope’

This paper contributes to theorising post-development by rethinking critical theory in light of the present shift of social movements and community organisations from demand and advocacy to political prefiguration. While struggling over the state, policy, and the law is still essential, grassroots organising processes, mainly in the global south but not exclusively, are simultaneously experimenting with alternatives to development, nurturing a still unknown 'utopian' content. I suggest Ernst Bloch's philosophy of hope facilitates an elective affinity between critical theory and prefigurative movements, allowing for a critical theory of hope that reintroduces a discussion of human pursuits as a collective agency. Like T. W. Adorno’s negative dialectics, the proposed critical theory of hope also produces an immanent critique of capital, but it is adequate for a world that millions of people are trying to rescue and reinvent in the face of unprecedented poly crisis. In Bloch’s philosophy, hope is a category struggle, utopia is concrete (a praxis-oriented activity), and possibility is not at the centre of philosophy but also dwells in the material world as the not-yet and, therefore, inspires collective action and other politics. Finally, I claim that temporality is a significant element of the post-development critique today and suggest that Bloch's notion of multiversum indicates diversity. However, unlike the pluriverse, it also contests the historicism and the universal linear time of capitalist development. The multiversum is a non-linear historiographical paradigm that facilitates the recognition of the multiple non-synchronic temporalities that dwell in indigenous and non-indigenous alternatives to development so that they outflow the capitalist expansion of abstraction, indifference and synchronisation.