The Challenge of Postcapitalism: Non-Capitalist Temporalities and Social Pathology

This chapter addresses the relationship between social pathology diagnosis and temporality, drawing attention to the conceptual limitations of the former in relation to the latter. The discussion describes the content of social pathology and its diagnosis with reference to leading theoreticians, and clarifies the approaches that shall be targeted. This is followed by an account of plural temporalities informed by a historical materialist optic. I argue that various modes of production overlap in historical societies and contain a multitude of temporalities, including post-capitalism, but the explanatory power and scope of social pathology falls short of illuminating these. The assumption of a homogenous, unified temporal backdrop to socially pathological processes, along with the assignment of a singular temporal logic to each pathology, acts as an impediment to critique and impedes the provision of remedies. In sum, the paradigm would benefit from more conceptual elaboration and development along lines of multiple temporality.