The Gramsci Gap

System emergence in monstrously morbid interregnums between worlds

The Contraptions Book Club is currently reading City of Fortune by Roger Crowley, to be discussed the week of January 27.

You’ve probably heard some version of the Gramsci quote “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” Here is a picture I made of the idea. I’m going to call this “time of monsters” the Gramsci Gap.

The line is generally attributed to Antonio Gramsci, but this particular version is actually a loose translation by Slavoj Žižek. A tighter translation of the original, according to a footnote in this essay, would be “…in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” This last bit, in either form, is not usually included in the quote, but to me it is the most interesting part. It makes an otherwise vacuous thought interesting.

Žižek’s version, with “Now is the time of monsters,” captures the spirit of the original, but perhaps loses some of the useful specificity. Interregnum suggests a particular understanding of old and new worlds as regnums — reigns of particular systems of governance rather than material circumstances or environmental epochs. The Latin regere is at the root of English words for both governance, like reign and regime, and words for measuring and ordering, such as regulation¹ and rule. The word ruler is particularly interesting since we use it both for a measuring stick and a monarch (which was also true of the original Latin apparently). This is not a coincidence. Measurement and control go together. The human ruler doesn’t just make the rules while remaining above them, he is also the measure of the rest of humanity.

The point of this little etymological digression is that the word interregnum could refer to either the period between the fall of one monarch and the rise of another or to the period between the fall of one system of rules and the rise of another. Most often, it refers to both, because it takes both to make a world in the sense of a regnum.

So “appearance of morbid symptoms” and “time of monsters” could apply to either aspect of world. Gramsci, being a jailed communist in fascist Italy, likely had both in mind, since he’s best known for a version of Marxism that emphasizes the importance of hegemonic system narratives over the specific depredations of ruling classes. This is a robust and general distinction. Modern Marxists for example, transpose this idea from class to race, and make a distinction between racism in personal attitudes and structural racism embodied by institutions. Conservatives reject this particular move, insisting on the rationality of their favored institutions, but simultaneously make similar distinctions with regard to (for example) the personal characters of individual muslims versus the institutional dispositions of Islam the religion (which they might characterize as “structurally terroristic” or something).

Without taking a position on any specific example, I will take this distinction as sound and given in general terms — every regnum has both rulers and rules of consequence and substance, and reasonable accounts of the Gramsci Gap must comprehend both aspects.

If you put the two translations together, you get an interesting idea that a “monster” is an instance of “morbid symptoms” appearing in either or both of the two building blocks of “worlds” — systems of rules and special people.

Carl Schmitt’s famous definition, “sovereign is he who decides on the exception” is useful for gluing these two kinds of monsters together, but I will be overloading it here to apply beyond sovereigns in the monarchial sense.

A human monster in the Gramsci Gap is typically any individual with some degree of exception-making capability, who is using that capacity in monstrous ways, resulting in one class of morbid symptoms.

A systemic monster in the Gramsci Gap is typically some scheme of rule of law that has undergone late-stage monstrous perversions (going beyond what I’ve been calling paradigm exhaustion recently), resulting in a different class of morbid symptoms.

What can we say about these two kinds of monsters and the conditions they create in the Gramsci Gap?