Of silkworms and butterflies
A new missive has appeared from the ever-prolific
, this time about Antonio Gramsci’s much quoted ‘interregnum’:
As luck and timing would have it, I’ve recently finished an 11,000 word chapter draft on the same theme, some of which speaks to Tooze’s discussion. For those interested, I’ve included parts of it below:
The key line can be found in the thirty-fourth entry of Gramsci’s third prison notebook, written in 1930:
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum, morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass.
This short, evocative entry is the only time Gramsci explicitly invoked ‘interregnum’, it is largely self-contained and sufficiently comprehensible, and the above quote can be extracted and aphorised, all features that have likely helped facilitate its easy adoption and adaptation. The widespread, albeit somewhat superficial, adoption of Gramsci’s ‘interregnum’ is indicative that it does speak to the present. It does capture something ‘in the air’. But what exactly? Perhaps perversely, the value of the ‘interregnum’ frame might be found in its negativity, insofar as it emphasises absence and loss.
The resonance of Gramsci’s entry comes from its uncanny capacity to speak through time to our present. Reflecting this, it has been widely employed in recent years. The quote is featured in reports by think tanks, it can be found in a wide range of newspapers and magazines, and has provided titles for multiple books. It apparently was even invoked (in its modified Žižek version) by a leading central banker at a Bank of America conference in Rome earlier this year. Given how commonly the line is referred to, it is rarely considered carefully. As Rune Møller Stahl observes, Gramsci’s formulation is ‘oft-cited but seldom analyzed’.
Considering the flourishing of recognition and engagement with Gramsci’s work in the 1970s and 1980s, it is noteworthy that some of the earliest examples of invoking ‘interregnum’ appears in the arts. In his 1979 film adaptation of the opera, Don Giovanni, the director Joseph Losey commenced with the original Italian quotation. It would also serve as the epigraph for July's People, a novel published in 1981 by South African writer and Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer, a meditation on the troubles and consequences of apartheid. This was accompanied by a lecture she gave in New York in 1982, published in The New York Review of Books, ‘Living in the Interregnum’. Her work offers perhaps the clearest template for its present usage. South Africa’s apartheid regime was historically out of step, it persisted, but was untenable. In the lecture, she explained:
The sun that never set over one or other of the nineteenth-century colonial empires of the world is going down finally in South Africa. Since the black uprisings of the mid-Seventies, coinciding with the independence of Mozambique and Angola, and later that of Zimbabwe, the past has begun rapidly to drop out of sight, even for those who would have liked to go on living in it. Historical coordinates don’t fit life any longer; new ones, where they exist, have couplings not to the rulers, but to the ruled. It is not for nothing that I chose as an epigraph for my most lately written novel a quotation from Gramsci: “The old is dying, and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.”
Gordimer’s invoking of Gramsci was acute and accurate, as there would be another decade of rule by coercion before the new in South Africa could finally emerge. The belief that the new must emerge – that white rule in South Africa could not persist indefinitely – could not be guaranteed, but it was siding with the force of history. Following Gordimer, there was something of interregnum for ‘interregnum’, until it began to be widely used after being invoked by both Zygmunt Bauman and Slavoj Žižek in the years following the 2008 financial crisis.
The most common manner in which Gramsci’s ‘interregnum’ has been employed is either as a frame, in which ‘morbid symptoms’ of the dying order are listed and considered, or it is used to punctuate or conclude, as something like stating an evident reality. It encourages a kind of ‘if-then’ thinking: if there is an interregnum, then morbid symptoms (or monsters) appear.
Trying to develop from Gramsci a ‘theory of interregnum’ is less helpful than it might appear. Rather, treating it in aphoristic form, with multiple valances and resonances, is more productive. It speaks into the void. What it captures and speaks to is the decline and loss of ordering principles, and with this, coercive power persists but it is increasingly naked. Without hegemony and legitimacy, there is only force, which can only be defensive and reactive. Moreover, the ‘morbid phenomena’ that arise manifest from the dying order, it is possible to identify those relationships. In these ways, Gramsci’s formulation captures distinctly conditions of decline and consequences of decay.
Given that Gramsci was a committed Marxist in prison for his beliefs, one can hardly fault him for his inclusion of the new, but the result is that it offers more hope of resolution than might be justified. Indeed, this is what is suggested in the original legal definition of interregnum, insofar as it describes a discrete period between rulers, it is meant to be a temporary period. Rather, a more appropriate rendering might be adopting the broadest definition – a ‘vacant space’ – that denies the comfort of resolution. Put differently, perhaps a shorthand way to describe the conditions of interregnum: these are occurring when forces of dissolution outweigh and overpower those of integration. Gone is power as something productive and generative; it remains in a negative, parasitic capacity, power to take and destroy, but not create. The trend line is towards further disorder. In this rendering, it is not simply that resolution is blocked, it is that it is not yet a viable possibility. Instead of ‘interregnum’, it might be more helpful to speak of entropy.
Whereas Gramsci’s invocation was intellectually honest – consistent with his Marxism – to invoke it now is more of a theoretical fudge or sidestep. The problem is that this uncertainty invalidates the frame of the interregnum, which presupposes a regular outcome – the advent of a new ruler, the establishment of a new order – and it is precisely this clarity that is prevented, as the new is not yet in view. One can only confirm an interregnum once that period has finished, and a new order has been established. Until that moment, it can only be an empty space and no more. From this perspective, the common tendency of invoking Gramsci’s ‘interregnum’ without seriously engaging with it becomes more comprehensible, as it is basically an intellectually satisfying cri de cœur. Indeed, the manner in which the old, the new, and the morbid symptoms are all arranged suggests a greater degree of comprehension than might be the case. Deprived of the ‘new’ that Gramsci could hold onto, all that remains is a recognition of the warping and waning of a passing order. The promise of resolution and ‘the new’ is precisely what is denied, ‘and between them yawns an empty space’, to invoke Hermann Broch.
Hannah Arendt commenced her review of The Death of Virgil with the following reflection:
Hume once remarked that the whole of human civilization depends upon the fact that "one generation does not go off the stage at once and another succeed, as is the case with silkworms and butterflies." At some turning-points of history, however, at some heights of crisis, a fate similar to that of silkworms and butterflies may befall a generation of men. For the decline of the old, and the birth of the new, is not necessarily an affair of continuity; between the generations, between those who for some reason or other still belong to the old and those who either feel the catastrophe in their very bones or have already grown up with it, the chain is broken and an "empty space," a kind of historical no man's land, comes to the surface which can be described only in terms of "no longer and not yet."
The notebook entry in which Gramsci spoke of an interregnum encourages an aphoristic reading in which it is generally understood with limited or no historical context. One consequence is that the distinctiveness of his insight tends to be overstated. Gramsci’s rendering has certainly become the most prominent, but he was hardly alone in recognising the historically empty space of that period after the First World War. Austrian writers keenly felt a deep sense of loss for the order long embodied in the Austro-Hungarian empire. Likewise, in Weimar Germany a ‘new’ had been born, but it lacked the solidity of a new order. Writing towards the end of World War Two, Broch captured in poetic but difficult prose conditions of interregnum, ‘no longer and not yet’, through his narration of Virgil’s passing. The ‘empty space’ was keenly felt in the Germanophone world, indeed, much of Europe.
Turning and returning to Gramsci and the vacant space: what of interregnum? The evocative phrasing seduces, but does not yield its fruit so easily. As noted, the most common response is to invoke Gramsci as a theoretical prop, suggesting deeper engagement than tends to be the case. At its most banal, ‘morbid symptoms’ is the hook for listing whatever ills or woes to be discussed. The result is reducing Gramsci’s ‘interregnum’ to ‘a theory of the obvious’, revealing little about the genuinely confusing conditions of the present conjuncture. Yet cliches contain within them kernels of truth, so often do banalities, and this does apply to Gramsci’s overused notebook entry. It does speak to the moment, but more partially and patchily.
Invoking Gramsci is to acknowledge a truth many know and readily accept: that there is some type of gap, a breaking apart, the old ideas and frames feel more and more ill-fitting for contemporary conditions. The old persists, but do so in tawdry, unconvincing fashion. Failure does not generate a response, force has not been met with counter-force, there is no clearly formulated alternative. Our condition is more piteous than in Marx’s analysis of Louis Bonaparte: tragedy, and then farce, but then what? That is what we are left discovering in real-time, with concepts and theories that feel like shabby sock puppets used in a not particularly funny, not particularly interesting performance.
To speak of interregnum is to suggest conditions of crisis, without any clear route to resolution. Refashioning the depiction of 1848, a historical turning point that fails turn. As has been developed here, it points us to the empty space, the void. It suggests conditions of fluidity, disorder, entropy, with these destabilising forces themselves been constant. To use Gramsci easily offers the false hope of the resolution of the ‘new’, but without also adopting his Communist beliefs, there is no clarity as to what that ‘new’ could be. Instead, one looks out and sees grey.
To speak of the old and the new, one must know, suspect, or hope what this entail. The tendency to quote Gramsci in lieu of analysis elides the difficulty. Yet is far from clear which and what order is dying. Orders and epochs wash over each other, like waves against the sand as the tides change. What is the contemporary interregnum? Or are there multiple interregna co-existing? Abdellah Hammoudi depicts, ‘our historical moment of “opening and disarray”,’ wondering if it signals the beginning of a new axial age. If that would be the case, the empty space of the present is likely far deeper than most invoking Gramsci might indicated. And so, to finish with more questions about what might this interregnum be, whether there might be plural interregna. Is it the end of the post-Cold War era, marked by US unipolarity and hyper-globalisation? Is it the related end of neoliberalism – in its different variants and guises – that has prevailed since the 1970s? Is it the end of the US-led international order that was established after WW2, and with it, potentially the end of a nuclear peace that has prevented direct war between great powers? Does the bankruptcy of Russia’s deluded imperialism in Ukraine, combined with the brutal defence of settler rule in Israel, represent the end of practices of settler colonialism and imperialism? Could it possibly be the much-awaited end of capitalism? Or finally the end of modernity? Is it feasible to be approaching the end of fossil fuels and the remarkable carbon pulse that has powered and populated the world since the industrial revolution? Might it also be the end of the unique configuration of the nation-state? With the rise of China, India and the increasingly centrality of Asia, is it the end of the dominance of Western societies and the belief systems associated with them? Do the changes in communication and knowledge brought about by digital technologies signal the end of mass literacy and text-based cultures? With rapid advances made through machine learning and large language models, does the advent of highly advanced forms of Artificial Intelligence mark the end of humans as the peak of intelligence and capacity? As the climate is pushed further out of balance, is it the end of the Holocene, and with it, the period of planet’s history so conducive to the life of humans, animals and complex ecosystems? These are all prominent questions being asked of the present moment, any and all might be conveyed in the sentiment that the old is the passing and signalling a period akin to Gramsci’s ‘interregnum’.
Lacking confidence in a clear end point – be that Gramsci’s Communism, Fukuyama’s liberalism, or whatever other brand – the problem is simply that the interregnum can only be understood on completion, and the ‘new’ tends not to be announced fully formed, waiting at the doorstep. This might not be especially satisfying, but it is a more honest reckoning with what occupying an ‘empty space’ entails, attempts at comprehension can be only partial and incomplete, revised and rethought.