Memes and monsters of the interregnum: Gramsci between the times

Faced with a continually mounting array of shocks, surprises and shifts, there is an understandable search for frames to describe these confusing conditions. A combination of the collapse of previous certainties with the lack of a new paradigm solidifing has led many to depict the present moment as an interregnum. This is not a neutral term, to use it is to bring forth the poetic phrasing of Antonio Gramsci: ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born’. Through a genealogical engagement with Gramsci’s prison notebook entry, this paper traces the remarkable trajectory of the term from obscurity to being adopted by commentators across the political spectrum. In the process, however, his insights have been flattened and thinned out, reduced to an analytical meme. Invoking Gramsci’s interregnum is often a way of sidestepping or avoiding more directly reckoning with challenging conditions of entropy and transformation. Bemoaning the death of the ‘old’ and the rise of ‘monsters’ is much easier than seriously reckoning with the contradictions and difficulties of an expanding empty space, one devoid of historical guarantees or clear precedents.