The Gramsci Gap - by Venkatesh Rao - Contraptions
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 regulation 1 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.
