In the scientific community, discussions about emergence are motivated by a need to understand the process by which complex systems exhibit novel characteristics that cannot be reduced to those of their parts. The whole is thus said to be greater than the sum of the parts. We borrow from this framework in order to explore a different understanding of communication. Instead of seeing the whole as the result of a communication process between the parts, we take a step back and propose to understand communication as the process through which both parts and whole emerge. This perspective opens the possibility to think of a communication that is not the result of an exchange between pre-existing individual agents, but the very process by which individuals emerge in the first place. From the perspective of social sciences in general, and of communication studies in particular, this theoretical experimentation points towards a model that is not subordinated to the traditional opposition between parts and wholes, individuals and collectives.

In the scientific community, discussions about emergence are motivated by a need to understand the process by which complex systems exhibit novel characteristics that cannot be reduced to those of their parts. The whole is thus said to be greater than the sum of the parts. We borrow from this framework in order to explore a different understanding of communication. Instead of seeing the whole as the result of a communication process between the parts, we take a step back and propose to understand communication as the process through which both parts and whole emerge. This perspective opens the possibility to think of a communication that is not the result of an exchange between pre-existing individual agents, but the very process by which individuals emerge in the first place. From the perspective of social sciences in general, and of communication studies in particular, this theoretical experimentation points towards a model that is not subordinated to the traditional opposition between parts and wholes, individuals and collectives.

I propose to trace the dialogical path of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of ‘interregnum’ briefly mentioned in one of his prison notebooks which was rediscovered in recent years and used in various political writings. I will first examine the meaning of the concept of interregnum in the context of Roman law, where it originates. Second, I’ll show how the Italian writer used it in a two-page note included in his Quaderni del carcere to describe the political crisis of our times. I will also briefly sketch the renewal of the idea of interregnum from the 1980s onward, when a specific quote from Gramsci’s note was used to frame various political crises, from South African apartheid to the civil war in Syria, all the way to the rise of a new far right ideology. In the third and main section, I’ll explore in more detail how, in the past five years, Keith Tester, Zygmunt Bauman, and Étienne Balibar all explicitly engage with the idea of interregnum in an open dialogue. While referencing one another, they used Gramsci’s interpretation of the concept in an effort to understand and address the contemporary problem of political synthesis. In the fourth part, and in the spirit of keeping discussion open, I will raise some issues regarding the various paths proposed by Bauman and Balibar to find our way ‘out of the interregnum.

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