Have you ever wondered why it seems that the world is falling apart? And why, in this planetary crisis, the absurd is increasingly taking over? Mattia Salvia, a young Milanese writer with a degree in philosophy and founder of Iconografie, a magazine on the spirit of the present time, gives us his captivating interpretation.
Think about it, you would never have imagined that one day, in Washington, there would be a carnivalesque attempted coup d’état, led by a scheming shaman, or a much more serious coup d’état, in Turkey, live on YouTube, or a social war, with memes, side by side with the real war, the war waged between the Twitter profiles of Russian and Ukrainian institutions, or a real propaganda merchandising supported by the Ukrainian government, made of T-shirts, mugs and key rings, which turn war into a football match, or that the terrible Taliban, goat-breeders with machine guns, with extremely retrograde ideas, had, one day, thanks also to the substantial American surrender in Afghanistan, created real trends on the Internet based on the figure of the chad (the alpha male very much in vogue in the American alt-right) founded, however, on their genius loci. And how many more things could be said.
Sage intrigues and frightens, from page to page, ranging between geopolitics and internet studies, philosophy and news, to focus on a grotesque world dominated by the absurd. He does so by dwelling above all, as the book’s subtitle states, on the “iconographies of the 21st century” and how they spread and change the way Internet users think.
It may sound like a light-hearted and entertaining book. Amusing it certainly is, as it dwells on things that are generally not known or in any case little explored by the majority of us. Light-hearted not at all, because although it may seem to deal with secondary themes, in reality they are the litmus test of so much of what goes on around us, with the ubiquitous and easily edited digital image becoming pure reality, the basis of the interregnum in which we find ourselves. And yes, the interregnum of the title is indeed Gramscian.
“La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati /The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old dies and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum the most varied morbid phenomena occur.” (Antonio Gramsci)
Mattia Salvia, Interregno: Iconografie del XXI Secolo /Interregnum: Iconographies of the XXI Century, Nero Edition, 2022 (Italian)
