A rigid material-instrument theory spawns absurd boundary questions

Evidence

If one starts from this baroque way of thinking a whole series of baroque questions are thrown up. For example, are libraries structure or superstructure? Or the specialised laboratories of scientists? If it can be maintained that an art or a science is developed through the developments of its technical instruments, why could one not maintain quite the contrary or argue that certain instrumental forms are structure and superstructure at the same time? … The art of typography would be the material structure of a whole series of ideologies, indeed of all ideologies, and the existence of the printing industry would be sufficient to provide a materialistic justification of the whole of history. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1636

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows Gramsci’s conception of structure/superstructure as non-mechanical, resisting the naive question of which ‘material things’ belong to which level.
• XREF: The typography reductio ad absurdum parallels the ‘printing industry justifies all of history’ critique; connects to later cultural-studies and book-history debates about technological determinism (McLuhan, Eisenstein).