A structural phase can only be analyzed after it has fully developed
Evidence
- The difficulty of identifying at any given time, statically (like an instantaneous photographic image) the structure. Politics in fact is at any given time the reflection of the tendencies of development in the structure, but it is not necessarily the case that these tendencies must be realised. A structural phase can be concretely studied and analysed only after it has gone through its whole process of development, and not during the process itself, except hypothetically and with the explicit proviso that one is dealing with hypotheses. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1451
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: Core methodological principle: structure is not statically identifiable, only retrospectively analyzable.
- DEEPTHINKING: Epistemological caution with wide reach — analysis of any present cultural formation (like current Islamophobia) is always provisional and hypothesis-bound.
Related
- Politics reflects structural tendencies that may never become realized (similarity 0.92)
- Political activity is the first, most elementary level of the superstructure (similarity 0.80)
- Subaltern histories must be studied through six distinct phases of their political formation (similarity 0.79)
- Structure and superstructure connect only through historically specific mechanisms, not automatic correspondence. (similarity 0.79)
- Sociology emerged as political science declined under positivist theories (similarity 0.78)
- The historical bloc unifies structure and superstructure as a circle of distincts (similarity 0.78)
- Cultural Studies emerged through encounter with Gramsci, structuralism, semiology, and psychoanalysis (similarity 0.78)