Collective wills are born from countless molecular discursive exchanges

Evidence

It would be possible to study concretely the formation of a collective historical movement, analysing it in all its molecular phases—a thing which is rarely done, since it would weigh every treatment down. Instead, currents of opinion are normally taken as already constituted around a group or a dominant personality. This is the problem which in modern times is expressed in terms of the party, or coalition of related parties: how a party is first set up, how its organisational strength and social influence are developed, etc. It requires an extremely minute, molecular process of exhaustive analysis in every detail, the documentation for which is made up of an endless quantity of books, pamphlets, review and newspaper articles, conversations and oral debates repeated countless times, and which in their gigantic aggregation represent this long labour which gives birth to a collective will with a certain degree of homogeneity—-with the degree necessary and sufficient to achieve an action which is coordinated and simultaneous in the time and the geographical space in which the historical event takes place. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 796

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘endless quantity of books, pamphlets, newspapers, conversations’ as the substrate of collective will prefigures later work on discourse, public sphere, and imagined community formation.