Critique reweights old ideology’s elements, promoting the subordinate to nucleus

Evidence

Importance of Utopias and of confused and rationalistic ideologies in the initial phase of the historical processes whereby collective wills are formed. Utopias, or abstract rationalism, have the same importance as old conceptions of the world which developed historically by the accumulation of successive experience. What matters is the criticism to which such an ideological complex is subjected by the first representatives of the new historical phase. This criticism makes possible a process of differentiation and change in the relative weight that the elements of the old ideologies used to possess. What was previously secondary and subordinate, or even incidental, is now taken to be primary—becomes the nucleus of a new ideological and theoretical complex. The old collective will dissolves into its contradictory elements since the subordinate ones develop socially, etc. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 798

Categorization

• XREF: The reweighting mechanism of ideological elements is directly load-bearing for the toolkit’s Orientalism module — how critique repositions subordinate elements resembles how new frameworks re-read an inherited civilizational discourse.
• SEED: Angle: how Islamic reform movements reweighted subordinate elements of classical tradition into new nuclei — an application of Gramsci’s mechanism.