Cultural formations are momentary equilibria of old and new social relations

Evidence

The affirmation that the philosophy is a new, independent and original conception, even though it is also a moment of world historical development, is an affirmation of the independence and originality of a new culture in incubation, which will develop with the development of social relations. What exists at any given time is a variable combination of old and new, a momentary equilibrium of cultural relations corresponding to the equilibrium of social relations. Only after the creation of the new State does the cultural problem impose itself in all its complexity and tend towards a coherent solution. In any case the attitude to be taken up before the formation of the new State can only be critico-polemical, never dogmatic; it must be a romantic attitude, but of a romanticism which is consciously aspiring to its classical synthesis. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1412

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines how Gramsci conceives the relation between a new philosophy-in-incubation and inherited culture: a variable equilibrium of old and new tracking social relations.
• XREF: connects to: Human culture and the natural environment form an interdependent dialectical system. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 251; Cultural revolutions can arise from mixed state, market, and individual drivers — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 195