Gramsci treats knowledge as superstructure expressing human needs and historical conditions.

Evidence

Accepting the affirmation that our knowledge of things is nothing other than ourselves, our needs and interests, that is that our knowledge is superstructure (or non-definitive philosophy), it is difficult not to think in terms of something real beyond this knowledge—not in the metaphysical sense of a “noumenon”, an “unknown God” or an “unknowable”, but in the concrete sense of a “relative” ignorance of reality, of something still unknown, which will however be known one day when the “physical” and intellectual instruments of mankind are more perfect, when, that is, the technical and social conditions of mankind have been changed in a progressive direction. We are then making an historical prediction which consists simply in an act of thought that projects into the future a process of development similar to that which has taken place from the past until today. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1309

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines knowledge as ‘superstructure’—substantive vocabulary for the toolkit: what we know is historically-situated, and what lies beyond it is relative, not metaphysical ignorance.
• QUESTION: The passage trails off wanting to re-examine Kant; worth noting Gramsci’s debt to and departure from Kantian phenomenology for later epistemology readings.