Knowing social relations historically enables individuals to multiply their agency collectively

Evidence

It is not enough to know the ensemble of relations as they exist at any given time as a given system. They must be known genetically, in the movement of their formation. For each individual is the synthesis not only of existing relations, but of the history of these relations. He is a precis of all the past. It will be said that what each individual can change is very little, considering his strength. This is true up to a point. But when the individual can associate himself with all the other individuals who want the same changes, and if the changes wanted are rational, the individual can be multiplied an impressive number of times and can obtain a change which is far more radical than at first sight ever seemed possible. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1260

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the genetic method: relations must be understood in their historical formation, not as a static system.
• XREF: The ‘individual as precis of all the past’ connects forward to how Islamophobia readings treat the subject as a sedimentation of colonial/imperial history (Fanon’s colonial psychology, racialized selfhood). — connects to: Agency is better understood as accomplished social action than as individual autonomous intent. — Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, Identity and Interaction: A…, 114; Conscientization requires reading social power relations and one’s own formation within them — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 271