Political self-consciousness arises through struggling against opposing hegemonies

Evidence

Critical understanding of self takes place therefore through a struggle of political “hegemonies” and of opposing directions, first in the ethical field and then in that of politics proper, in order to arrive at the working out at a higher level of one’s own conception of reality. Consciousness of being part of a particular hegemonic force (that is to say, political consciousness) is the first stage towards a further progressive self-consciousness in which theory and practice will finally be one. Thus the unity of theory and practice is not just a matter of mechanical fact, but a part of the historical process, whose elementary and primitive phase is to be found in the sense of being “different” and “apart”, in an instinctive feeling of independence, and which progresses to the level of real possession of a single and coherent conception of the world. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1199

Categorization

• XREF: Section’s closing thought is completed in passage 1200’s ‘critical conception’ preceding it; connects to how identity-politics critique begins from a felt sense of being ‘different and apart’. — connects to: Consciousness-raising framed personal problems as political ones requiring collective action. — Theresa M. Senft, Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in…, 61; Chemical well-being can suppress the motivation for political struggle — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2380