Spontaneity marks subaltern classes that lack class-for-itself consciousness

Evidence

In the “most spontaneous” movement it is simply the case that the elements of “conscious leadership” cannot be checked, have left no reliable document. It may be said that spontaneity is therefore characteristic of the “history of the subaltern classes”, and indeed of their most marginal and peripheral elements; these have not achieved any consciousness of the class “for itself”, and consequently it never occurs to them that their history might have some possible importance, that there might be some value in leaving documentary evidence of it. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 803

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines spontaneity as the historiographical signature of the subaltern — the absence of documented conscious leadership.
• XREF: Connects to subaltern studies (Gayatri Spivak) and the question of whether the marginalized can speak or be documented. — connects to: Class difference persists even as class consciousness converges — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 193; A class’s historical fate registers as an internal felt mood rather than external data — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 743; Class consciousness shapes the gestalt of thought, not its details (+2 more)
• SEED: Material for an essay on how archives and documentation themselves are instruments of class power — who gets to leave documentary evidence.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that subaltern history is definitionally under-documented, because its agents never saw their history as worth recording, is a dense insight that redounds on every empiricist history of the oppressed.