Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist and political theorist who wrote most of his important work while in prison under Mussolini’s rule. The idea that he would end up on a trading card is a little strange. It’s not a textbook. It’s not a syllabus. A small collectible card, the kind you might put in a binder with baseball stats or Pokémon evolutions. But for at least one student, that’s where the introduction took place.
The story goes like this: a young woman, who wasn’t sure what she wanted to study as an undergraduate yet, found a theory trading card with Gramsci on it. There are different stories about how they got them, like whether a professor gave them out or she found one lying around in the hallway. But the meeting itself seems to have gone differently than most assigned readings do. Maybe it’s something about the shortened form. The surprise of it, if you will. You could fit Gramsci’s face on a card and his main ideas into a few lines. The whole thing would be small enough to hold in one hand.
It’s possible that the format did something that the normal way of going to school has trouble with. I felt like I could talk to someone who thinks a lot. It is really hard to understand Gramsci’s ideas about cultural hegemony and how powerful groups keep their power not just through force but also through consent and by slowly changing what people think is normal or inevitable. These ideas are spread out over 400 pages of primary sources. When you put them on a card, they become something you can sit with. Turn it over. Go back to.
She did come back to them. From where she ended up, that much is clear. To this day, she is a professor and teaches theory to students who are probably going through the same early stages of intellectual uncertainty she did. Something about her makes me think she knows what it’s like to have an idea that hasn’t quite clicked yet. In a classroom, that’s not a small thing.
Not only is the personal arc from student to professor interesting, but so is what it says about how people actually learn. It’s easy to see the formal paths: classes, syllabi, reading lists, and office hours. Stranger and less planned events are more likely to be the ones that stick with you. A conversation that was heard in the hallway of a department. A documentary that was watched for some other reason. A random trading card picked up. Something really interesting about the fact that decades of academic writing on Gramsci couldn’t do what one small card seems to have done is fascinating.
It’s still not clear how widely theory trading cards were used or if they were ever used as a long-term teaching tool. The idea isn’t as crazy as it sounds, though. Teachers have long been troubled by the difference between how information is created and how it gets to people who aren’t looking for it. In his own writings, Gramsci talked about “organic intellectuals” and how ideas need to spread beyond the elite in order to have an impact. That’s kind of ironic.
It’s likely that she doesn’t think about the card every day. But it’s hard not to think of the little thing that started something bigger, maybe in a drawer or long since lost. A name, a picture, and some words about culture and power. Enough to get someone interested. That’s all it takes some times.
