Page 121 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

98 Communication and Evolution of Society

edge, communicative action, and the consensual regulation of
action conflicts—learning processes that are deposited in more
mature forms of social integration, in new productive relations,
and that in turn first make possible the introduction of new
productive forces. The rationality structures that find expression
in world views, moral representations, and identity formations,
that become practically effective in social movements and are
finally embodied in institutional systems, thereby gain a strategi-
cally important position from a theoretical point of view. The
systematically reconstructible patterns of development of norma-
tive structures are now of particular interest. These structural
patterns depict a developmental logic inherent in cultural tradi-
tions and institutional change. This logic says nothing about the
mechanisms of development; it says something only about the
range of variations within which cultural values, moral repre-
sentations, norms, and the like—at a given level of social orga-
nization—can be changed and can find different historical
expression. In its developmental dynamics, the change of norma-
tive structures remains dependent on evolutionary challenges
posed by unresolved, economically conditioned, system problems
and on learning processes that are a response to them. In other
words, culture remains a superstructural phenomenon, even if
it does seem to play a more prominent role in the transition to
new developmental levels than many Marxists have heretofore
supposed. This prominence explains the contribution that com-
munication theory can, in my view, make to a renewed historical
materialism. In the following pages I would like to at least
suggest wherein this contribution could consist.

I
The structures of linguistically established intersubjectivity—
which can be examined prototypically in connection with ele-
mentary speech actions—are conditions of both social and per-
sonality systems. Social systems can be viewed as networks of
communicative actions; personality systems can be regarded under
the aspect of the ability to speak and act. If one examines social
institutions and the action competences of socialized individuals