Page 163 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

140 Communication and Evolution of Society

a. Historical materialism does not need to assume a species-
subject that undergoes evolution. The bearers of evolution are
rather societies and the acting subjects integrated into them;
social evolution can be discerned in those structures that are
replaced by more comprehensive structures in accord with a
pattern that is to be rationally reconstructed. In the course of this
structure-forming process, societies and individuals, together
with their ego and group identities, undergo change.®° Even if
social evolution should point in the direction of unified individ-
uals consciously influencing the course of their own evolution,
there would not arise any large-scale subjects, but at most self-
established, higher-level, intersubjective commonalities. (The
specification of the concept of development is another question:
in what sense can one conceive the rise of new structures as a
movement?—only the empirical substrates are in motion.) 8
b. If we separate the logic from the dynamics of development
—that is, the rationally reconstructible pattern of a hierarchy of
more and more comprehensive structures from the processes
through which the empirical substrates develop—then we need
require of history neither unilinearity nor necessity, neither con-
tinuity nor irreversibility. We certainly do reckon with anthropo-
logically deep-seated general structures, which were formed in
the phase of hominization and which lay down the initial state of
social evolution; these structures presumably arose to the extent
that the cognitive and motivational potential of the anthropoid
apes was transformed and reorganized under conditions of lin-
guistic communication. These basic structures correspond, pos-
sibly, to the structures of consciousness that children today nor-
mally master between their fourth and seventh years, as soon as
their cognitive, linguistic, and interactive abilities are integrated
with one another.
Such structures describe the logical space in which more com-
prehensive structural formations can take shape; whether new
structural formations arise at all, and if so, when, depends on
contingent boundary conditions and on learning processes that
can be investigated empirically. The genetic explanation of why
a certain society has attained a certain level of development ts
independent of the structural explanation of how a system be-