Page 189 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

166 Communication and Evolution of Society

matic—not the supply of power, security, or value, but the supply
of motivation and meaning. To the extent that the social integra-
tion of internal nature—the previously quasi-natural process of
interpreting needs—was accomplished discurstvely, principles
of participation could come to the fore in many areas of social
life; whereas the simultaneously increasing dangers of anomie
(and acedze) could call forth new administrations concerned with
motivational control. Perhaps a new institutional core would then
take shape around a new organizational principle, an institutional
core in which there merge elements of public education, social
welfare, liberalized punishment, and therapy for mental illness.
I mention this perspective—for which there exist clues at best
—only to elucidate the posszbility that a sociostructurally an-
chored pattern of differential exercise of social power could out-
live even the economic form of class domination (whether ex-
ercised through private property rights or state bureaucracies
occupied by elites). In a future form of class domination, soft-
ened and at the same time intensified, to sociopsychological
coercion, “domination” (Herrschaft—the term calls to mind the
open, person-bound, political form of exercising social force,
especially that of European feudalism) would be refracted for a
second time, not through bourgeois civil war, but through the
educational system of the social welfare state. Whether this would
necessarily give rise to a vicious circle between expanded partici-
pation and increasing social administration, between the process of
motive formation becoming reflective and the increase in social
control (i.e., in the manipulation of motives) is, in my opinion,
a question that cannot be decided in advance (despite the con-
fident judgment of revivified pessimistic anthropologies).
I have proposed a spectrum of problems connected with the
self-constitution of society, ranging from demarcation in relation
to the environment, through self-regulation and self-regulated
exchange with external nature, to self-regulated exchange with
internal nature. With each evolutionarily new problem situation
there arise new scarcities, scarcities of technically feasible power,
politically established security, economically produced value, and
culturally supplied meaning; and thus new historical needs come
to the fore. If this bold schema is plausible, it follows that the