Page 192 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

169 Historical Materialism

matic theory; in sociolinguistics and ethnolinguistics, insofar as
they are concerned with universals of processes of uttering and
understanding; in the psychoanalytic theory of language, which
investigates the conditions of systematically distorted communica-
tion; and, finally, in the structuralist analysis of world views,
which seldom penetrates beyond the surface of complex tradi-
tions."*
Structuralism has naturally come up against the limits of all
synchronic investigations. In linguistics and anthropology this has
been less noticeable only because of the static properties of their
object domains. For the most part, structuralism limits itself to
the logic of existing structures and does not extend to the pattern
of structure-forming processes. Only the genetic structuralism
worked out by Piaget, which investigates the developmental logic
behind the process in which structures are formed, builds a bridge
to historical materialism. As shown above, it offers the possibility
of bringing different modes of production under abstract devel-
opmental-logical viewpoints.
It is indeed possible to model the history of technology on the
ontogenetically analyzed stages of cognitive development, so that
the logic of the development of productive forces becomes visible.
But the historical sequence of modes of production can be ana-
lyzed in terms of abstract principles of social organization only if
we can specify which structures of world views correspond to in-
dividual forms of social integration and how these structures limit
the development of secular knowledge. In other words, precisely
a historical-materialist appproach is directed to a structural anal-
ysis of the development of world views. The evolution of world
views mediates between the stages of development of interaction
structures and advances in technically useful knowledge. In the
concepts of historical materialism this means that the dialectic of
forces and relations of production takes place through ideologies.

2. The anthropological theories of evolution of the late nine-
teenth century (Morgan, Tylor) were driven back, in our century,
by the culture-relativistic views of the functionalist school; only
authors like V. G. Childe and L. White held on to the concept of
general stages of development.” Under the influence of the