Mental work is, also as a moment of society’s division of labour, by no means identical to ideology. Their connection is therefore very deep: The result of any mental work can turn into ideology in certain social situations, society’s division of labour constantly creates situations in which such turns become necessary and permanent (Lukács 1986b, 427).5
2.2.7. The Emergence of Language
Lukács argues that communication already exists in higher animals for the purposes of ‘danger, food, sexual desire, etc.’ (1978c, 100). Human language and communication would arise out of economic necessity when humans are required to say something to each other in order to master the rising complexity of the organisation of production. So for example hunting requires co-operation because it is a complex process, for which co-ordination is necessary. ‘Its [co-operation’s] mere existence, albeit on a low level, results in the emergence of another key determination of social being from work, the precise communication of humans united in work: language’6 (Lukács, 1986b, 118). Language enables teleological positings that have the intention to ‘encourage other people to conduct a teleological positing that is desired by the predicating subject’7 (Lukács, 1986b, 119). Language develops with the development of work, cooperation, and the division of work (119).
Communication is based on the fact that the human is an ‘answering being’8 (Lukács, 1986b, 339). An answer, however, presupposes a question. Humans have the capacity to find answers posed by nature and to ask questions about nature, themselves, and society. We can therefore say in expanding Lukács’ thought that communication is based on a dialectic of questioning and answering, in which a question produces answers, which produces further questions, and so on.
2.2.8. The Spatio-Temporality of Communication
Words that form a language are abstractions and generalisations of reality (Lukács, 1986b, 346, 419). The description of a specific circumstance is concrete and therefore requires a complex linguistic combination of words (1986b, 346). Language enables the ‘distancing of the object from the subject’ (1978c, 100) and enables this distancing.
Georg Lukács as a Communications Scholar
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