In this way what is depicted by the verbal sign is separated from the objects it describes, and hence also from the subject uttering it, becoming the mental expression for an entire group of particular phenomena, so that it can be applied in a similar way in completely diferent contexts and by completely diferent subjects (100).
Human language allows the repetition and development of production processes in the same or diferent spaces at diferent times. Lukács, at a high level of theoretical abstraction, hints at the facts that the development of production technologies allows the spatio-temporal distancing of production, that the development of transport and distribution technologies enables the spatiotemporal distancing of distribution, and that the development of conservation and preservation technologies fosters the distancing of consumption. ‘In its further development, work constantly interposes whole series of mediations between man and the immediate goal which he is ultimately concerned to achieve. In this way, work gives rise to a diferentiation between immediate and more mediated goal positings’ (101–102).
The spatio-temporal distancing of production requires physical and linguistic technologies of production, distribution, and consumption. Communication is an important means of organising work and human activity in spacetime and over spatio-temporal distances. ‘The mental distancing of objects by language only makes the real distancing that thus arises communicable, making possible its establishment as the common possession of a society’ (102). The storage of information enables the organisation of the economy and society over spatio-temporal distances and across generations. Society’s development is therefore connected to the development of information technologies that store and distribute information about human social relations. They include, for example, human memory, tradition, myths, art, writing, lists, timetables, the book, libraries, archives, schools, universities, newspapers, the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the television, cinema, the database, computers, computer-mediated communication, the Internet, records, tapes, CDs, DVDs, Bluray discs, digital hard disks, servers, FTP, cloud storage, etc. (see Fuchs, 2003).
Language is a complex in society that mediates both the human metabolism with nature as well as the relations between humans in society (Lukács, 1986b, 18). It helps distancing human subjects from objects and from other subjects and at the same time helps to co-ordinate the production of new objects out of existing objects and the emergence and reproduction of social relations between humans.
2.2.9. Freedom Within Necessity
For Lukács, consciousness enables a form of freedom within necessity (Lukács 1986b, 308), i.e. human choices between diferent actions based on conditions that are not self-chosen. Conscious human action opens up the world to chance and makes it to a certain degree undetermined and shapeable by humans. To illustrate this circumstance, Lukács (1986b, 304) quotes in this context Marx (1867, 208–209): ‘No one can sell unless someone else purchases. But no one directly needs to purchase because he has just sold’. If someone who has money chooses to buy or to save, what exactly s/he buys in the case of a purchase, and from whom, is not determined, but rather depends on an interaction of complex conditions and choices, the ‘mutual dialectical polarity of the ideal and the real’9 (Lukács, 1986b, 306). Market supply, local accessibility, wages and prices, class struggles, transport structures, etc. condition the possible choices that the potential purchaser makes based on his/her evaluation of these structures. The ideal moves the real, but it can only move ‘real possibilities of being-in-itself’10 (343).
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Critical Theory of Communication