Sich als Subjekt des Sprechens über das eigene Leben einführen

A Processed Processor: The Processual Nature of the Self

“…This should make clear that recent theoretical as well as empirical questions on the linguistic nature of the self, beyond the symbolic character, emphasize precisely the pragmatic aspect of the linguistic. Rather, speaking always formulates social situations of individuals (and thus of their selves), whether in the mirror of a linguistic habitus (Bourdieu, 2005;Jafke et al, 2022), which can also be inferred from speech act theory (Austin, 1979;Searle, 2007), whether as part of discursive (power) relations and technologies of the self (Foucault, 2007), sedimented in patterns of interpretation (Oevermann, 1988), in practices of subjectivation (Alkemeyer, 2013;Reckwitz, 2015), in narrative patterns of self-description (Lucius-Hoehne & Deppermann, 2004), historically shaped institutions of self-thematization (Hahn, 1987), in socially established spaces of reference (Herma, 2022), or determined with procedures of a recent discourse-analytically oriented sociology of knowledge (Keller, 2014). The (communicative) constitution of the self is taken up from this perspective less as a consciousnesstheoretical question than as an action-theoretical one.…”

“…This would allow us to discuss an expanded notion of adaptation, which (to take just a few examples) could also be read in light of Althusser's concept of invocation and submission as a logic of action, or, for instance, in terms of how Bourdieu (1987) conceives of the social habitus as a modus operandi or generative grammar (in contrast to the Chomsky interpretation), that is, as a social principle of generation in which active and passive elements amalgamate simultaneously (the habitus as a "structuring and structured structure"). The habitus of the self, for example, has so far been researched only rudimentarily (on this, Jafke et al, 2022). Sociological and psychological approaches could likewise enter into correspondence with the modernization-theoretical discussion of the development of individuality and, via this, also take into account historicalevolutionary aspects of the "becoming of the self."…”

“…In the habitus, the body and its practices are quasi praxeologically fused. The starting point here: Experienced social history (the socially “incorporated”) is constantly “embodied” by individuals, whether in the physical, in arrangements of feeling, in patterns of speaking, for example, how a subject introduces himself linguistically about his own life (on this Jafke et al, 2022), or already in the physical “posture,” which, according to Bourdieu, can also be understood as a social posture formed in its entanglement of experienced personal with social history.…”

“…This would allow us to discuss an expanded notion of adaptation, which (to take just a few examples) could also be read in light of Althusser’s concept of invocation and submission as a logic of action, or, for instance, in terms of how Bourdieu (1987) conceives of the social habitus as a modus operandi or generative grammar (in contrast to the Chomsky interpretation), that is, as a social principle of generation in which active and passive elements amalgamate simultaneously (the habitus as a “structuring and structured structure”). The habitus of the self, for example, has so far been researched only rudimentarily (on this, Jafke et al, 2022). Sociological and psychological approaches could likewise enter into correspondence with the modernization-theoretical discussion of the development of individuality and, via this, also take into account historical-evolutionary aspects of the “becoming of the self.” One possible point of convergence, both theoretically and empirically, might be a perspective that advances the “self” as a process of “adaptation through reference” (Grundmann, 2020, p. 81), that is, as an approach in which the concepts of adaptation (Greve, 2023) and the reference spaces of the self (Herma, 2022) intertwine, insofar as aspects of self-concept development and practices of self-reference come into correspondence within the framework of networks of relationships and recognition—that is, always together with others in the world.…”