I’m reading Habermas for my critical social theory, and I don’t fully get his arguments, but I think I like this passage:
We should not understand subjective experiences as mental states or inner episodes, for we would thereby assimilate them to entities, to elements fot the objective world. We can comprehend having subjective experiences as something analogous to the existence of states of affairs without assimilating one to the other. A subject capable of expression does not “have” or “possess” desires and feelings in the same sense as an observable object has extension, weight, color, and similar properties. An actor has desires and feelings in teh sense that he can at will express these experiences before a public, and indeed in such a way that this public, if it trusts the actor’s expressive utterances, attributes to him, as something subjective, the desires and feelings expressed. (Reconstructing Historical Materialism, 147)
I am not sure if Habermas is saying he agrees with this statement, or if it is a part of the concept of “dramaturgical action” that he is critiquing, but I found it interesting nonetheless.
EDIT: I’m a few pages further ahead, and I think Habermas doesn’t agree with that statement because:
But Foggman’s model of action does not provide for his behaving toward the social world in a norm-conformative attitude…. dramaturgical action can take on latently strategic qualities to he degree that the actor treats his audience ass opponents rather than as a public…. The dramaturgical model of action presupposes langauge as a medium of self-presentation; the cognitive significance of the propositional components and the interpersonal significance of the illocutionary components are thereby played down in favor of the expressive functions of speech acts. Language is assimilated to stylistic and aesthetic forms of expression. Only the communicative model of action presupposes langauge as a medium of uncurtailed communication whereby speakers and hearers, out of the context of their preinterpreted lifeworld, refer simultaneously to things in the objective, social, and subjective worlds in order to negotiate common definitions of the situation. (149, 150)
