At any rate, for the moment I’m happy to accept the provisional compromise of using “reflexivity” for the concept I’m after (with, I’m sure, occasional slips – I’ve been using the term “self-reflexive” for this concept for a long time now…), and perhaps something better still will come along.

Thanks for the well-wishes – unfortunately this seems to be a year when every virus in Australia has my number…

Gabriel – Many thanks for this. Quick side note: your link didn’t seem to point to anything, and so I’ve tried to correct it to what I believe you were intending – please let me know if I haven’t gotten it right (would seem a pity to point your link to, say, someone else’s post on Fichte self-reflexivity…). ;-P

I’m going to remain out of the way of the question of whether texts can be self-reflexive, mainly because my diving into this issue will probably blur the (somewhat narrow) meaning I’m trying to give to the term “self-reflexivity” above – happy, though, for others to enter this fray… :-)

I enjoy that you parse the “reflection”/”reflexivity” issue in the post at your site – nicely done – I’d be interested in hearing you develop further your suggestion that the notion of reflexivity need not be limited to subjects (recognising that a comment box might not be the right place for this, and this is presumably an issue you explore in greater detail at your site – which, I must apologise, I won’t be able to explore properly until I’m over this cold…).

Anyway, just a few quick thought, concerning your response: first, let me address a little guilt of my own. you wrote:

I’ll confess a twinge of guilt when you mention that you’re already weary of the issue – given how often I bring it up

I should have said ‘wary’, not ‘weary.’ you have my apologies for that rather infelicitous typo.

Past that, I would also like to express my agreement with you concerning your use of ’self-reflexive.’ I think it’s a useful concept indeed. And i think it has a completely distinct meaning from the one i’m tracking (Sinthome’s suggestion also sounded like an elegant way for me to avoid any confusion — i.e. “reflexive” might just do the appropriate kind of work. But I guess i’m still thinking through your more ’sociological’ conception, so I should probably think about the matter a little more before saying anything substantive).

Alexei – Many thanks for this. I’ll confess a twinge of guilt when you mention that you’re already weary of the issue – given how often I bring it up (just ask Sinthome… ;-P), I suspect I’ll irritate the hell out of you with it. :-) Perhaps we can begin a process of unpacking the issues in a preliminary way, and see whether your weariness persists.

My initial reaction is to suspect we’re heirs to slightly divergent genealogies – theoretical speciations. I’ll grant that I’m likely using the term “self-reflexivity” in an idiosyncratic way, but I’m not using the term in any sense in which it could be sensibly applied to a writer – or to a text (I wonder, though, if rob wants to intervene on your point about whether a text can be self-reflexive?).

I understand that there may be approaches where there could be synecdochal transfer of the concept from some notion of a self-reflexive theorist to the sorts of things such a person produces – but this presupposes that the originary referent is the author or individual subject. There are, though, sociological traditions that deploy concepts of self-reflexivity in a sense quite decentred from subjectivity. Such traditions probably contribute more directly to my use of the term, than do the genealogies you have suggested (not to say that there is no relation between the two, but only to note that metaphors of self-reflexivity have had some time to become naturalised and to acquire their own network of associations outside the tradition of transcendental philosophy).

Self-reflexivity in my work – and Sinthome gets this right above (without suggesting that Sinthome would necessarily agree with the term or with what I then do with it analytically) – is a property of a social field. I call theories “self-reflexive”, not because the theorists who generate them are “self-reflexive” in the conventional sense, or because the theories follow some specific procedure or reflect back on themselves in a way that demonstrates some specific methodology or thought-process, but rather because their core analytical categories capture this self-reflexive property of the social field.

In this sense, the genealogy of the term “self-reflexivity”, as I use it, would probably be traced more directly to Marxist notions of “social contradiction” than to the problem of the conditions of possibility for the subject (historicised or otherwise). I say this, of course, realising that these two problematics – that of developing a historicising response to transcendental philosophy, and that of expressing the non-identity of a social field – have themselves often been historically intertwined, leaving us with an admittedly complex legacy. I’m simply pointing to the potential for a divergence in the meaning of the concept of self-reflexivity, as deployed in different settings.

On another level – and I’ll apologise in advance for the truncatedness, as this point is a bit difficult for me to develop here – I am specifically critical of attempts to centre critical theory on analyses of intersubjectivity – and of the tendency to equate “the social” with “the intersubjective”. Realising that this won’t mean much at this point, my position would be that central dimensions of contemporary society – dimensions that are important for understanding shapes of consciousness, patterns of social reproduction, and potentials for transformations – simply won’t be captured adequately by the attempt to transcend the limitations of theories of the “subject” via theories of the intersubjective constitution of meaning.

My position on this may be complete nonsense, of course – and there would certainly be no reason for anyone to be terribly interested in how I’m hand waving toward the issue here. I mention the issue only to suggest that a different set of genealogical concerns may apply – and that it’s at least possible that something might get lost in the shuffle, if you begin from the assumption that all forms of critical theory are retracing roughly similar models of the world. I’m open to the concept – certainly there are complex issues to be thought through, in terms of tacit notions of agent formation in the kind of theory that I do. But I’d suggest we explore one another’s positions a bit, before we pre-emptively leap to the verdict that we’re trying to do roughly the same thing, in roughly the same way: perhaps this will prove to be the case – but we might learn more from one another if things prove otherwise… ;-)

All this said, I want to be careful to acknowledge the core of your point: most approaches that are committed to a notion of self-reflexivity similar to the one I am trying to deploy, do also understand themselves as interventions (often quasi-Hegelian ones) into the problem of the conditions of possibility for the constitution of the subject – and, yes, they generally both historicise and attempt to conceptualise the potential agency of the subject, and thus see themselves as transforming the terms of the problem as posed by transcendental philosophy. My gut instinct is to say that whether they are successful in transforming those terms may depend on whether they predicate their theory on intersubjectivity – but this is an area where I could easily be wrong. Nevertheless, I would suggest that this issue is separable from the sorts of questions I am trying to raise through the term “self-reflexivity” (however ill-starred this term might be for what I am trying to express).

Sinthome – Yes. :-) I had some questions I had wanted to ask you – basically along the lines of whether you’d like to criticise the focus on the social that remains in the concept as I’m outlining it here. My sense from your comments above is that at least the most irritating dimensions of my focus on “self-reflexivity” might have been allayed by some of the recent discussions – that self-reflexive theory in this sense is at least attempting to be an engagement with the world, rather than the stipulation of a set of preconditions for that engagement. I was just curious whether you wanted to press on other issues (aside from the obvious terminological one).

What I was hoping to intimate in my post (here) was that transcendental philosophy originates with precisely the same fundamental problem as critical theory — though to be sure, the emphasis on experience, its conditions of possibility, and the unifying activity of the subject have now been historicised. And such a historicization is to be understood in terms of the intersubjective formation of an agent, rather than a subject — i.e. a doer, not a knower. Or, to rephrase the matter along Blumenbergian lines, what I’m trying to trace is the occupation and reocuppation of roughly similar models of the world.

This said, if we’re aware of this metaphorization of theory, then it becomes a great strength, for we can now genealogically trace the currently effective emancipatory conditions that are available to us. We can, in short, identify something that may have been lost beneath the surface of our technical vocabulary. If, on the other hand, we lose sight of our own metaphorical transfers, we’re going to run into trouble (i.e. a text cannot be ‘reflexive,’ unless that’s a fancy origami technique).

The objective and the subjective are indistinguishable; the worker produces himself through his work as a certain exposure of the world which objectively makes him the product of his own product. (103)

And earlier:

what does it mean to make History on the basis of earlier conditions? I then said: if we do not distinguish the project, as transcendence, from circumstances, as conditions, we are left with nothing but inert objects, and History vanishes. Similarly, if human relations are a mere product, they are in essence reified and it becomes impossible to understand what their reification really consists in. My formalism, which is inspired by that of Marx, consists simply in recognising that men make History to precisely the extent that it makes them. This means that relations between men are always the dialectical consequence of their activity to precisely the extent that they arise as a transcendence of dominating and institutionalised human relations. (97)

Descartes, Kant, and Husserl lack self-reflexivity precisely to the extent that they present a sharp division between the subject and the object (yes even Husserl), where we must first bracket the existence of the world and analyze our own subjectivity, prior to speaking of the world. Yet the subject’s relation to the world, others, and history is dialectical, such that it cannot be said that there is one thing, a subject, and another think, an object, where the two could be divided. Rather, they’re only found in their interpenetration and reciprocal development. As such, reflexivity cannot be reflexivity of a subject, but is always receptivity of a social field as the subject-agent emerges within a social field that she both constitutes and which constitutes her. It’s truly a shame that no one reads Sartre’s Critique due to the stain of his earlier existentialism. It really is a treasure trove with regard to all these questions.