can you be too reflexive?
Last week we had an interesting seminar for those who are writing contributions to the anthology with the Turkleish working-title Livet i og utenfor skjermene (Life on and off screens). My contribution will be the chapter "Digitale arenaer og subjektivitet: selvets retorikk i endring" ("Digital arenas and subjectivity: changing rhetorics of the self", I've written about it earlier). Interestingly the anthology will present a few differing perspectives about the self, which I think is a good thing.
The comment that I most appreciated to my contribution was a question by Knut Ove Eliassen who questioned whether reflexivity is only a good thing, or rather, can you be too reflexive? I might have misunderstood his question and comments, but indeed he made me think. I introduced my brief presentation with a few typical photos published online, and I included some which clearly illustrate that young people put a lot of effort into their self-presentations and also that they have internalised genre-conventions from other media forms (e.g. advertising and pornography). The basic question however, concerns more than just these extreme cases and naturally also more than just online representations of self. Are we becoming too obsessed with our represented self, with how we appear, and couldn't this be connected to the reflexive self? It is interesting that the reflexive self is generally interpreted as a good thing, almost as a virtue.
6 Comments:
I agree that was an interesting idea. He (if it was him) brought up whether narcissism was applicable in some of these cases which while controversial (and not something I can really comment on as I am not a psychologist) did make me think.
By the way I misread Turkle-ish for Turkish and I thought for a second the book was going to be translated again!
And what an obvious comment, kind of. How come it has been absent from my discussion? I might add that when I started thinking about this article, I thought about the tendencies I observed about young people not being afraid of showing off their positive sides (not at all like the Jante Law).
It did occur to me that Turkleish could easily be misread :-)
does self-reflexiveness necessarily imply self-obsessiouness nor narcissim?
Not at all! And we willl not claim that my informants are self-obsessing. More than normal
I was told by a third party that you had been kind enough to mention my comment on your blog (and by the way, this is virtually my first excursion into this medium, I am one of the few persons that still enjoy writing old-fashioned letters, you know, pen and paper). Anyways, the idea I got was quite simple: Reflection is always mediation, that is, something is reflected by the medium of something else, like light is reflected by a mirror. Self-reflection is thus the I regarding itself (lets call that other self "me" just to keep the two I's separated). That reflection is never "naked" in the sense that reflection is a way of measuring yourself, your thoughts, actions, emotions and so forth (even Descartes, as Foucault and Derrida has shown does have a metaphysical ground on which his meditations are based). The me, that is the past I, what I thought, felt, did, etc. becomes a matter of contemplation. This contemplation involves certain principles of measurement, quite often moral or ethical ones ("did I say something stupid?", "did I act correctly?", "what are the motives behind my reactions" and so forth). These principles of measurements originate in values that are outside ourselves, be it consciously or not. Hence, in the long history of subjectivity in the West, the act of reflecting upon yourself, has more often than not, been an important part of social technologies that have functioned as discipling mechanisms (for instance the religious confession or the measuring of the self against certain clichés in popular culture). My point is certianly not that self-reflexivity is bad, but that there are many forms of self-reflexivity and that its social functions are manifold and complex. In other words that there is always necessary to define or at least conceptualize what kind of self-reflexitivity we are dealing with, how it works, what its outcome is and, certainly, does liberate us in any way?
Wonderful, thanks for clarifying Knut Ove. I will certainly try to problematise the concept and idea of self-reflexivity in revising my chapter (which I will have to begin working on ASAP).
I haven't read Sennett's Fall of Public Man but from reading Giddens' classic Modernity and self-identity Sennett appears very concerned with the obsessive character of modern subjects endless preoccupation with social identity. Narcissism, 'what this means to me' and a constant search for self-identity. I.e. Sennett appears to be very aware of the negative character self-reflexivity can take on.
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