Emotional Reflexivity: Feeling,Emotion and Imagination in Reflexive Dialogues

Reflexivity and Modernity

For Anthony Giddens, the concept of reflexivity refers to how people in late modernity make continual changes in their lives in response to knowledge about social circumstances. Knowledge is the key here, for this is disseminated to people by the institutions and expert systems of late modernity to help them cope with the continuous changes of a detraditionalized society, where routine, habit and custom have been eroded as ways of managing and reproducing social life. Furthermore, knowledge is central to reflexivity for it is this mediated element that distinguishes reflexivity from mere self-reflection. In what follows I focus more on the work of Giddens than that of Beck, as the latter is concerned more with the societal level of reflexivity – such as the social processes that occur beyond our knowledge and awareness – and not so much with self-identity and self-consciousness (Beck, 1992[1986]; Beck et al., 1994). However, Giddens and Beck are united in seeing modernity as characterized by increased risk and therefore by emotions such as fear and anxiety.

For Giddens, reflexivity ‘should be understood not merely as self-consciousness but as the monitored character of the ongoing flow of social life’, and this reflexive monitoring of action depends on rationalization, understood ‘as a process rather than a state and as inherently involved in the competence of agents’ (1984: 3). Thus, reflexivity is distinguished from mere self-consciousness or self-reflection, as reflexivity draws on the knowledgeability of human agents about their social world so they can recursively order their social practices. But changes in late modernity also affect the very nature of the self, specifically placing greater emphasis on reflexive projects of the self. The latter ‘consists in the sustaining of coherent, yet continuously revised, biographical narratives, tak[ing] place in the context of multiple choice as filtered through abstract systems’ (Giddens, 1991: 5).

However, this theory of reflexivity is highly individualistic as it fails to register how, even in late modernity, a person’s self-identity is still constructed in their relations to others in many important ways, in families, through friendships, workplace relations, or indeed in any forum or medium through which individuals come to identify or dis-identify with each other. Rather than this, Giddens’s theory of self-identity ‘consists instead of the self as reflexively understood by the individual themselves in terms of a particular biographical narrative’ (Atkinson, 2007: 537). It has also been highlighted how Giddens’s position leads him to ignore the interrelatedness of individuals and the importance of the way they are regarded by others as central factors in the creation of identity (Kilminster, 1991). I want to argue here, however, that Giddens also ignores the importance of the role that others play in our own reflexive stance, particularly in terms of the internal conversation through which we come to understand ourselves, our lives, the meaning of our actions and our biographical narratives. This cannot be disentangled from the way that others regard us and respond to us, evaluating our actions and our selves, or from the way that we imagine that they do. This has vital importance for the way we feel about the world, the people we are related to, and our own selves: in other words, our emotional outlook. Because Giddens would perhaps understand this as a factor in people’s self-reflection and the creation of self-identity, he may not regard it as central to reflexivity and the knowledgeable production and reproduction of social action. However, as I show here, we cannot so neatly disentangle reflexivity from self-reflection. Indeed, Giddens does not spell out the already existing capacities in humans that reflexivity builds on. The picture he paints is one in which modern institutions become more reflexive, so individuals seem to automatically follow suit. But this would not happen without people already having capacities for reflexivity, stemming from self-reflection.

In failing to account for the way identity and reflexivity is created through social relations to others, theories of reflexivity also fail to account for emotions. Indeed, the only emotions that Giddens acknowledges are fear and anxiety, which are produced by the reflexive and ever-changing institutions of modernity. Other emotions circle around fear and anxiety, such as shame; however, this stems from the anxiety about the adequacy of our biographical narrative and, again, this seems disconnected from the view that others take about us and the way they judge and value us (Giddens, 1991). Here, emotion is not seen as relational but as a wider social product of modernity itself. As Holmes (2010) points out, the focus on risk means that Giddens overemphasizes the prevalence of fear and anxiety in modernity and does not understand that other emotions could be elicited by people facing constant change; for example, people could feel excited at this prospect. The difficulty here cuts deeper, though, as Giddens, following Kierkegaard, identifies anxiety as a basic existential condition of humanity, one that needs to be effectively managed by unconscious processes for us to function reflexively in the risky world of late modernity. For Giddens (1991), the unconscious functions as a tension management system, created by the protective cocoon against anxiety that caregivers provide for infants and children in their upbringing, which continues throughout life to provide a basic sense of ontological security in the world, helping us deal with the fears that regularly assail us. This also allows us to establish a feeling of trust in the reliability of the world, so that the emotional landscape of late modernity is one in which ‘large arenas of security intersect, sometimes in subtle, sometimes in nakedly disturbing, ways with generalised sources of unease’ (Giddens, 1991: 181).

But Giddens’s understanding of the unconscious is contradictory, as he also claims that it provides motivation for human action that is unacknowledged by the agent. However, he is not clear about what this means, nor how this works alongside the tension management function of the unconscious. One is left with the feeling that Giddens’s theory of the unconscious is, as Thrift puts it, ‘simply a supplement which enables him to privilege practical consciousness and knowledge’ (1993: 114). I would go further and argue that his theory of the unconscious is a convenient ‘ground clearing’ device that sweeps aside the full pallet of emotions which are part of social relations, leaving space for reflexivity to function in a way that allows for the monitoring of action and for its rationalization. There is little awareness of the possibility that, as I suggest here, the uncomfortable emotions that torture us, such as shame, are as much a product of a hyperactive consciousness of how others might see us, as of the failure of the unconscious to adequately manage this anxiety. Furthermore, other positive emotions can arise from social relations and may influence reflexivity. For example, a sense of confidence in oneself, fostered by the positive responses of others, may instil a sense of self-confidence and ease within social contexts as much as a well-functioning, anxiety-managing unconscious may do.

However, my main concern is not that theories of reflexivity have too narrow a view of the emotions. It is that they do not put feeling and emotion at the centre of reflexivity in terms of the way that people structure their activity and make choices. Instead, the position of theorists of reflexivity is Cartesian: a knowledgeable agent stands at an emotional distance from the social world and makes reflexive choices on the basis of their knowledge. In times of uncertainty the agent may be afflicted with anxiety and fear at the constant risks he or she takes, which are kept at bay by the bulwark of feelings of trust within the unconscious, but their view of the world comes from their knowledge-base rather than from previous emotional experience. Fear, anxiety and trust may influence reflexivity, but they are not the source of reflexivity. So this understanding of reflexivity is, at base, not relational, is disembodied (as the body only figures in this scheme as it gets drawn into reflexive projects of the self) and unemotional: it is reflexivity based on knowledge.

Here, I present the opposite position: that emotion is the source of all our thinking as it is integral to the relations we have with our world and the people within it. As the psychologist Lev Vygotsky put it, the emotional-volitional sphere is behind every thought that arises in human consciousness (1987[1934]). A whole range of emotions colour, enliven and animate those social relationships and are central to our reflexive thinking and choices. Furthermore, reflexivity is not a given but is based on self-reflection which emerges from the reflexive dialogues that humans hold with themselves. It is to the nature of this dialogical reflexivity, or ‘internal conversation’, that I now turn.

Reflexivity and the Internal Conversation

In her recent work, Margaret Archer has made the internal conversation central to reflexivity. For her, reflexivity is defined as the mental capacity of people to consider themselves in relation to their social context (2003). The internal conversation mediates between structure (the social context which provides enablements and constraints to social action) and agency, and the two are theorized as analytically distinct realms with different causal powers and properties. Agency derives its causal power from the internal conversation, which in turn allows for self-reflection (understood as synonymous with reflexivity). Because society and individual are analysed as two distinct causal powers, Archer searches for a causal power that cannot be attributed to society but which must arise in the private, individual domain. This is reflexivity.

Like Giddens, then, for Archer reflexivity is about deliberation and choice in relation to objective circumstances, in this case the social context people find themselves in, which they must, as agents with their own personal powers, negotiate. Also, like Giddens, for Archer the unconscious provides a ‘clearing ground’ for reflexive consciousness, except in her case the unconscious is acknowledged only in the sense that there are things of which we remain non-conscious; this can then be instantly bracketed out of the analysis because the non-conscious ‘by definition can play no part in the conscious, reflexive deliberations of the active agent’ (Archer, 2003: 25). Unlike Giddens, though, Archer’s theory of reflexivity is not predicated solely on the knowledge disseminated from the institutions, media and expert systems of modernity. Reflexivity, as the capacity for self-reflection, has a more primitive origin in the practical mastery that infants effect in their early embodied explorations of the world (as shown by the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget) and also in the reflexive engagements with their own bodies (as demonstrated in the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty). Later in childhood reflexivity is enhanced through learning language and, with it, the development of the inner conversation, but because reflexivity originates in the practical engagement with the world – ‘which is prior to, and primitive to, our sociality’ (Archer, 2000: 7) – it cannot be reduced either to language or to the reflexive institutions of modernity.

Additionally, emotion is understood to be at the centre of the reflexive project, as it is through reflexivity that people rank and prioritize their concerns – the beliefs and desires spoken of in the above quotation. Thus, the reflexive agent deliberates over the ‘ranking, patterning and pursuit’ (Archer, 2003: 27) of their concerns, which provides the modus vivendi that animates them and drives them into action. Again, emotion is not primarily linguistic in origin as it arises from the three different orders that humans are engaged with: ‘our physical well-being in the natural order, our performative achievements in the practical order and our self-worth in the social order’ (Archer, 2000: 9). However, despite Archer’s claim that ‘our emotions are among the main constituents of our inner lives’ and that they are ‘the fuel of our inner conversations’ (2000: 194), emotions largely figure in her work only as commentaries on our concerns. So if we fail to live up to one of the ideals that rank highly in our order of concerns we feel bad or angry with ourselves, and if we fail to live up to a central tenet of our beliefs we may feel guilty. We do so not because society tells us it is bad to be a lapsed Catholic or a socialist who hoards his or her money in a capitalist bank: we feel bad about breaching our concerns because they matter to us. Thus, the self-worth, or lack of it, that we experience in the social order is not about how other people value and judge us, but rather how we value and judge ourselves against our own subjective order of concerns.

What Archer misses, though, in her account of emotional reflexivity is other people and our emotional relationship with them, even though she claims her theory to be relational. Despite this, emotions seem related only to our own subjective order of concerns, or to have some objective relation to those concerns in the way we perform a task in the practical order, or how we behave within the social order. How others judge and value us seems to play no role at all in emotional responses, or if it does it would only be because someone else’s judgement of us chimes with our own subjective one. While laudably trying to avoid social determinism, giving the agent space for freedom and determination of their actions, Archer has ended up in voluntarism, which is central to her work, and also in another trap she seeks to avoid, rationalism. The view of agents deliberating on objective circumstances and ranking their own subjective order of concerns paints a picture of a reflexive agent that floats free of all commitments, except for those that are self-chosen. Emotions are a commentary on our concerns, but this says little about the process through which these have become concerns in the first place. Surely, how we develop our concerns is not disconnected from our emotional connection, identification and dis-identification with caregivers, friends, teachers, the wider generation and society?

Surprisingly, in her book on reflexivity and the internal conversation there is little discussion with her research participants about their emotions. While Archer’s categorization of their ‘mode of reflexivity’ is interesting and often revealing, emotion only comes to the fore in this study when considering those labelled as ‘fractured reflexives’. For these individuals their internal conversation has become predominantly expressive, to the point where their hierarchy of concerns and modus vivendi cannot be translated into practical projects. Their inner conversations ‘are too exclusively affective to be practically effective’ (Archer, 2003: 299). This has fractured their reflexivity, disabled them from putting their order of concerns into practice, and leads them into a vicious cycle where they increasingly dwell on the emotional commentary that castigates them for their failure. But this assumes that too much, or excessive, emotion fractures reflexivity and disables people in practical terms.

Despite her intentions, this gives Archer’s theory of reflexivity a rationalistic and individualistic hue. Reflexivity allows us to ‘stand back’ in order to subjectively reflect on ourselves in relation to objective circumstances, something we can do successfully only if we are not too emotionally engaged. This reflexive capacity is presented as a fundamental aspect of a subjective ontology, rather than one particular stance we can take towards the world but which we cannot consistently maintain. Furthermore, what the agent sees around it is a world of different causal powers – the enablements and constraints of an objective social ontology – rather than a world of other people with whom one has a primary, emotional engagement.

While I generally support Archer’s desire not to reduce human agency and self-reflection to discourse or to social institutions, as some social constructionists do, and have argued something like this myself (Burkitt, 2003), I do not support her desire to make the internal conversation, and therefore reflexivity also, a fundamentally private concern, something with distinct causal powers from the social realm. While the internal conversation is private in one very obvious way, in that we do not have to share our own linguistically articulated thoughts with others, this does not mean the causal powers of reflexivity are essentially private or individual. Archer has to confront this dilemma head on when she discusses the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, on whose ideas she relies for her understanding of the ‘internal conversation’. Peirce was clear that the internal conversation can only be based on the language we have learned in our social upbringing, which we use in our daily lives to communicate with others; therefore language is a social medium. Yet it is also used to articulate our private thoughts. Archer takes this to mean that Peirce upheld a notion of private thought, which in this weak sense no doubt he did, and that ‘our inner lives are not swamped with sociality’ (2003: 67). From this Archer goes on to claim that the life of the mind retains relatively autonomous properties and powers, but this is something of a climb-down from the more radical realist claim that structure and agency are ontologically ‘distinct’ strata of reality ‘as the bearers of quite different properties and powers’ (2003: 2, my emphasis).

Overall, then, theories of reflexivity are too individualistic and rationalistic, and, in order to maintain that stance, have to devise means to keep emotions out of the process of reflexivity itself. Even if emotion enters the process it does so only as a subjective commentary on our own concerns, a view that stops us developing a relational understanding of emotions in terms of the relation with others in the social world, as well as in terms of the subjective relation we have to our own self. Furthermore, theories of reflexivity foster the view that this is a process in which a subjective agent monitors their objective actions or deliberates on the choices presented to them by an objective social order. However, as Lash has argued, reflexivity is also aesthetic, meaning that it ‘is hermeneutic as well as rationalistic’ (1993: 2); it is not just about self-reflection but also self-interpretation. I would argue that in aesthetic reflexivity, we seek to interpret the meaning imputed to our actions, or to ourselves, by others with whom we are interrelated, or we seek to interpret the enigmatic aspects of ourselves (Burkitt, 2010a, 2010b). What I suggest in the next section is that we must begin to understand how this interpretive reflexivity is bound up with our interactions with others and, thus, our emotional connection to them, through which we interpret and imagine the way they evaluate and judge us – a process that evokes strong emotions.

Reflexivity and the Internal Conversation: Feeling, Emotion and Imagination

The internal conversation is seen as vital to self-reflection, not just by Archer but by the whole canon of pragmatist thinkers from William James and Peirce (on whose ideas she draws) to G.H. Mead and C.H. Cooley, because it is through the internal conversation that we come to talk to ourselves as we would to another person. In so doing we adopt both the subjective stance (when we say ‘I’) and the objective stance (this is ‘me’, my social role or character), being able to reflect on our own self as if it were an object. Learning to say ‘I’ is not the only source of subjectivity, as some thinkers, particularly Benveniste (1971), have claimed, because prior to the learning of the first-person pronoun in language infants also get a sense of the ‘I’ through their embodied power to move and to perform physical tasks, producing effects in the world – what Merleau-Ponty called the sense of ‘I can’ (1962[1945]). However, Charles Horton Cooley has also claimed that while this sense of subjectivity, or ‘I’, is not a metaphysical property, in that it only arises in the linguistic interaction between individuals and is therefore an empirical fact, nevertheless it cannot be reduced to a simple linguistic marker. The sense of ‘I’ has an emotional force behind it which is the ‘my-feeling’, for if this were not the case then the sense of ‘I’ would be devoid of all life and feeling. In fact, Cooley notes how children who have mastered expressions such as ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘mine’ often use them with almost exaggerated feeling – in the sense of, ‘that toy is mine’ – so that the emotional animus in the act is unmistakeable.

However, rather than this self-feeling being a purely private or internal referent, Cooley argues that the way we feel about ourselves can never be separated from the way that others express feelings about us, an idea encapsulated in his famous notion of the ‘looking glass self’. However, this metaphor is widely misunderstood. The idea is often criticized (and no doubt Archer would take Cooley to task for this) because it is claimed that if we simply become the mirror image of what others think about us – expressed in what they do and say towards us – then this is simple social determinism. Here, the subject would have no agency at all and simply become whatever the attitude is that the other takes towards it. If human beings were really this way we all would be simple reflections of our social circumstances. This is not the case, however, because Cooley gives agency to the individual through their capacity for imagination. He says that:

In a very large and interesting class of cases the social reference takes the form of a somewhat definite imagination of how one’s self – that is any idea he appropriates – appears in a particular mind, and the kind of self-feeling one has is determined by the attitude toward this attributed to that other mind. A social self of this sort might be called the reflected or looking-glass self. (1983[1922]: 183–4)

So Cooley is saying here that it is not the attitude of the other, taken on board in a direct and unmediated way, that influences the way we feel about ourselves: instead, it is how we imagine the other is looking at us and our interpretation of their judgement that is the crucial factor, something which may itself depend on the way we have grown to feel about ourselves from past social experience, perhaps even from early infancy. Cooley himself goes on to point out the problem of the idea of a looking glass self, in that:

A self-idea of this sort seems to have three principle elements: the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his judgement of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling such as pride or mortification. The comparison with a looking-glass hardly suggests the second element, the imagined judgement, which is quite essential. (1983[1922]: 184)

So the imagination of the judgement and evaluation of the other is crucial in terms of how we perceive ourselves to appear in their thoughts, something which is done little justice through the simple metaphor of a ‘looking glass self’. Yet, although Cooley doesn’t say this, imagination itself will be coloured by the self-feeling we have developed from the past, so that, for example, someone who has developed a positive feeling about themselves may tend to imagine that others see them in a more positive light, while those who feel they have been rejected or unwanted may look for that response from others, feeling in general that others judge them more negatively. So, while all of us are likely to feel pride or mortification if we think others judge us either positively or negatively, we are still inclined to imagine certain judgements in the minds of others depending on the self-feelings we have developed throughout our life-experiences in social interaction. Here, not only imagination but also memory is central to the sense of self and is therefore a crucial part of our agency – the stance we take towards others and the way we act.

This is essential for the idea of reflexivity I want to develop here. First, this is because others are active in the process of our reflexive stance on self and world, in that our imagination of their value judgements influences our reflexivity. Second, emotion is central to this process as these value judgements make us feel something about ourselves. So, if we are caught being dishonest by someone we highly regard as a person of integrity, we will feel doubly ashamed. It is not only that we have breached some internal value system that is central to our personal concerns, although we may have done so: what is equally important is the judgement of others about what we have done. Similarly, if we have performed a task well and others comment on this, it will confirm our sense of pride in a job well done: if others do not comment or seem unimpressed, we may be puzzled as to why that is, even if we are still pleased with our performance. So here, the view of our self is not just one way, whether that is inner or outer directed: rather, it is both, in that we can judge ourselves by our own value system yet still can be influenced by the response of others, and both things will stir our emotions. Third, this does not rob us of agency, as Archer claims of similar ideas in the work of G.H. Mead, so that the social swamps the subjective, private world. Other people and voices populate the reflexive dialogue or drama, and our imagination of their judgement influences self-feeling, but it is precisely this that makes us who we are and shapes the way we respond to others. In other words, it gives us our own personal style of agency. Fourth, because this subjective assessment of the judgement of others requires imagination, it is an interpretive theory of reflexivity. That is, we interpret the social situation as to how we understand the response of others with whom we are emotionally engaged (because their view of us matters), rather than simply monitoring our action or deliberating on external social conditions.

An excellent example of this can be found in Andrea Mayrhofer’s work on non-suicidal self-injury, which utilizes the work of Cooley to interpret data from interviews with those who self-injured. Mayrhofer’s study reports that factors like abuse, child sexual abuse, parental neglect, invalidation, and bullying at school constituted social aetiologies which led to respondents perceiving themselves as unlovable, a failure, or worthless. For some individuals, non-suicidal self-injury was a way of punishing themselves as, ‘[c]onceptually, a self which is worthless is hated; as self without value can be abused; and a self which is a failure needs to be punished’ (2011: 133). The centrality of individuals’ emotions in their interpretation and imagination of their appearance to the other person, or the imagination of the judgement of that appearance, along with the self-feelings that arise from this, highlights emotion as a motivating factor in the reflexive process itself, suggesting an interpretive theory of reflexivity. Respondents’ interpretations were rooted in social interactions of a negative kind, and the body figures here not as a causal factor in self-injury but as a meaningful social display of deeply felt emotion. Whilst Mayrhofer does not reject evidence of the body’s physiological role in self-injury, she does reject individualistic models of self-injury.

Although Mayrhofer does not comment on the implications of her work for theories of reflexivity, these can clearly be drawn out. Her work illustrates how the ‘I’ that thinks and reflects on itself and world is based on feelings about its own self that are connected to the relational social world of interaction, in which it is always situated (as are we all). Self-feeling is the basis of the ‘I’ which is at the heart of self-dialogue, self-reflection and, ultimately, the processes of emotional reflexivity (in the above case, that of self-hatred).

Her study also showed that the involvement of expert systems does not simply ‘sequester’ experience from the existential realities of everyday life, as Giddens (1991) would have it. For those who self-injured, the response of agencies to this, particularly the medical profession, was mixed, and often people who self-injured were regarded as ‘time-wasters’ and given short shrift. They were then left to cope on their own, or with friends and contacts made through internet chat rooms, with the very difficult and emotionally messy existential experiences they faced, such as self-loathing, fear and anger. Where expert systems or agencies helped, they had a sound knowledge and experience of the problem of non-suicidal self-injury and could respond in a positive manner to those who were suffering. Where they did not respond well, the sufferer often had more knowledge than the professionals, gleaned from internet sites and other sources. However, this is also mixed in with the opinions and experiences of others on internet sites and chat rooms, which can reinforce a group identity around self-injury, along with the practices associated with it. So the ‘mediation’ of experience in extended forms of reflexivity does not sequester or remove difficult and frightening existential experiences and problems, nor does it always provide individuals with effective powers over the management of their own activity. Although most of those in Mayrhofer’s study who self-injured had a lot of knowledge and insight into their behaviour, their reflexivity did not give them the power to stop unwanted behaviours at will. The emotional compulsion to self-injury remained in most cases without intensive collective support to address, not only self-injurous behaviour, but also the emotional feelings that underlay it.

For those who self-injure, the world is a negative, threatening and hostile place where trust is hard to find. But this is not because of the failure of the unconscious to deal with these existential fears and dreads; indeed, Mayrhofer points out that self-injury is often the result of unacknowledged shame, or of other negative self-feelings that the person could not admit to. For others, negative self-feelings were firmly at the forefront of their consciousness. In these cases what tortured individuals was the negative responses of others that they perceived from their own past and present experiences, and which coloured their reflexivity towards both themselves and their world. Furthermore, these negative self-feelings were lodged in specific social and emotional experiences, rather than in a generalized sense of existential dread that they had not been emotionally cocooned against by their caretakers. In contrast, the problem was that those very people had not given care but had been abusive or neglectful. Indeed, in R.D. Laing’s work he referred to ontological insecurity (as opposed to security, as Giddens does) and thought this emerged from particular social contexts, especially familial ones, where individuals had not been able to develop a strong and independent sense of self (Laing, 1959). Either this was because they had been neglected and made to feel insignificant and worthless, or because they had been engulfed by caregivers who were overly loving or controlling. However, the source of negative and divided self-feelings was not a universal and endemic sense of anxiety that had to be screened out by caregivers; rather, it was these people who brought all kinds of anxieties into the world. The source of people’s anxieties and emotional distress was particular disordered social relations and interactions.

Before I consider the implications of all this for theories of reflexivity, let me first address an obvious objection to the use of self-injury as an example. It could be said that this cannot be used to challenge theories of reflexivity as it illustrates fractured reflexivity, where people have become fixated on reflexive dialogues that emphasize and exaggerate their own lack of self-worth, disabling the effective use of reflexive knolwedge or the proper ordering of concerns. This example shows how reflexivity is not working in these particular individuals, rather than how reflexivity does work for the rest of us. However, this is to fix people too rigidly into different categories of reflexivity, something that Archer saw as a possible danger in her own sorting of people into different modes of reflexivity (Archer, 2003). Instead, I would suggest that we are all ‘fractured reflexives’ to some degree. Either the knowledge we have about the situations we face is imperfect, or expert systems have failed us, or we are experiencing a powerful emotion that is colouring our reflexive view of ourselves, our actions, and our world to a high degree. Even those of us who feel ourselves to be sailing on calm emotional waters may be unaware that, beneath our reflexive understanding, the sea of feelings may be a bit more choppy than we think. In his work on somatic or somaesthetic consciousness, Richard Shusterman follows pragmatists like John Dewey in arguing that all of us are guided in our actions by unreflective bodily habits, and what is of interest is the balance and interplay of the reflective and unreflective in our actions (Shusterman, 2008). Complete mindfulness, in which reflective thought can operate on the basis of a continually calm and still emotional temperament and relaxed body, is something that can only be achieved by Zen masters after years of meditation practice. For those of us who are not Zen masters and have attempted to meditate by sitting still in a quiet room with eyes closed and focusing on one’s breathing, it is interesting to note how quickly one becomes afflicted by feelings of restlessness, craving sensory distractions and movement, and how hard it is to simply focus one’s mind. This is because such focus is quickly invaded and hijacked by all kinds of thoughts and by different voices calling out for attention, some expressing feelings that are not entirely pleasant. In the ordinary run of our lives, in which most of us manage to concentrate for long enough to be effective in what we do, we are unaware of this, of the words, thoughts and feelings at the outer edge of our reflexive dialogue which may only occasionally intrude into that dialogue. So if we take the work of pragmatists seriously, the issue is raised of the relationship between reflexivity and habit (Dewey, 1983[1922]; Gronow, 2008), or from a Bourdieuian perspective the limits placed on reflexivity by habitus in a class divided society (Adams, 2006), as well as issues of the unconscious and the way it can be considered in relation to the reflexive dialogue (Burkitt, 2010a, 2010b).

The point I want to make here, however, is that we are emotionally engaged with others in our social interactions and these emotional engagements regularly motivate our reflexivity through the reflexive dialogue we privately stage with the image and voice of others (Burkitt, 2010a). In reflexive dialogue, feelings and emotions are not just attendants to reflexivity; they are the basis and motive for reflexive thought. Reflexivity does not emerge from out of nowhere, nor is its source the various founts of knowledge: behind every thought is the emotional-volitional sphere and this is true also of reflexive thought. Furthermore, our thoughts are always coloured by emotion so that we never see the world in a neutral way. Our knowledge is formed and shaped by our feelings about the world and the others with whom we interact and, thus, by our emotional relations to it and to them.

We can draw a diagram for this as in Figure 1. Although diagrams such as this make the whole thing overly schematic, as they cannot capture real-time experience, they do have an analytical value in allowing us to think more clearly about how processes like reflexivity might work. From the diagram we can see that social interactions with others produce self-feeling through which we sense and perceive ourselves within the world, and this motivates responses and actions that feed back into the world of interaction with others. Some of the feelings we have may be consciously acknowledged, others may be unconscious, existing on the fringe of awareness. Over time these may become relatively stable or unstable feelings about self and world, and will set alive the self-reflective dialogue between ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘we’ and ‘they’, depending on how we relate to others emotionally. Feelings, sensations, thoughts, words and actions all flow together seamlessly and sometimes almost instantaneously. But for analytical purposes this diagram gives us a feel for the way the interactive world feeds into self-feelings, self-dialogue, and, with it, self-reflection. Self-dialogue takes place through imagination, a conversation between different selves and voices as we imagine what others may be thinking and saying about us and the moral or evaluative stance they may take towards us and our actions. We can also dialogically reflect on our feelings and emotions and try to change and influence them, so that the relation between self-feeling and self-reflection is two-way. Here the diagram is more useful because it is only when we pause to reflect that emotion starts to appear in consciousness as a fully articulated and named experience (as in, ‘I’m aware of feeling queasy: oh, I’m getting frightened about this upcoming interview’). The distinction I have made between feeling and emotion can help make sense of this, in that feeling may be vague and nebulous until it is clearly articulated and named as a specific emotion (Burkitt, 2002). That is, we may act on a feeling without naming it or pondering it much. It is only when we do so and the feeling enters reflective, linguistic consciousness that it becomes a nameable emotion and we can try to put it in context. Why am I feeling anxious, nervous or excited? The context we put the emotion into is a relational context and only then can we understand it: I’m starting to feel nervous because I’ve got that talk to give next week, or I need to have that serious conversation with my partner. Reflexivity occurs when we bring some externally mediated knowledge to bear on the process of self-reflection and interpretation, and also try to take a more distanced view in the monitoring of our actions. Here, emotional reflexivity comes into play, such as emotional intelligence and other practices of the self that reflect on habit or habitual emotional patterns and responses. But breaking these is hard as they are the basis of our very selves.

OPEN IN VIEWER Figure 1.

Add to this that feelings can be ambivalent, conflicted, or divided and we see the task reflexivity faces in keeping clarity or from becoming fractured. Theorists of reflexivity also assume that reflexive consciousness speaks with one voice in the monitoring of action, in the deliberation over choice, or in the ordering of concerns. Yet this may not be the case. If reflexivity is dialogical by nature, then many voices may join the conversation about our actions, about the choices we should make, or what is really important to us. This is why choice is not always clear, or there is moral ambiguity, and we end up flummoxed. Reflexivity and reflection can put order into recursive practices and into the ranking of our concerns, but not always. Most of us will at some time experience fractured reflexivity.

Overall, then, my view is that because dialogical reflexivity is bound up in relations to others and populated by their voices, as well as the voices we identify as our ‘own’, the emotions entangled in those relationships animate, shape and colour the way we reflexively see ourselves and the way we consider ourselves in relation to the social context: indeed, it influences the very way in which we see the social context itself. Our own ‘self-feeling’ is coloured by the emotional stance that others take, and have taken, towards us, especially at key or formative periods of our lives, and something of this stays with us in our reflection on the social world and self. This is bound to influence the way people interpret the situation, monitor their own actions and make choices in social contexts. Reflexivity is not just rational and involves rationalization; it is also relational, dialogical and emotional.