Reflexivities as Affective Ways of Relating That Produce

Implicit Notions of Subjectivity

The assertion that our notion of reflexivity has an implicit notion of subjectivity has already been highlighted in the literature (Davies et al., 2004; Pillow, 2003; Rose, 1997; Shaw, 2016). For example, as a psychotherapist, I could think that a client is assuming, say, a notion of self as knowable, rational, and unitary. His way of practicing reflexivity is limited by the implicit notion of selfhood he is holding. Perhaps he tries to make sense of himself—he relates to himself—through observing and logically analyzing his thoughts and actions. Maybe if he could think/feel differently about what a self can be, his way of being reflexive could also change.

Our ways of being reflexive in research are also of course shaped by our notions of selfhood. For example, Etherington (2017) writes on the use of reflexivity for counseling and psychotherapy research arguing that the personal is interwoven with our research products and that we should be transparent about our subjective participation. She says, “Reflexivity creates transparency by providing information about the contexts in which data are created and located, and the researcher’s part in the co-construction of new knowledge, allowing the reader to judge its trustworthiness” (p. 90). I think she is interested in a way of understanding reflexivity—to relate to it—as if we could actually be conscious of ourselves and how the context is shaping us. Her notion of the self is that it is knowable and somehow separable from its creations. What does this produce? Maybe a research practice where researchers feel more responsible for their own involvement, having the ethical duty of being transparent about it. It might also enable certainty and definiteness in our research processes and conclusions. In this sense, I am emphasizing how the different reflexivities work, what they produce and not if one is truer than the other.

Pillow (2003) shows how reflexivity, in its definition and uses, is related to the notion of subjectivity that the authors are holding. She says,

Thus, if my subject, either myself or an “other,” is knowable the possibility that I can then know this subject through better reflexive methods is attainable. On the other hand, an understanding of a subject as postmodern, as multiple, as unknowable, as shifting, situates the purposes and practices of research, and the uses of reflexivity, quite differently. (Pillow, 2003, p. 180)

She is proposing the notion of uncomfortable reflexivity to refer to reflexive practices that stay with the multiplicity and unknowability of the subject. This is a different reflexivity with different productions. Conceiving the self in this postmodern way changes the ways in which I relate to myself and this produces myself differently.

Rose (1997) argues that transparent ways of conceiving reflexivity conceptualize the self as something prior and already formed waiting to be discovered. She argues, “If the process of reflexivity changes what is being reflected upon, then there is no ‘transparent’ self waiting to be revealed” (Rose, 1997, p. 313). Probably Etherington (2017), in her aim of showing how the researcher is part of the construction of the research, exemplifies this transparent notion of reflexivity. Rose (1997) is critical of the practice of situating oneself as a researcher—as if one could actually know where one is situated—and proposes instead to show the uncertainties in the process. She thinks that this practice can generate a questioning of the authority of academic knowledge.

I think that these texts can work to broaden the possible conceptualizations and uses of reflexivity. Nonetheless, with these challenges to the conceptualization of the self as knowable in a transparent way, arguably, the very practice of reflexivity is put into question. Jackson and Mazzei (2012), for example, imply that reflexivity entails a stable and knowable subject, and as they move to other ways of thinking about subjectivity, they reject the notion of reflexivity.

In our process of flattening and folding, we do not seek more and more reflexivity that reveals more and more about the researcher’s ways of knowing. We seek to unsettle the “I” of both the researcher and researched who is a static and singular subject. (p. 10)

Do not we need at least a certain reification of the self to be able to be reflexive on it? What happens when our conceptualization of the self is that it is not essential but constantly produced through social discourses? Davies and her collaborators (2004, p. 361) put this point across positing that reflexive writing relies on a notion of an already existing self—the one that is reflexively explored. They underscore how this is at odds with conceiving a fluctuating and fragmented subject always in process of being constituted by discourse. At this juncture, the second point that I mentioned earlier, namely that the reflexive practices are also producing a self, is called forth.

Reflexivities Producing Subjectivities

My argument of reflexivity as ways of relating that produce assumes that the subject is continuously constituted. The notion that reflexivity is a way of relating to ourselves that is producing this very self is influenced by Foucault (1986, 1990, 1997). He emphasizes how we take ourselves as objects in different ways—drawing from the social discourses available—producing ourselves in this action. Therefore, the argument that situates reflexivity and a continuously socially constituted subject as incompatible is turned on its head: reflexivity is the operation that allows the subject to be continuously socially constituted.

Deleuze (2006) elaborates how Foucault develops in his late work, specifically in “The use of pleasure” (Foucault, 1990), a thematic that was hauntingly present in his earlier work, namely the notion of folding. Foucault turns to see the self—with the notion of “interiority” that it entails—as being produced in a process of folding of the social or the “outside.” The categories of external/society and internal/self are troubled. “The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside” (Deleuze, 2006, pp. 96-97). What would be the “external” social discourses are folded in producing an “internal” space constitutive of the self. Therefore, the self is created in a reflexive relation to oneself—a turning in, a folding—that is never apart from the power relations that instate it in the first place. “Recuperated by power-relations and relations of knowledge, the relation to oneself is continually re-born, elsewhere and otherwise” (Deleuze, 2006, p. 104).

Butler (1997) takes Foucault’s input to think about how power is productive of the subject. Even if power appears at first as external, it becomes internal through a turning on itself in which it assumes a psychic form, giving a sense of self and identity to the subject. Importantly, Butler insists that it is the reflexive movement of turning upon oneself, which is produced through power, the one that inaugurates the distinction of an inside—a psychic space—and an outside.

The form this power takes is relentlessly marked by a figure of turning, a turning back upon oneself or even a turning on oneself. This figure operates as part of the explanation of how a subject is produced, and so there is no subject, strictly speaking, who makes this turn. On the contrary, the turn appears to function as a tropological inauguration of the subject, a founding moment whose ontological status remains permanently uncertain. (Butler, 1997, pp. 3-4)

Taking this way of thinking about reflexivity as a relating to—and through this producing—oneself, I am stressing that we can keep on thinking about reflexivity and having a relational and socially traversed notion of subjectivity. When thinking about reflexivity as ways of relating to oneself, there is no previous and sovereign self that exercises this reflexivity, but reflexivity is the way in which “we” turn upon ourselves, we relate to ourselves—not from a sovereign place—continuously producing this very self.

The relation to oneself is a form of self-knowledge that draws from “all the techniques of moral and human sciences that go to make up a knowledge of the subject” (Deleuze, 2006, p. 103). In that sense, the theories about reflexivity are offering ways of understanding and relating to oneself that create oneself in this very movement. In understanding oneself one also creates oneself—one draws the boundaries of what a self is through the conceptual apparatus (Barad, 2007) of a particular conceptualization of reflexivity.

In the next section, I will develop the Barad’s argument around her notion of apparatuses to think further about the different reflexivities as ways of relating. Barad (2007) is informed by both poststructuralism, in particular Foucault and Butler, and Bohr’s quantum physics.

Reflexivities as Apparatuses

In this article, I have been proposing to think about reflexivity as affective ways of relating, positing that each form of reflexivity can be useful in certain contexts because each way of relating enables different subjectivities and productivities in general. To think further about this, I introduce Barad’s (2007) concepts of intra-action, apparatus, and agential cut. In what follows, I present these concepts to relate them directly to my notion of reflexivities as ways of relating.

In Barad’s perspective, what we conceive as bounded units are not foundational but emerge through intra-actions. As she says,

The notion of intra-action (in contrast to the usual “interaction,” which presumes the prior existence of intendent entities or relata) represents a profound conceptual shift. It is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the component of phenomena become determinate and that particular concepts (that is, particular material articulations of the world) become meaningful. (p. 139)

With her notion of intra-action, Barad wants to stop thinking in dichotomies like human and non-human, material and conceptual as if they were categorically different. She proposes that they are only differentiated through particular intra-actions. Importantly, Barad (2007) is drawing on Bohr to postulate that concepts are not abstract and separated from the material. For conveying this, the notion of apparatus becomes fundamental. It is in the specific material arrangement that an apparatus provides, that a concept becomes meaningful. As Barad explains,

According to Bohr, theoretical concepts (e.g., position and momentum) are not ideational in character but rather specific physical arrangements. For example, the notion of position cannot be presumed to be an individually determinate attribute of independently existing objects. Rather, position has meaning only when an apparatus with an appropriate set of fixed parts is used. And furthermore, any measurement of position using this apparatus cannot be attributed to some abstract, independently existing object but rather is a property of the phenomenon—the inseparability of the object and the measuring agencies. (p. 139)

In that sense, we cannot think about concepts separated from the apparatuses that they are intra-acting with for them to become meaningful. In a way, the concepts come to exist in specific intra-actions and not in abstract. Barad, applies this to herself—doing what I qualify as a reflexive move. She is researching Bohr to build her own theory. In doing so, she is careful not to say that she has the “correct” interpretation of Bohr’s work as if such thing could exist in abstract and absolute terms. She tries not to put forward what Bohr was really thinking as apart from her “own interpretative apparatus” (p. 121). That is, her understanding of Bohr is an interpretative apparatus that delineates (produces boundaries) that bring to life the concepts of Bohr as she is using them. Bohr’s concepts (as she understands them) come alive and meaningful because her interpretative apparatus is intra-acting with them. This production of boundaries is what she calls agential cuts. Without these boundaries what is, is indeterminate and not meaningful. An agential cut does not act only in semantic terms, it is not only what makes something meaningful but what makes something exist in ontic terms. As Barad (2007) explains,

Apparatuses enact agential cuts that produce determinate boundaries and properties of “entities” within phenomena, where “phenomena” are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting components. That is agential cuts are at once ontic and semantic. It is only though specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of “components” of phenomena become determinate and that particular articulations become meaningful. In the absence of specific agential intra-actions, these ontic-semantic boundaries are indeterminate. In short, the apparatus specifies an agential cut that enacts a resolution (within the phenomenon) of the semantic, as well as ontic, indeterminacy. Hence apparatuses are boundary making practices. (p. 148)

As it might be already implied in the previous paragraphs, Barad thinks of apparatuses not just in terms of the instruments that scientists use. Instead, bringing Foucault in the conversation, Barad thinks of the apparatuses as discursive practices. She defines them in this way:

Discourse is not what is said; it is that which constrains and enables what can be said. Discursive practices define what counts as meaningful statements. Statements are not the mere utterances of the originating consciousness of a unified subject; rather, statements and subjects emerge from a field of possibilities. This field of possibilities is not static or singular but rather is a dynamic and contingent multiplicity. (Barad, 2007, pp. 146-147)

According to Barad’s (2007) argument, discursive practices create the boundaries that enable us to make sense in an otherwise indeterminate complexity. They are not fixed nor transcendental but historical and always open to be modified. Discursive practices create reality in the same way that the apparatus enacts the agential cuts that makes intelligible, and thus existing, a determinate object of study. Barad thinks of the apparatuses as discursive practices and the other way around.

The basic idea to understand that it is not merely the case that human concepts are embodied in apparatuses, but rather that apparatuses are discursive practices, where the latter are understood as specific material reconfigurings through which “objects” and “subjects” are produced. (p. 148)

How we think about the subject—individually, relationally, or socially transversed—appears through the conceptual (and material) apparatus that we are using. For instance, when we are using the notion of a transparent and more essentialist reflexivity, this can be thought of as a conceptual apparatus that brings about a unitary and knowable subject. “That is, the agential cut enacts a resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological (and semantic) indeterminacy” (Barad, 2007, p. 140).

I think that the different forms of reflexivity make us look at ourselves/produce ourselves in particular ways. As Barad (2007) says, “Knowing entails specific practices through which the world is differentially articulated and accounted for” (p. 149).

I take Barad’s argument in this way: everything is intra-acting with everything else; there are no foundational boundaries that essentially distinguish one thing from the other. As Barad says, “Outside of particular agential intra-actions, ‘words’ and ‘things’ are indeterminate” (p. 150). Instead, the boundaries are created through conceptual (and material) apparatuses that make agential cuts. So, if we bring in the apparatus of a relational and opaque reflexivity, this will draw certain boundaries that might shape, for instance, forms of subjectivity that are permeable and do not intend to master themselves. Crucially, our ontoepistemological assumptions shift as we use one apparatus or another. They shift because the apparatus brings about the semantic meaningfulness and ontic reality of what is shaped. That is, thinking of transparent reflexivity as an apparatus, this apparatus brings about/creates the boundaries of what we assume to be, say, a unitary and responsible subject. Before the apparatus of transparent reflexivity, which is not concepts alone, enacted this agential cut, there was not a unitary subject to ascribe responsibility to. It is in this sense that our conceptual apparatuses matter, because they create the realities that we form part of. Importantly, the apparatuses are not stable, they are also intra-active phenomena. In that sense, they are in an ongoing possibility of change.

Significantly, inspired by Barad (2007), the concepts that we use are not apart from our material engagement. In that sense, my use of, say, poststructuralism is intra-acting with the space I inhabit when reading and writing about it, with my economic situation, with my feelings, with my relationships, and so on. In that sense, it is not that I use a concept and apply it in an abstract way; instead, this concept is intra-acting with my life in ways that go well beyond my intentions and awareness. “The agential cut and the formation of a phenomenon depends on the site, the discursive interpretations, and the subjects and objects intra-acting with and through it” (Højgaard & Søndergaard, 2011, p. 12).

The sense of what a subject is appears in an agential cut, intra-actively; therefore, my ontoepistemological assumptions are not stable. At one point, for instance, intra-acting with anxiety, instability in my personal relationships, and my sense of belonging, I might be performing a transparent reflexivity, yielding a sense of stable self: “this is who I am.” In an academic context, intra-acting with papers, secure in some institutional and economic stability, it might be easier to hold uncertainty; practice an opaque reflexivity and this might yield a sense of shifting, unstable and permeable subjectivity.

From this understanding, it does not follow to portray one type of reflexivity—or reflexivity broadly—as better or worse than other options. Instead, each reflexivity, understood as a particular way of relating to oneself—and constantly producing that self in this gesture—is a particular apparatus or discursive practice that enacts an agential cut producing the boundaries that give shape and meaning.

In the following section, I give myself to the task of particularizing these different ways of relating through proposing a threefold questioning device to aid us in thinking about in which particular ways we are exercising reflexivity. These questions point toward different conceptualizations that produce, through agential cuts, the boundaries of what we consider our world at that moment, including our notion and sense of subjectivity.

Different Reflexivities Producing Differently

I put forward that the kind of reflexivity that we are enacting rests upon the kind of relationship we are holding toward ourselves. As I have mentioned, I propose a threefold questioning device to qualify how we are relating to ourselves. I do not see these questions as requiring answers that reflect the “truth” of how we are “really” using reflexivity, neither do I imply that these questions exhaust a characterization of reflexivity; instead, I see these question as tools for making distinctions that might be useful.

The first question inquires into how transparent or opaque we assume our access to ourselves/others/texts. A transparent reflexivity might lay on a relationship to myself where I think that I can observe myself as if I could stand outside myself and look through. It might be that my conceptualization of the subject is more essentialist, more relational, social/relational, or intra-active, in each case I would think that I can assert unambiguously and transparently what is going on. Therefore, a transparent reflexivity as an apparatus (Barad, 2007) might yield a production of unitary and stable subjectivity, a sense of clearly understanding and seeing oneself/others/relationships/texts, a knowledge that fills in the gaps with certain authority, an analysis where the responsibilities of the people involved are foregrounded, a sense of identity that empowers groups of people, and so on.

An example of a transparent reflexivity with a relational/social understanding of the subject is put forward by standpoint theories. Hartsock (2006) has underlined how standpoint theories criticize the possibility of a subject accessing their experience without mediation. She underscores how the subject is formed through social relationships and to acquire consciousness of this formation—and changing these relational configurations—is an objective of standpoint theories. “This is for me an important aspect of standpoint theories: they are not about individuals reporting their experience but groups coming to understand the social relations in which they are involved” (Hartsock, 2006, p. 179). Arguably, here there is also the assumption that the subjects can transparently know the ways in which they are socially engaged. I think that this assumption of transparency—the belief in the possibility of actually knowing how one is and has been socially formed—allows a sense of empowerment. It gives the possibility of not naturalizing one’s situation—especially when there is unfairness in it—and to do something about it, that is, to change the social ensembles that one is part of.

Another way of being reflexive on myself that allows more opacity will not assume that I can transparently know what is going on. Opacity assumes that there is something in between what is happening and our narrative of it—the unconscious, not articulated dynamics of relating, social discourses, and so on—that implies that there is no direct access to experience. Psychoanalysis can be very helpful in this area. Bion (1970) explicitly asks us to tolerate uncertainty and not knowing. He posits that when we think we know we saturate something preventing further learning. “An analyst with such a mind is one who is incapable of learning because he is satisfied” (Bion, 1970, p. 29). Also, Bollas (1987) argues that there is much known at an existential and felt level that does not translate into verbal conscious articulation. Bondi (2014), informed by Bollas, says, “I have acknowledged the limitations of ‘transparent’ self-reflexivity and introduced the idea of knowledge that is embodied but unthought” (Bondi, 2014, p. 8). This might produce a researcher or a psychotherapist who relies on intuitive and bodily feelings to advance their inquiry. At the same time, it can produce a piece of work that does not want to close down meaning.

I do not want to claim that opacity is assured in research—or in psychotherapy—because of holding a psychoanalytic understanding. There are, of course, different theories and nuances within psychoanalysis. For example, Young and Frosh (2009) distinguish ways of bringing psychoanalysis to research into interpretative and disruptive ways. The first tries to find a truth or a more fixed account of what is happening, while the second would be continuously disrupting and opening up new meanings.

Hollway and Jefferson (2013) are situated in the first category (Lapping, 2016; Young & Frosh, 2009). Hollway and Jefferson (2013) argue that the interviewees—and anybody—do not have a transparent access to themselves. The research participants are defended subjects and the researcher can get to an understanding of what is going through analyzing their countertransference. However, contradictorily, this analysis can be quite transparent: for example, assuming that the researcher can know something that the participant does not. ⁴ In that sense, this understanding has been criticized for fixing (Lapping, 2016) the meaning of the participants. For example, Holmes (2013), drawing on their proposal, produces quite a transparent interpretation of a research participant: “Emma here is adopting a child-like, helpless position in relation to the interviewer. By evoking concern in those with whom she interacts she is more likely to receive their care” (Holmes, 2013, p. 166).

I think that an opaque reflexivity with a relational-social understanding of subjectivity is present in Butler’s (1997, 2005) work. This relational-social and opaque reflexivity might be performed through a critical way of relating to myself where I am questioning my thoughts and actions, not believing that they are foundational because there are social discourses wider than I am that I inevitably draw upon. Considering the social discourses in being reflexive might yield a subjectivity that is critical of itself and wider social dynamics. It might be that in this critical approach some suspicious distance to my “experiences” is created.

The second question inquires into how is our understanding of subjectivity is (essentialist, relational, social/relational, intra-active, etc.). This inquiry has been the interest of many authors. To mention a few, within psychoanalysis there has been a move toward relational ways of understanding subjectivity in American relational psychoanalysis (Mitchell & Aron, 1999); here there is a rejection of the notion of the subject as driven by instincts and instead the subject is understood as thoroughly relational (Mitchell, 1981, 2000; Mitchell & Aron, 1999). Gendlin (1997) proposes to understand the self as relational and processual—not only always influenced by others and its environment but constituted through them. I believe that in psychotherapy being reflexive with a relational understanding enables less focus on pathology (which is a more essentialist notion) and a focus on how different ways of relating might propitiate change (Serra Undurraga, 2016).

Going beyond a relational perspective that only includes relationships, Butler (1997, 2005) speaks about the formation of subjectivity through the social; she does not imply that the subject and the social exist as previous entities that then relate but that the social is productive of subjectivities. Barad (2003, 2007) proposes the concept of intra-action rather than interaction, where she includes the social and material dimensions. I believe this can yield a sense of decentered humanness: aware of how our constant engagements with the material non-human are enabling our existence and experience.

The third question is, “In which affective/relational modality/ies are we relating to ourselves?” When I am being reflexive about myself, I take myself as an object in particular affective ways: challenging myself, comforting myself, securing myself, opening myself, distancing from myself, managing myself, and so on. Bollas (1982) stresses the importance to think about the space where the self relates to itself as an object. He points at how we handle ourselves all the time in everyday tasks with more or less success in giving space to our desires, in managing our anxiety, and so on. He relates our way of handling ourselves to how we have been handled in the past. How I relate to myself in writing this piece is relevant to what I produce. For example, I need to hold the frustration and anxiety that a work in progress can produce. Maybe if I am not able to contain the uncomfortable sensation of uncertainty, I might rush up to finish the piece, closing my inquiry to what I already know and feel comfortable with.

I would like to think not only about our ways of relating to ourselves and others but also to theories as an affective engagement. For example, I think that what different authors mean by reflexivity when they move away from it (Barad, 2003, 2007; Davies, 2014; Gale & Wyatt, 2017; Haraway, 1997; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; Taguchi, 2012) is probably constrained and narrowed down to a very specific notion of reflexivity that assumes transparency and an essentialist thinking. In this, I could think that there might be an affective need of simplifying a popular concept: reflexivity, to be able to reject it and promote a new one: diffraction. We embrace a new concept relating to the concept, to ourselves and others through it, in affective ways. As Wyatt (2019) narrates,

To say “diffraction” feels an artifice, a pose, a clever play inviting the question “What do you mean, ‘diffraction’?” whereupon I can give the concept a convoluted explanation (convoluted because I don’t feel as if I inhabit it, can’t shuffle into it, like a coat, with familiar ease); and if I’m lucky I sound well-read and intellectual. (p. 146)

Haraway (1997) proposes diffraction as an alternative to reflexivity, criticizing the latter for only displacing the same elsewhere (p. 16). I understand that reflexivity is criticized for reifying what it analyzes. But this particular quoted phrase is important; it engages me affectively. If reflexivity only “displaces the same elsewhere,” who am I when I am still using it? In the same text, Haraway acknowledges the work of Sandra Harding in critical reflexivity as necessary and closer to her notion of diffraction than to other conceptualizations of reflexivity. Haraway (1997) says about the critical reflexivity of Harding,

Unlike the Latour of Science in Action, she does not mistake the constituted and constitutive practices that generate and reproduce systems of stratified inequality-and that issue in the protean, historically specific, marked bodies of race, sex, and class-for preformed, functionalist categories. (p. 36)

In that sense, Haraway (1997) is stressing how there can be a conceptualization of reflexivity that does not assume that there is a something already there—for instance, the category of race—but that this is a process constantly in-the-making. What is she doing in relational and affective terms? Is she making teams? What is this producing in the academic community?

I want to remark that we can have a more relational and processual understanding and still use reflexivity—understood in a particular way. However, my intention is not to disregard the more essentialist and transparent ways of using reflexivity because I argue that they can also have useful productions.

I think about each reflexivity—that is about each way of relating—as an apparatus or discursive practice (Barad, 2007) that produces the boundaries that delimit its objects. Each of these conceptual apparatuses enact the agential cuts that produce particular realities and meanings. Of course, my own conceptual apparatus is not out of this; I am offering an apparatus to think in each reflexivity as not right or wrong but more or less useful in particular moments. Following this path, reflexivity is not in itself about capturing correctly what our thoughts/feelings/social and relational positions are. Every time that we refer back to ourselves, we are performing an action that has an impact, that has consequences.

For example, if in reviewing my notes for writing about a clinical case, I say, “Actually, I was not able to hear this client in this session; I was imposing on her my own ideas of what a healthy bereavement would be,” I am not only trying to capture what was happening in that session but, in this endeavor, I am also relating to myself in some particular ways and enabling some possibilities. I am assuming a degree of transparency: “I am doing this,” “I was not able do that.” I am not holding a relational understanding of my performance in this moment; it is more essentialist in that I am seeing something that I do as a personal difficulty in my practice. I am relating affectively with myself with certain kindness in the sense that I am giving myself some space of flexibility: I am not saying for example that “I am an imposing therapist.” This reflexivity might yield a sense of myself: “I can impose on my clients” that allows a sense of responsibility over myself, a self-awareness of how imposing I might be, and the possibility of hearing more closely how my client might think differently about bereavement. My way of being reflexive also produces the boundaries of what I conceive as “my client” and “his bereavement” as, for instance, something personal that happens “inside” my client. Furthermore, both my reflexivity in the session and in thinking about it afterward are not enacted from a position of mastery. Instead, I am part of an intra-action (Barad, 2007) with material/semantic situations. What I consider as “I” and “my client,” “bereavement,” and so on, emerges through the operation of that apparatus—that is, through that specific way of reflexively relating to myself.

Useful Reflexivities

In this ground, I propose thinking of reflexivity as affective ways of relating to oneself that yield, that produce. Here I could be enacting something that I can be critical of: I am saying what reflexivity is or is not, as if believing that I need to discuss which concepts reflect reality more adequately. Saying reflexivity is not representational but productive can just be another contribution to the great amount of academic texts with representational assumptions. Can I get out of this? I believe that I cannot dispense with the notion that in every definition there is a representational flavor. Maybe the only difference is the aim for the definition to be valued in its productions, in its yielding, in its use, in what it moves—or does not.

I propose a way of relating to the different reflexivities and its theoretical underpinnings in which we think about the potentialities and disadvantages of them, instead of embracing one and disregarding other ways. To be clear, I am not proposing to stop criticizing conceptualizations of reflexivity, instead I think it is important to be aware of the groundings and critics of each way of understanding reflexivity so that we can use them.

What I mean by the word use comes from Winnicott (1971). Commonly, we would associate use with a strategic management of the other. However, the word in the Winnicottian sense has almost the opposite connotation: it refers to how I can perceive the other outside my omnipotent control. He underscores that when this happens I am able to use the object. I understand this use as being able to get what the singularity of the other can offer. Benjamin (1990, 2004) draws on the Winnicottian concept of use for her notion of intersubjectivity. She is positing that when we perceive the other as another—not as someone that is doing something to us: an enemy or an ally—we can use them in the Winnicottian sense. Inspired by this, different theories and ways of conceiving reflexivity can be recognized in their otherness—outside a sense of omnipotent understanding that would allow us to discard or fully integrate a particular theory.

Reflexivities Operating Outside Our Voluntary Intention

I think of the different reflexivities as ways of relating that produce forms of understanding and worldings (Barad, 2007) that can be useful in some contexts—by producing these very contexts—and I might employ even if being unaware of it and consciously rejecting them.

For instance, I have argued that I do not want to put one way of being reflexive over the other. However, I see how I tend to give more value to relational and more opaque ways of being reflexive. But this very statement about my valuing opaque and relational reflexivities is made from a more transparent and essentialist reflexivity. It takes the shape of a confession. Inspired by Barad (2007), how I act—for example, using a transparent reflexivity—needs to be understood not as an operation from a position of mastery but as an action that is produced in determinate material/semantic intra-actions.

Pillow (2003) acknowledges that we might be reproducing a form of reflexivity that we are outwardly rejecting. She describes four reflexive strategies that act in a confessional fashion; she is critical of them yet acknowledges how: “In identifying these four strategies, I have also been able to find myself and my writing styles in each and see how attached and invested I remain to these ideologies, however much I may think I work against each” (Pillow, 2003, p. 181).

If we stick to one concept and categorically reject alternative conceptualizations—as it might be to put forward the notion of diffraction through a rejection of reflexivity (Barad, 2003, 2007)—we might be enacting the dichotomous thinking that we actually claim to be rejecting. In psychoanalytical terms, it might be similar to what is called a paranoid-schizoid operation where we hold one thing very close to our identity, rejecting or undermining other possibilities. A paranoid-schizoid operation is based on splitting (separating into incompatible extremes), which works for creating order (Ogden, 1988). Splitting is used to make an order that brings a sense of safety and security—keeping something that is felt to be threatening at bay—but it does not help to complex and deepen a process of comprehension. “Splitting is a boundary-creating mode of thought and therefore a part of an order-generating (not yet a personal meaning-generating) process” (Ogden, 1986, p. 48). Following from this, it might be that the rejection of reflexivity altogether with the embracing of diffraction helps to create a sense of organization, but that might be at the expense of losing complexity and nuances. For rejecting strongly something, we probably need to reduce it or simplify it. In a Winnicottian sense, we need to negate its otherness that we cannot omnipotently embrace with our minds.

One could think that what I am doing here is to embrace reflexivity through rejecting diffraction, that is that I am doing exactly what I am critical of. Nonetheless, I hope it is clear that the version of reflexivity as affective ways of relating that I develop in this article is heavily influenced by Barad’s (2007) conceptualizations—that are related to the notion of diffraction. ⁵ In that sense, reflexivity understood as affective ways of relating is not made in opposition to diffraction but in collaboration with it. In any case, I do not claim I know or control how I am relating to myself, to the concepts, and to the readers in this work. For sure, I am enacting—and the paper on its own will be enacting—ways of relating that escape my best intentions.

I am arguing here that reflexivity is an activity that we are engaged in inevitably—we are always relating to ourselves, forming ourselves (Butler, 1997; Deleuze, 2006; Foucault, 1990) and producing a world (Barad, 2007) in that action. This activity, though, is not commanded from a position of mastery. Instead, we find ourselves being reflexive in some ways, even if we claim to reject these ways. Because of this, the threefold questioning device can help to qualify in which ways we are being reflexive at any given moment, without assuming that we already know how we are doing it. But the threefold questioning device will not provide objective answers. To be clear, to be reflexive on how we are relating is precisely another way of relating, not an—impossible—neutral operation.

Conclusion

In this article, I have put forward an understanding of reflexivities as affective ways of relating that produce. According to this conceptualization all that there is, is relating. The entities are not essential but products of ways of relating that need to be continuously reactualized. From this perspective, it does not make sense to think in a correct or incorrect conceptualization of reflexivity but to think about what the different conceptualizations enable. Taking Barad’s (2007) concept, I ask: what worlds the different reflexivities as apparatuses produce?

I have used Barad’s argument to think how the different reflexivities might work as apparatuses that produce their subjects and their objects. Whenever we are using a certain reflexivity, we are articulating a world. We do this not from a sovereign position but as part of an intra-acting system.

If all what we have is ways of relating that have certain productions—that allow some things and disavow others—then reflexivity needs to be directed toward the questioning of how we are relating, understanding that, crucially, this exercise of reflexivity is in itself a way of relating that yields certain productions. And I believe that a potential production of being reflexive in how we are relating to ourselves/others/theory is an inquiry that understands that there are not better or righter conceptualizations in abstract terms but more useful concepts in certain contexts—because of the very contexts that they produce.