The Reactionary Anti-Reflexive Turn

I am looking at the photo of two police officers in Galveston, Texas. They have a black prisoner, hands tied behind his back. He’s on foot and they’re walking him on a leash. The photo and the way it invoked slavery caused an outrage. The police apologised said that the officers ‘didn’t have any malicious intent’. But how ‘un-reflexive’ - that is, how lacking in critical self-awareness - one must be to not realise today, in 2019, that to be a white person riding your horse wearing a cowboy hat and dragging behind you a black handcuffed person looks bad? 

I am also looking at a photo of a mob, in Lebanon, carrying placards that say ‘Employ only Lebanese People’ and ‘Syrians, go back where you come from’. I see Lebanon’s minister of foreign affairs, Gebran Bassil, encouraging these people. I cringe. Is this minister who is continuously dealing with Lebanese immigrants not aware of the history of ‘go back where you come from’? How can he not be aware that the Lebanese who have migrated to all corners of the globe have been subjected to that very same taunt everywhere they’ve been? But you know you are losing the battle when the president of the United States himself so lacks reflexivity as to use exactly this kind of language.

Recently, I watched The Final Quarter, a film about the booing of the indigenous footballer Adam Goodes in Australia.The film makes clear how racist the booing was. But there was no clear sense as to why the crowd kept on booing well after many were pointing to the racist nature of the booing. To me it became clear that the crowd was booing Goodes precisely because they were being told not to boo him. More than wanting or not wanting to be racist towards Adam Goodes, they didn’t want to be told to reflect on the nature of their racist booing. That is, the crowd were booing the politics of reflexivity itself.

I am thinking these events in terms of reflexivity because, at the moment, I am teaching my students about the work of Pierre Bourdieu, a sociologist who has most elevated reflexivity to a social scientific technique. Bourdieu-ian reflexivity demands that social scientists reflect systematically and rigorously on the way they collect and analyse data and the way their relation to what they are researching is part of the very constitution of the object being analysed. Bourdieu differentiates between structural reflexivity which involving analysing the social position from which one is gazing at the world and biographical reflexivity which is the analysis of one’s personal formative history. But the two are nonetheless related and to me, Bourdieu’s reflexivity was the ultimate stage in a university education marked by a continuous examination of oneself and one’s prejudices. Becoming aware of the way we are marked by our position within the relations of exploitation and domination that structure society was by far the most personal dimension of getting an education. It meant that education was never just about acquiring positive knowledge about the world, it involved working on oneself to become better. 

I come from a middle-class Lebanese Catholic culture that saw itself as uncritically pro-western in its outlook. It is a culture which bristled with all forms of classism (looking down at poor people and seeing them as responsible for the state they are in), sexism, racism (towards Muslims and Arabs whom we were encouraged to think of as 'not us' and as backward, but also towards blacks) and homophobia. As such, as I saw it and still see it, there was endless room for reflexivity and for bettering myself. Most importantly, I internalised the firm belief that reflecting on oneself and working on oneself to be less sexist, less racist, less homophobic, less transphobic was, firstly, a never ending job  –  I will always have traces of these structures in me and have to continuously work on myself in this way, and, secondly, it was a good thing  –  it was good for society and it was good for me personally to work on myself in this way. And it is this firm belief in the goodness of reflexivity and critical self-awareness that makes me look with alarm at those un-reflexive moments described earlier. It seems that they are an increasing trend that is part of the backbone of the turn towards reactionary politics today. As with the boo-ers of Adam Goodes, there is a revolt against an imaginary super-ego and a reactionary sense of liberation from ‘having to watch oneself and be careful lest we hurt someone.’

I am not alarmed because some people are unable to be reflexive. One of the advantages of a Bourdieu-ian education is that it invites you to be reflexive about reflexivity itself. Reflexivity needs some social conditions for its flourishing and indeed, the university has been one of the main places where these conditions exist. There is no point assuming that people who are reflexive are so simply as a matter of will, or worse still, because they are morally superior people. Being overworked and worried and tired and feeling besieged in daily life does make one less open to reflexivity. Even in the most mundane of ways. I myself can say that I am less willing to be receptive to a reflexive critique of my residual sexism vis a vis domestic labour if I am feeling tired and irritated after a long working day.

An inability to reflect on the social conditions that allow one to be more multicultural, non-sexist, etc. is a form of non-reflexivity that is specific to the liberal middle-class. Rather than seeing its ‘openness to change’ as the product of its ‘life of ease’ this middle class sees itself as morally superior. It uses its liberalism as a mode of asserting forms of class distinction and superiority over working class people. The latter are portrayed in the process as vulgar and unable to be reflexive. This, in fact, is not true. There is a long tradition of reflexivity and openness to change among the working classes. Except it is less ‘show offy’ than middle class ‘openness’ and not as good to use in the United Colours of Benneton-type ads of glossy magazines. As such this very down to earth, matter of fact and non-declarative working class reflexivity is kept out of the visual culture of global capitalism. It is made invisible. It is one of the unfortunate aspects of the history of reflexivity that this invisibility has made it evolve predominantly in the form of a de-facto alliance between reflexive intellectual culture, middle class forms of anti-sexism, anti-homophobia and anti-racism etc. and global capitalism. This alliance has been most detrimental to the spread of reflexive politics outside of urban liberal spaces and blunted its progressive political potential. 

To be clear though, the main problem today is not the people who are not reflexive enough but can be. It is those who defensively think that reflexivity is a bad thing and who are encouraged to do so by various media shock jocks and politicians. For such people being invited to reflect on one’s sexism or racism is not seen as an invitation to ameliorate oneself. Rather it is lazily experienced as a mode of being put down and victimised. Lazily, because it is a license to not do anything at all. While some of the classist modes in which this demand for reflexivity have been made have contributed to its rejection, there is no doubt that anti-reflexivity is also a reflection of the self-interest of a greedy section of the population who sees itself as deserving more and who has put its desire for economic social climbing before all else. This population has grown to see those who make demands of reflexivity as political enemies who have nothing truthful to say. Their demands to be sensitive when speaking about people’s weight, people’s physical appearances, etc.. are laughable examples of ‘political correctness’. Invented, but occasionally real, examples of a lazy political correctness gone wild were used to delegitimise what in essence is a good down to earth reflexive politics. One can laugh at the effort to use ‘s/he’ instead of ‘he’ and show an awareness of the gendered nature of politics. But is it anything more than an effort to be considerate and aware of the way gendered relations of power mark our lives and our writing and an effort to combat them? Even an invitation to reflect on better ways to relate to nature in the face of global warming is seen today by the anti-reflexive mob as an elitist pack of lies, and as yet another strategy by this elite to victimise ‘ordinary people’ and stop them from accumulating wealth. For, as seen from this anti-reflexive perspective, the reflexive elite is alarmist and interested in propagating guilt. In fact, there is nothing to be guilty about and everything is really ok: it is ok to use plastic, it is ok to mine for coal, it is ok to be sexist and, most of all, let’s not forget, “it’s ok to be white.” The last thing needed is someone telling us we need to critique ourselves.

We have had several years now of the legitimisation of this smug self-satisfied rejection of the reflexive imperative in the form of rejecting ‘political correctness’, or rejecting ‘navel-gazing’ as John Howard, in Australia, scornfully called it. It can be said that anti-reflexive culture as an ascendant force has seized power in several parts of the world. We are also seeing it aiming to enter the university in the guise of the need for programs that educate people in ‘Western Civilisation’. The idea that to celebrate certain Western texts is a defence of ‘Western Civilisation’ while the reflexive writing that critiques those texts for their racism and sexism is an attack on Western Civilisation is intellectually poor, for what is the reflexivity I am talking about other than a finer moment in Western civilisation (though one should be aware that there are other reflexive traditions)? The idea is in fact so obviously intellectually poor that one feels that it would be quickly recognised as such by many more people if it wasn’t so ‘financially rich’. But this is true of the whole anti-reflexive tradition.