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The Emotionalization of Reflexivity
Citation for published version:
Holmes, M 2010, 'The Emotionalization of Reflexivity', Sociology, vol. 44, no. 1, pp. 139-154.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038509351616
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10.1177/0038038509351616
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Sociology
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The Emotionalization of Reflexivity
Mary Holmes
Department of Sociology
Flinders University
mary.holmes@flinders.edu.au
Biography: Mary Holmes is a senior lecturer in sociology at Flinders University in
Australia. She has published various articles relating to her empirical work on
distance relationships and to her other research interests in the sociology of the body
and in social movements and emotions. She has recently published The
Representation of Feminists as Political Actors (VDM, 2008) What is Gender?(Sage,
2008) and Gender in Everyday Life (Routledge, 2007).
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The Emotionalization of Reflexivity
Abstract
Reflexivity refers to the practices of altering one’s life as a response to knowledge
about one’s circumstances. Whilst theories of reflexivity have not entirely ignored
emotions, attention to them has been insufficient. These theories need emotionalising
and this paper proposes that emotions have become central to a subjectivity and
sociality that is relationally constructed. The emotionalization of reflexivity refers not
just to a theoretical endeavour but is a phrase used to begin to explore whether
individuals are increasingly drawing on emotions in assessing themselves and their
lives. It is argued that dislocation from tradition produces a reflexivity that can be
very dependent on comparing experiences and can move others to reflect and reorder
their own relations to self and others. Thus emotions are crucial to how the social is
reproduced and to enduring within a complex social world.
Key words: detraditionalization, emotions, reflexivity, routine action, symbolic
interaction
Introduction
The argument that follows is made in an unemotional and non-reflexive mode. Much
sociology of emotions seems to similarly lack emotionality. Applying the highly
rational register required by academic convention may not inevitably stifle emotional
expression in writing, but it is very difficult to write academically and emotionally
about emotions. Why this may be so requires another paper, but I begin with an
apology for the lack of emotionality in this paper because it is an absence I would like
the reader to keep in mind. What I have done is try to be clear, and it is perhaps that
very effort at clarity which has washed away the flavour of the feelings which attend
all our thinking, and which I here argue are crucial in making the social world within
reflexive modernity.
Reflexivity is a capacity via which individual and social lives are produced and
changed as people react to their circumstances in ways no longer governed by
tradition (Giddens, 1990). There has been considerable debate within sociology about
the meaning and importance of reflexivity within the contemporary social world (e.g.
Archer, 2007; Beck, 1992; Beck et al., 1994; Giddens, 1990). These debates have
built upon philosophical engagements with the Cartesian dichotomization of reason
and emotion. Despite this history, efforts to consider the emotional component of
reflexivity have been limited. Highlighting reflexive emotionality will rescue
definitions and explications of reflexivity from their over-focus on the cognitive and
the individual. Instead I propose defining reflexivity as an emotional, embodied and
cognitive process in which social actors have feelings about and try to understand and
alter their lives in relation to their social and natural environment and to others.
Emotions are understood not in terms of some that may retard reflection and some
that may enhance it; rather reflexivity is thought to be more than reflection and to
include bodies, practices and emotions. The first section establishes a starting point
for this argument by showing how theories of reflexivity focused around
detraditionalization and risk (Beck, 1992; 1994; Giddens, 1990; 1992) have
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pessimistically highlighted fear as a response to the difficulties of making calculated
choices within the uncertainty of modernity. Uncertainty renders habitual action
unfeasible, but a wide range of emotions are drawn on to feed reflexive practices
which continue to connect most individuals to each other (Archer, 2003; 2007). The
emotional and relational component of reflexivity are outlined in the second section,
where it is suggested that symbolic interactionism offers ways forward in thinking and
researching. The final section sets out some intitial steps toward understanding the
emotionalization of reflexivity as crucial in current processes of self and social
(re)production. Comprehending emotionalization is vital to examining how
contemporary subjects reflexively produce a sense of feeling, thinking and being in
the world which relies on others.
Reflexivity, Risk, Routine Action and Trust
Theories of reflexivity do not adequately attend to emotions. One of the most
influential of those theories has argued that a proliferation of risk has driven people
towards reflexivity (e.g. Beck, 1992; 1994), but recognising a fear of risk is
insufficient. Beck distinguishes between reflection as about knowledge, and implicitly
rational choices, and reflexivity as the way people are forced into self-confrontation
by social processes such as modernisation and individualisation. For Beck reflexivity
is closely associated with risk assessment as individuals try to deal with risks, like the
high risk of relationship break-up, which they cannot protect themselves against.
However, fear is only one emotion attached to reflexivity and to what extent people
are risk assessors in all areas of their lives is open to question (Elliott, 2002a: 300).
A more humanly emotional view, going beyond the stark calculability associated with
risk, can be generated by examining how reflexivity is positioned between the
reproduction of self and of society (Elliott, 2002a: 300-301). Such a view can
challenge Beck’s (1994) claim that reflection is about knowing, and not to be
confused with reflexivity, which involves self-dissolution. For him reflexivity
describes a reflection free reproduction and alteration of society via modernisation.
This can make people reflect on the threats to self, but it does not inevitably do so.
People have to modify their lives because of what is happening at the social level, but
as Anthony Elliott (2002a: 302) argues that this may be more a ‘reflex’ than a result
of reflection. Like Elliott, I doubt the distinction between reflection and reflexivity,
suggesting that ‘reflection-free forms of societal self-dissolution’ (2002a: 302) cannot
be separated from the individual’s ability to reflect. Social processes may have
unintended consequences, but this does not mean that the reproduction of the social
involves no reflection. Elliot’s work assists in establishing that thinking feeling (not
just fearing) agents play a part in social reproduction but the relationship between
reflective and routine actions requires further investigation.
Detraditionalization describes the shift away from tradition as a guide to life (Giddens
1990); and while not total (Adkins, 2000; Gross, 2005; Thompson, 1995) it means
that people deal frequently with unfamiliar situations in which they cannot rely on
calculation nor on habitual nor routine actions. Uncertainty is thus intrinsic to
modernity and makes rational choices based on the probability of certain outcomes
unfeasible. When there are so many unknown factors in play, it is almost impossible
to predict what is likely to be the ‘best’ outcome. Additionally the pace of change
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means that practices cannot be passed down, for example children show their parents
how to operate computers. The complex division of labour also makes people reliant
on experts to translate and evaluate knowledge claims. Some of the key work on
reflexivity, has thus called into question Bourdieu’s (e.g. 1987) claims about the
centrality of habitus in the reproduction of the social, but with little to say on
emotions. Margaret Archer (2003, see also 1993), for example is supportive, in
theoretical terms, of Beck and Giddens in so far as they highlight the demise of
routine action. Archer claims that routine action cannot be resorted to except for a
reduced number of tasks like cleaning one’s teeth or crossing the road. However, this
relies on a definition of habit as not conscious cognition. Current understandings of
neural processes indicate that decisions might be made and stored to be acted on later
using reflexes (Elder-Vass, 2007). This indicates the need to rethink what constitutes
routine action by blurring the demarcation between conscious reflection and
supposedly sub or unconscious habitual reflexes. The complex implications of this for
non-essentialist understandings of bodies and emotions can only be hinted at here,
under the rubric of agency.
To consider reflexivity as emotional and bodily is a step towards rethinking agency
without rational/emotional dualism. For this purpose Archer’s ideas about agency are
helpful in relocating it as a practice of actual human beings living together in the
world. This requires departing from Beck, Giddens and associated theorists (see Beck
et al., 1994), who conflate structural effects with the powers of individual agents. For
example, Archer (2007) argues that in Reflexive Modernisation Beck et al. (1994) are
deceptive in seeming at first to attribute reflexivity to systems, but later say that
systems cannot be reflexive, only people. For Archer (2007) reflexivity is the mental
capacity of people to consider themselves in relation to their social contexts and their
social contexts in relation to themselves. This position allows that Beck, Giddens and
Lash do have a compelling argument about growing reflexivity, but she finds them
unable to deal adequately with reflexivity as a phenomenon. The most useful aspect of
Archer’s criticism is her attempt to replace their vision of individual subjectivity as
capricious, a constant reinvention in which uncertainty means that people cannot react
rationally in relation to the potential consequences of actions. The problem with her
solution is that evoking ‘rational’ reactions is limiting in allowing for a more
emotional, yet not capricious, vision of agency. In illuminating the ‘internal
conversation’ as mediating between structure and agency, Archer does suggest that
such a conversation entails emotions. Most particularly, she argues that the ‘long-
running internal conversation that shapes our life projects’ is one that is ‘an emotional
matter of finding the particular project attractive enough to see it through and to bear
the costs of subordinating other interests to it’. She is adamant that it would be ‘a
serious error’ to see the internal conversation as ‘purely cognitive’ (Archer, 2003:
101-2). Nevertheless, in making central the cognitive deliberations that she regards as
crucial to that conversation, the part that emotions play remains less well elaborated.
The nod towards emotions is also somewhat obscured by her insistence that we are
talking to ourselves and not, as Mead suggests, to society in the form of some
generalized other. Such a position means that she considers the most important
relations to be ‘those that obtain between the mind and the world’ (Archer, 2003: 94).
Her criticism of Mead relies on reading his theory of the generalized other as over-
socialised in portraying this other as an internalised version of societal expectations.
However, Mead can be read as offering a version of self as continually shaped in and
through actual, as well as imagined, interaction with others - including versions of our