Reflexivity Quotes

“Another anti-theoretical stratagem is to claim that in order to launch some fundamental critique of our culture, we would need to be standing at some Archimedean point beyond it. What this fails to see is that reflecting critically on our situation is part of our situation. It is a feature of the peculiar way we belong to the world. It is not some impossible light-in-the-refrigerator attempt to scrutinize ourselves when we are not there. Curving back on ourselves is as natural to us as it is to cosmic space or a wave of the sea. It does not entail jumping out of our own skin. Without such self-monitoring we would not have survived as a species.”
― Terry Eagleton, After Theory

“Although scholars such as Butler have debated such approaches as reinforcing problematic identity models and creating an either/or distinction, Lather is referring to the power of using the discouraged discourse as an act of transgression. Thus, embodiment and reflexivity are tools used to disrupt current language and assumptions about the value of female bodies through a voluptuous validity. The term "voluptuous" is not used as an objectification of a sexualised body, as seen through the male gaze, but rather as an ownership of the body through a somantic fullness. Characteristics associated with female, body, fluids, excess, undisciplined, and out of order aspects are purposively used as an act of rebellion against patriarchal taboos.”
― Jill Green

“Our attention is responsive to the world, but the world is responsive to our attention.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“But knowledge alone is not a sufficient basis for making decisions.”
― George Soros, The Alchemy of Finance

“Sociology suffers from a certain problem: any social knowledge it produces gets fed back into the system, which is thereby changed. This means that sociology is always describing the social field the way it was before sociology described it.”
― Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory