This is a question I’ve been pondering after an interesting discussion last night. Fractured reflexivity is the tendency of a person’s deliberation to intensify distress rather than leading to a course of action. The process of trying to work out what to do generates anxiety rather than helping them come to a conclusion. Exactly how this manifests itself varies a great deal: the character Llewyn Davis is a vivid example of fractured reflexivity, someone who drifts through his life episodically in a way he finds unsatisfying but seems unable to extricate himself from.
However this is a matter of personal reflexivity. It’s been identified and analysed at the level of the internal conversations of specific individuals. Can a similar process be identified at the level of relational reflexivity i.e. how networked individuals come to orientate themselves reflexively to the relations between them? So rather than discussion and dialogue leading to the elaboration of some course of action for ‘us’, it instead distresses all concerned and actually works to preclude deliberate action? If this is something which occurs then it raises the further question of how social circumstances might work to engender tendencies towards fractured relational reflexivity.
Mark Carrigan 