Reflexivity is the art of turning the gaze inward, of recognizing that we are never just observers—we are always entangled in the thing we seek to understand. It is the scholar acknowledging that their hands are not clean, that their questions are shaped by the world that made them. It is the writer who understands that the story is not just about what is written, but about who is writing it and why. It is the economist who sees that predictions do not just describe markets, but move them. Reflexivity is the reckoning, the awareness that knowledge is never neutral, that every inquiry bends toward the one who asks it.
Frankétienne understood reflexivity as both a necessity and a trap—a constant turning inward that reveals the fractures in our knowing, the ways we are shaped even as we attempt to shape. He spoke of it as a kind of existential vertigo, where the writer, the thinker, the artist becomes both the subject and the object, both the hand that writes and the text that is written.
For him, reflexivity was not just about acknowledging one’s position in the world—it was about being ensnared in it, about seeing how language folds back on itself, how meaning is never fixed but always in motion. It was the spiral, that infinite looping of self and society, history and imagination, forever bending, forever shifting.
To engage in reflexivity, then, is not just to recognize the self in the story, but to realize that the self is the story—written and rewritten, pulled by forces seen and unseen, moving through a world that is always, in some way, writing back.
One of his most striking reflections on reflexivity comes from his engagement with the spiral as a metaphor for existence and creation:
“L’écrivain est pris dans la spirale de son propre texte, il est à la fois le créateur et la créature, le démiurge et le pantin.”
(“The writer is caught in the spiral of his own text; he is both the creator and the creature, the demiurge and the puppet.”)
This captures the essence of reflexivity in his work—an endless interplay between control and surrender, between the one who writes and the one who is shaped by the writing.