Reflexivity, Mind, and Identity: The Examined Life and Art

By way of approaching the subject, it bears consideration why phenomena of self-reference and (self‐)reflexivity should relevant in the first place. One reason is that indeed, they appear often and in sometimes surprising places. Another is that when and where they appear, they tend to cause no end of trouble. We are aware that Kurt Gödel brought down the elaborate edifice of Russell and White-head’sPrincipia Mathematicaby showing that their formal system could not ac-commodate statements about itself and maintain internal consistency, and we

 Niklas Luhmann,Law as a Social System[], trans. Klaus D. Ziegert (Oxford: Oxford UP,

):–, see also–.

 Cp. Khachig Tölölyan,“The Contemporary Discourse of Diaspora Studies,”Comparative Stud-ies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.():–,–.

 Kim D. Butler,“Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse,”Diaspora. A Journal of Transnational Studies.():–,.

are familiar also with the sense of vertigo induced by M.C. Escher’s Drawing Hands. In relating phenomena of reflexivity to the mechanisms and structure of human cognition and of products of culture, Douglas Hofstadter has offered highly stimulating and complex observations in his 1979 Pulitzer Prize winning bookGödel, Escher, Bach. An Eternal Golden Braidand the more recently publish-ed re-statement of its main argument,I Am a Strange Loop.Hofstadter presents self-reflexivity of the Gödelian type as a“loop”that allows a system“to‘perceive itself’, to talk about itself, to become‘self-aware’,”and he argues that“in a sense it would not be going too far to say that by virtue of having such a loop, a formal systemacquires a self.”⁶He likens these loops to an abstract Mobius strip“in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive‘upward’

shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle.”⁷Such recursion is a crucial aspect of the way our mind works:

Consciousness […] is an inevitable emergent consequence of the fact that the system has a sufficiently sophisticated repertoire of categories. Like Gödel’s strange loop, which arises automaticallyin any sufficiently powerful formal system of number theory, the strange loop of selfhood will automatically arise in any sufficiently sophisticated repertoire of cat-egories, and once you’ve got self, you’ve got consciousness.⁸

The idea that complexity produces self-sustaining systems that will also become aware of themselves is developed by Hofstadter at great length, and there is no space to discuss this nexus here in detail. Ernst Cassirer notes that in Western cultural history, self-knowledge is widely acknowledged as“the highest aim of philosophical inquiry” and that man, indeed, “may be described and defined only in terms of his consciousness.”From Plato onwards, the fundamental an-thropological question,“What is man?”, has been answered:“Man is declared to be that creature who is constantly in search of himself–a creature who in every moment of his existence must examine and scrutinize the conditions of his existence. In this scrutiny, in this critical attitude toward human life, consists the real value of human life.”⁹

Douglas R. Hofstadter,Gödel, Escher, Bach. An Eternal Golden Braid[] (New York: Vintage Books,):.

Douglas R. Hofstadter,I Am a Strange Loop(New York: Basic Books,):‒.

Hofstadter,I Am a Strange Loop,.

Ernst Cassirer,An Essay on Man. An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture[]

(New Haven, CT: Yale UP,):–.

It is the ubiquity and the apparent centrality of reflexivity for human nature that makes it a worthwhile subject of inquiry on principle. There is, however, a more specific relevance of the subject to the topic of this volume. In aesthetics, reflexivity has proven a very stimulating subject of scholarly inquiry. From the most general and fundamental perspective, reflexivity is a feature of any work of art. The idea behind this claim is that art must signal its own‘artificiality’

in order to facilitate its actualization as art in the first place. If it fails to do so, it is treated as ‘not-art’ and therefore not actualized – in a case such as Beuys’s famousFettecke, with the direst consequences. Art is seen as self-reflex-ive in that it reflects the circumstances of its own production (in terms of the con-tingent historical context as well as those authorial intentions that went into it), although this mode of reflection notoriously involves significant ambiguity and requires the hermeneutic engagement with the artifact. To treat an object as art is to consider it as a medium in a communicative exchange between‘proffered meaning’and‘meaning-seeking’; and the precarious outcome of this exchange is predicated on the reflexive entry into this art-specific mode of meaning-seeking.¹⁰A different kind of self-reflexivity is also involved when works of art signal their relation to other existing works of art, thus commenting on their sta-tus as part of an existing‘system’or tradition of art, either approvingly or criti-cally. Genres, for instance, are commonly conceived of as means for the classifi-cation of works of art that signal certain communicative properties associated with their specific form, and in the case of literature, they delineate a given text as ‘literary,’ as Derrida argues in“The Law of Genre.”¹¹ Finally (although the list could be much extended), art is also sometimes said tocause self-reflex-ion on the part of its recipient and will tend to further self-knowledge. As Richard Posner puts it,“[i]f you don’t already sense that love is the most important thing in the world, you’re not likely to be persuaded that it is by reading Donne’s love

 Reinold Schmücker,“Ist Kunst reflexiv?,”inDie Sinnlichkeit der Künste. Beiträge zur ästhe-tischen Reflexivität, ed. Georg W. Bertram, Daniel Martin Feige, Frank Ruda (Zurich: Diaphanes,

):–,.

 See Stefan Schenk-Haupt,“Die Einteilung der literarischen Gattungen und die Problematik der Lyrik,”inGattungstheorie und Gattungsgeschichte, ed. Marion Gymnich, Birgit Neumann, Ansgar Nünning (Trier: WVT, ): –, . Derrida says that genre marks a text, and by reflexively‘re-marking’on its own genre-markedness, the text signals its nature as ‘lit-erature’:“this re-mark–ever possible for every text, for every corpus of traces–is absolutely necessary for and constitutive of what we call art, poetry, or literature.”See Jacques Derrida,

“The Law of Genre,”Critical Inquiry.():–,–.

poems, or Stendhal, or Galsworthy. But reading them may make you realize that thisiswhat you think, and so may serve to clarify yourself to yourself.”¹²