Reflexivity (Bourdieu)

Reflexivity, for Bourdieu, is not the narcissistic self-examination that the term suggests in popular usage. It is the methodological and ethical discipline of examining the social conditions that produce one's own perception — recognizing that the categories through which one understands the world are themselves products of social position and therefore partial, interested, and potentially complicit in reproduction. The sociologist who studies dominated populations must also study the conditions of her own privilege, the institutional position from which she observes, the habitus that structures what she sees and what she cannot see. Reflexivity is difficult precisely because it requires perceiving the water one breathes as water — making visible the doxa one inhabits, which is the precondition for contesting its terms. In the AI age, reflexivity is the capacity to see that the signal one brings to the amplifier was socially produced.