Abstract
The idea that our knowledge of the world must incorporate an awareness of the impact of our presence in it has been central to the modern project, suggesting a reflexive dimension to such knowledge. The limits of this, and the paradoxes engendered by ignoring them, are sources of the distortions and rationalizations that result in practice, whether for the individual or in organizational contexts, where protocols of reflexivity and accountability produce a collapse of rationality into its opposite, an imposed, and arbitrary routine. These tensions can be precariously resolved through ‘style’, but still reveal a necessary inscrutability of the subject to itself, resulting in a fracturing of our experience of the world that project seeks to master, manifest at the individual level in the repetitive pattern of addiction, and showing the need to distinguish between a motivational ‘unconscious’ and a modernist or reflexive ‘non-conscious’.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jervis, J. (2018). Reflexivity and the Project of Modernity. In: Modernity Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49676-8_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49676-8_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-49675-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-49676-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)