Self-Reflexivity

I have never truly understood what it meant to be "self-reflexive." The definition, "referring to own's self" is a bleak and obviously 2-D representative of a multi-faceted and revealing concept, yet it got the job done in allowing me to use the word without shame when confronted with the concept. However, the facets of self-reflexivity truly envelop the discourses we partake in on a daily basis - is the choice to order an iced, skinny vanilla latte a choice ripe with self-reflexivity, referring to the orderer and the orderer's life choices?

Though that may not be the most stable representation of self-reflexivity, it this practical observation that I am familiar with that helped my understanding of the term. In Mitchell's "MetaPictures," he does not provide the following definition himself, but quotes John Rachjman, who clarifies self-reflexivity in a way that encompasses all of its complexities:

"To say the work of art is 'self-analytic' is to say that it consists in the crisis it goes through, that it is punctuated by moments of 'breakthrough' or 'revelation,' which require that one question one's conception of who one is or how one has invested itself in it. It is to say that a work is constituted through those events that arrest the self-evidence of one's identity and that open other possibilities that retroactively re-interpret it."

Self-Reflexivity is contained in real time, and happens the moment you actively engage with a text and force a re-interpretation of the text through its referral to its own function.

Though texts we have engaged in in class do an astute job of demonstrating self-reflexivity, such as Daniel's Public Secrets, a text that truly came to mind was Shelley Jackson's My Body - A Wunderkammer.  The hyperlinked body parts of Shelley Jackson's body take you on a journey through her somewhat embellished auto-biography. Throughout the hyperlinked creative non-fiction pieces, multiple words are hyperlinked within texts that were brought to you by hyperlinks, and so on and so forth.  As you immerse yourself in Shelly Jackson's "Cabinet of Secrets," you delve deeper into a pool of hyperlinks, sending you spiraling down a rabbit hole where coming out on the other side is truly another trip in itself. Not only is the text self-reflexive of how Shelley's body functions, the hyperlinks translate the self-reflexive concept that Shelley's body functions as a whole and cannot be separated into parts since it doesn't not exist in real life as such - one cannot engage with the ears without traveling through a set of hyperlinks through her thighs, shoulders, and neck. Through this sort of forced attentiveness to content, "Hypertext, in other words, provides an infinitely re-centerable system whose point of focus depends upon the reader, who has become a truly active reader in yet another sense." (Landow, 36) This active readership allows the text to take whatever direction it may, depending on the reader's own choices. Through this, "hypertext does not permit a tyrannical, univocal voice" (Landow, 36).  The text speaks about the reader's interest, and yet also is self-reflexive in the right that it concerns itself with the author's sense of organization. Therefore, lexias presented in "My Body - A Wunderkammer," are "points in space containing all other points" that emphasize the intertextual nature of both the way the literal body works and the way text works in the hyper-textual world.