Ilan Gur-Ze’ev (University of  Haifa, Israel), with Jan Masschelein (KULeuven, Belgium) and Nigel Blake (Open University, UK)
 
 

Abstract
This article sets forward a new concept of reflection, to be contrasted with more usual readings of the concept, for which we use the term 'reflectivity'. The contrast is related to a distinction between normalizing education and counter-education. We claim that within the framework of normalizing education there is no room for reflection, but only for reflectivity. In contrast to reflectivity, reflection manifests a struggle of the subject against the effects of power which govern the constitution of her conceptual apparatus, her knowledge, her consciousness and her limitations and possibilities for successful functioning. Reflectivity re-presents the hegemonic realm of self-evidence and the productive violence of social and cultural order. Reflection, by contrast, aims to challenge the supposedly self-evident and the present order of things. Reflection aims at transcendence and represents a moral commitment in respect of the otherness of the Other, which power relations in every realm of self-evidence oblige us to neglect, to destroy or consume. Transcendence is a concrete utopia, and so is the subject in her nonrepressive communication with the Other: they are part and parcel of our present possibilities, sometimes in microscopic arenas, struggled for, and from time to time even realized.

Keywords
Reflection, reflectivity, counter-education, normalizing education, subject, the Other, transcendence, utopia, justice, dialogue.
 

The current educational rhetoric of reflection raises great hopes but also makes great pretences: it promises the stimulation of reflection among teachers and students by the use of new teaching methods. It also proposes new versions of reflection as well as new attitudes towards it. The issue of reflection has become a focus of many diverse orientations and opposing interests, but there is too little attention to the meaning of the concept itself.
In this article we will open up an examination of the concept of reflection and its diverse uses within different political, ideological, philosophical and cultural contexts. We will also try to broach and elaborate an alternative concept of reflection within the framework of an alternative educational arena, which we call “counter-education” (Gur-Ze'ev 1998 and Masschelein 1998) and use the term to distance ourselves somewhat from “Critical Education”, though we certainly come close to arguments and positions that are often associated with and elaborated within that movement.

Some writers sometimes refer to 'self reflection' (Lather 1994, 119), 'transformative reflection' (Doll 1993), the 'reflective act' (Derrida 1973, 63-65), ‘reflexive discourses’ or ‘reflective institutions’ or reflexive cultures (Adam 1996, 141) or 'self-reflective' communities (Brown 1994, 25). We consider reflection a uniquely human potential. Reflection necessarily pertains to some “subject” or to some “one”.  However, we believe that this subject of reflection is not the epistemological subject or the knowing subject but the responsible or ethical subject i.e. the subject that is not detached but affected or addressed by other people and events involving them, and therefore not indifferent but responsible. This responsible or ethical subject does not seek or provide the explanation or prediction of human action by relating it to historical or social conditions or ‘facts’, but rather refuses to accept the force of putative ‘facts’ or the course of history and attempts to reach a judgement on this history. Reflection acknowledges the radical indeterminateness of human action, that is, the freedom of action to break through history, to interrupt the factual and actual course of things, to make a new beginning (Arendt) which puts in question every previous explanation of events. Therefore reflection acknowledges the need to judge the meaning of history and the responsibility to do so. This acknowledgement which expresses itself in the desire to judge (and act) testifies that the subject is affected or addressed from beyond itself and has to respond. It testifies that the subject is open to the (totally) Other and not simply produced, manipulated and ever reproduced within the historical process.

It is possible to conceive reflectiveness as a susceptibility to events and to think of events as figures of a reality which itself in no way presupposes conditions of possibility that could justify or explain them. This conception of an event does not equip us with anything positive or negative with which to address historical situations, to respond to ethical challenges and new political possibilities. It gives us no guidance concerning our responsibility towards the Other or towards ourselves or towards the prospects of a future dialogue, of reflection or of overcoming wrong, the bad, wickedness or evil. Nonetheless, this conception does manifest the openness of being and the openness of the subject and of her potential dialogue with the Other. When we understand the concept of reflection within this particular framework, we do not treat it as a merely negative element. Yet nor do we treat it as a positive basis on which a better human future is to be erected, as proposed by some utopians such as hooks (hooks 1990), Grossberg (Grossberg 1998) and Giroux (Giroux 1992 1992) within feminist, multiculturalist and postmodernist discourses. Rather, this way of understanding reflection  is complementary to or an aspect of Walter Benjamin’s conception of the ‘Messianic moment’, an event which forces itself on reality from outside history and into the present (Benjamin 1974, p.203).

Prayer, as reflection, manifests a connection between the historical and that which is other than historical, that of which history is part, that which in a way makes history possible whilst aiming at transcendence within it and from it. Prayer, as reflection, however, is struggled towards or realised by suffering human beings, themselves manipulated in many ways by others. The struggle takes place against an historical background in which the realm of the supposedly self-evident (2) is elaborated, developed and ever extended. Reflection, in this version, makes manifest an openness of possibility which is realised in prayer as an instant moment of negativity, as opposed to some on-going process of  positing alternatives within the realm of the ‘self-evident’ (a process itself part of that realm). Reflection, in this respect, constitutes both a kind of transcendence for the subject (who becomes specifically an ethical subject and is part of a dialogue which always involves a response to the Other), and a realisation of responsibility towards the Other, and to the not-yet or never-more.

By contrast, liberal and Enlightenment conceptions of reflection represent it as a dynamic process which can be institutionalised. We think there is indeed such a kind of activity which confirms, advances and develops the realm of  the currently self-evident,  but we want to call it “reflectivity”, to contrast it with “reflection”, the process discussed above which requires judgment and the transcendence of  the supposedly self-evident.Within a dialogic process, there can be a place for genuine reflection, provided dialogue remains uninstitutionalised.(3)  But ultimately dialogue which remains open to 'reflection proper' can never be pre-required to be“efficient”, “profitable”, “right” or popular. So we shall reserve the term ‘dialogue’ by definition for an uninstitutionalised form of interaction.

Why do we need this distinction? For that which Levinas calls 'the ethical I', transcendence is an act and not a process, and yet even as an 'overcoming' of history it is always historically situated and so has a concrete context.   There is a tension between the ethical I and the subject as a partner in a dialogue, even where each of them is nothing less than a Utopian idealisation. The ethical I is involved with the subject as partner in a dialogue and enters there into a process where reflection becomes more contextualised, although as a process of negation rather than confirmation of the present realm of self-evidence. Yet reflection is determined within a magic circle: it is an act of freedom, and moreover of struggle over the very possibility of freedom. It demands and is conditioned by the diversity of human freedom and possibilities, on the one hand, and on the other also demands acts of responsibility and courage, towards oneself and towards others. But therefore, as a human activity, reflection takes place in a social arena and it plays a unique part within that arena - though a problematic part, as will be shown. This is why, whether as a realised or a non-realised potential, it is always ultimately both an individual, yet also a social process. As such, reflection is only one element of a rich, complex, and dynamic human intersubjectivity. Reflection is always distorted, partial and situated amid conflicting forces, aims and orientations.

As part of human intersubjectivity and as a social process, reflection has not only a role but also a place. Language is the home of reflection. Yet linguistic meanings are never ‘givens’ and we cannot use language to ‘deduce’ the universal validity of particular meanings. Language can never accommodate an ideal of transparency, can never justify itself in its own terms. Therefore the subject, which can only constitute itself in and through the use of language, can never be unrestrictedly autonomous in its self-constitution. This is not to imply that the subject is caught inextricably in heteronomous and thus repressive social relations. Within counter-education, there is room for transcendence from subjectivity as it is constituted by normalising education and transcendence as part of a process of overcoming the given and the self-evident. Transcendence is also a central element of dialogue as part of counter-education.

However, even in the transcendence of the ethical I (and certainly not within a dialogical process), the “subject” cannot be fully and entirely self-constituting. This is just as true moreover within the process of reflection itself, even as a private and personal struggle for overcoming psychological and ideological distortions and for self-elevation. Within counter-education the critical reconstruction, the resistance and transcendence which are possible within a dialogue can advance concrete political involvement and commitments, yet this resistance and transcendance can never constitute a positive general theory and praxis of political truths, or of the transparency of reality or of a possible transparency and self-constitution of the self. Here there is only a room for an absolute commitment to a negation of present “reality”, not for absolute thruths or moral absolutes. The case is different, however, for the ethical 'I' in Levinas' sense, an 'I' which precedes cognition (Levinas 1987 (b), p.56) and critique: here, confronted with the otherness of the Other as the totally other (Levinas 1996, pp.62-63), the I  faces the absolute - her responsibility towards the Other - yet it has no words or theory, and only as such it faces the infinite (Levinas 1987 (b), p.166). This constitutes an absolute transcendence from the hegemony of facts and precedes or overcomes the project of creating or searching for transparency and justice. In counter-education, two versions of transcendence relate to its two versions of reflection (as we shall see), as opposed to reflectivity. In each of its versions, counter-education nvolves an openness in which there is room for challenging, if not overcoming and transcending, education as normalisation, as an evasion of reflection and transcendence.

Transcendence is a human imperative - part of what it is to be truly human. And the possibility of transcendence is also a pre-condition for a dialogue, within which reflection is realised. Yet transcendence is always historically limited. Human beings cannot but live in the realm of necessity, limitations and distortions. Transcendence is not a neutral possibility. It is a response. A response  to a call from beyond the apparently self-evident and which enables us, by creating openness, to overcome 'mere life'. The possibilities of the realisation of transcendence, however, vary in different historical stages, in different cultural arenas and in different social settings. The conceptual, emotional and political limitations and possibilities, the impotence inflicted by a normalising education play a special role both in preventing transcendence and in its distortion.

Reflectivity cannot give birth to transcendence because it is concerned with the apparently self-evident, the positive. But reflection, as a potential of the ethical subject, and as an open possibility for all who struggle against normalising education within a dialogic process, makes transcendence possible. Yet is not the only way to transcendence. In the last resort transcendence is realised where the messianic moment bursts into the historical; in this moment, the immanent is broken (Masschelein 1996, p.99). In the moment of rupture, the self-evident is problematized and deciphered, new possibilities arise from the very fact that the self-evident, the facts, do not have the last word and the violence of the normalisation process is broken, postponed or questioned. This means that transcendence has to be realised in the local “microscopic” arena, not as part of grand total alternative to the given reality. This manifestation of the messianic moment within history is always a struggle for overcoming, but rarely an act of successful overcoming. It is not necessary conceptual and rational and can sometimes burst out as a passionate act which is neither rational, legitimate nor expected. It is not characterised by success, but rather by its refusal of the given, which is characteristic of the ethical 'I'.

Reflection is immanently a process of active negation. It is a special kind of refusal of “the given facts”. Within the Utopia of reflection, the ethical I questions the realm of self-evidence, cracks it open and examines it very closely. It is never solely a positive element, or simply “functional” for the stasis of a social system. This is why reflection is necessarily at odds with positivistic orientations and hegemonic groups and tendencies in any society. It is a source of the dissenting spirit and an arena for alternatives to self-evident, productive and controlled relationships. Necessarily, it negates normalising practices and their ‘self-evident’ philosophical, ideological and social foundations.

It seems to us that the political and philosophical potential for dissent which makes reflection dangerous to any current social system, currently induces the agents and representatives of our own system to foreclose or disrupt actual potentials for reflection and their social and conceptual pre-conditions. There are certainly successful strategies within contemporary managerial practice which develop distorted or adulterated versions of “reflection” which are controllable and socially “constructive”. Such strategies divert reflection (perhaps unwittingly) into underwriting the self-evidence of the social order, justifying it and developing its controlling and repressive potentials. In a world of capitalist globalization, this is manifested quite dramatically in hegemonic educational strategies, similar educational projects found in diverse corners of the global economy, as the need grows for the international system’s ever greater sophistication, for ever more controlled and advanced reflectivity and flexibility, functional for capitalist reproduction and technological advance. The result is that this kind of “education for reflection” actually narrows the scope and possibilities for reflection. In particular, the idea of “reflection” gets used and promoted in pursuit of instrumental control, absorbed into the further promotion of instrumental rationality and thus itself subject to “rationalisation” and control. In such ways as these, the promotion of reflection as an aim of education comes to subvert and negate education altogether as a form of critique and a route to transcendence. Reflection in this adulterated sense refers to a theoretical attitude which aims at explanations, predictions or understandings of human action which in fact disregard the full scope of human freedom (and creativity or transcendence) and therefore sidesteps the demands of responsible judgment.

Our claim is that the flexibility of the political order, its reproduction and its progress are determined by social and economic trends whose inner logic has the potential to undermine any intellectual and political developments which rely on more than narrowly instrumental rationality. (Amongst the ways of doing so, they call for and incubate 'alternative' quests, logics, truths  and values.) The current order’s greatest enemy is the inherent human potential for a kind of unrestricted reflection which cannot but challenge the hegemony of instrumental rationality and the concomitant abandonment of transcendence and of any utopian politics. Any call for something radically different from the present order and its rationalised and systematically enforced industrial and social relations, is its enemy. (Anyone who doubts the potential of this system for evil, if only when it fails, should attend to the unfolding dynamic of economic and social disruption in East Asia, where the spectre of fascism has been glimpsed by quite level-headed commentators. Comparisons with the situation of post-Versailles Germany have been made.)

Counter-education presupposes the potential of change for the individual . And it presupposes an essential difference between a subject and an object. An object is not defined by passivity. Some objects are very active, intermittently, or permanently, like a volcano, an artificial heart or a computer or the Internet network.  Moreover, intensity and sophistication do not make the difference between object and subject, nor the potential for self-regulation. A refrigerator or a market also exhibit these properties. The distinguishing mark of the subject is its responsibility towards the totally Other and the self: its potential to accept responsibility and to unveil an openness towards the other than the given, even the given self and her strivings and truths. The subject as a potential partner in a dialogue and as a potential ethical 'I' can change into something other than social forces impel it to be, and as such can become undetermined. This is a special kind of autonomy, very different from the one proclaimed by the Enlightenment, by the free market apologists or those ideologues of the Internet who praise it as a free environment for autonomous individuals from Toffler (Toffler 1994) to president Bill Clinton (Clinton 1997). The kind of autonomy we refer to is a human possibility, but not a given fact. However, even as a possibility it is not a manifestation of omnipotence or of  the active dimension of the subject. In a sense it displays something of the vulnerability of the subject in its relation to the infinite: that even when its openness is not blocked or distorted, when its actions are not impeded by manipulation, even at this rare moment, its autonomy reveals the subject as “being chosen” by something totally other, a “passivity”, an enclosure which makes possible its response to the call of the totally Other, its realisation of responsibility towards the Other, its transcendence. As such the subject suffers this kind of autonomy which is potentially at odds with the present order and at odds with her current way or life or mode of being. This potential realisation of the openness of the subject is a concrete Utopia, and the subject receives “her” orientation or passion from beyond her historical horizons, from “outside” them. The subject needs to struggle for its realisation in two connected arenas : i) a struggle within and against its social and existential conditions, and ii) a struggle within and against its conceptual, emotional and ethical conditions.

The subject realises her potential not as a monological thinking entity but as a reflective partner within a dialogical process; a process in which the prevailing realm of self-evidence and of her own existence, its present constitution and goals, are questioned. Reflection presupposes the possibility of the subject’s ethical act of transcendence and of acceptance of responsibility for the other and of her eventual alienation from her present identity and from the self-evidence of the given facts. A subject can and should distance itself from the self-evident and from what it was ‘made to be’, can transcend these by its realisation of reflection and self-reflection. No machine, however sophisticated, will be able to transcend itself within a dialogical process as a fulfilment of any such ethical obligation.

It is this unique human potential, and the possibility of responsiveness to the Other which differentiates human beings from objects, be they even the most sophisticated objects of Artificial Intelligence. This would hold true even in the most fantastic event of machines becoming able to master reflectivity, “transcendence” and “dialogue”, and not just discursive communication: For even in these cases, there would be no possibility of the ethical act or of ethical affect or for that kind of response which makes possible reflection and transcendence. The transcendence hypothesised for such machines could only imitate the transcendence typical of human life and human capabilities, without replication of human ethical commitment. The story of 2001: a Space Odyssey might illustrate this residual difference. After all, the space machine in 2001, sophisticated as it was, did not and would not change its determined course, once “emancipated” from its state of mechanical control in the service of human interests. This is exactly how the rocket fell short of any potential for transcendence; genuine transcendence is manifested in a dialogical process and as fulfilment of an ethical obligation, not merely as a realisation of an epistemological potential. The same point applies to cyborgs and to human participants in cyberspace.

Dialogue is a concrete Utopia. Or, in other words, in dialogue we can experience some trace of the possibility of transcendence of the realm of self-evidence and of what happens currently to be called reality. Thus, dialogue affords a glimpse of an ever- and always-possible utopia, not one which lies at the end of a long, difficult and actually never-ending voyage or trajectory. This glimpse of transcendence is therefore not a regulative idea (not some telos inherent in our human nature as communicative beings), but a concrete possibility offered to us by the otherness of the Other. As is shown in the Socratic example, it is impossible within dialogue to separate the love of truth from love for the dialogic partner. Moral responsibility for truth and for the other person are inseparable. Dialogue aims at transporting subjects beyond the current realm of self-evidence towards new horizons and new, more human, possibilities.

This detachment from the given and the self-evident is governed by the possibility that each subject can be supported, enriched and challenged by the other. The partner in dialogue is acknowledged in her otherness, irreplacable as a particular person, in her difference rather than her sameness (Levinas 1987 (a), p. 48). At the same time, the dialogue which makes possible a certain kind of transcendence is a political event and is socially contextualized, although impossible to reduce to historical developments, power games and symbolic exchange, as some writers in the tradition of Critical Pedagogy commonly suppose (Giroux 1992, pp. 78, 134). Self-elevation is never a narcissistic inner movement or act of self-creation, but manifests rather a response to the otherness of the other as totally Other. It is a social relation which is not a mere effect of those powers external to the dialogue which control and distort it, forming the subject into a mere agent of the system. Recognition of the Other as totally different and, as such, as an equal partner and a possible source for new perspectives and possibilities, is a pre-condition for the transcendence and elevation of each subject participating in such non-violent communication. In  dialogue, as distinct from discourse, participants are pragmatically committed simply to rational practices but ethically committed to each other, and they can achieve transcendence only jointly, or not at all. Dialogue is also a conversation with tradition: it is linked to the present order of things and to a realisation of the imperative, the need for its negation. In two different ways, dialogue is a way of life: as a Utopia and as a unique moment in which the continuum of the Same is overcome and self evidence is broken. In this moment, the totality of normality is altered and room is made for an alternative.

Human unreadiness for the call to transcendence and for dialogue between the 'I' as a person and the Other as the totally Other, is neither an accident nor a result of manipulation which can be reconstructed and overcome. It is a normal human situation. To be unready for dialogue is part of the order of things and a natural aspect of human beings functioning as (active) things. It is responding to the call and entering a dialogue which is unusual, a scandal, an accident that normalising education is committed to render impossible, or at least rare and insignificant. We should not treat all distortions and opacities as if they were extraneous to dialogue and the subject, as if they are necessarily threats from a wicked outer world or as if the subject were not itself deeply distorted and fragmented. Distortions and opacities are always present both in dialogue and in the subject and some are even constitutive for them and not “bad” “things”. If we are ethically responsive, we are profoundly touched and altered by the Other. Why else might we bother to engage in dialogue  anyway? This otherness affects us unavoidably and does not depend on recognition of the Other as an equal partner or possible source of alternative potentialities.

In some historical cases, the chances are better for readiness of partners for dialogue. In such instancs, reflection can be struggled for directly. In other cases. things are more difficult. In any event, a dialogue is determined by solidarity between its partners, their  shared alienation from the given and the self-evident.

Reflection is not simply a matter of transparency and personal authenticity. Nor is reflection simply a synonym for rational discussion and decision about the good, because reflection itself is not ethically neutral. Reflection, and the kind of transcendence it involves, are possible only for concrete beings. The crisis inherent in reflection is only possible for a concrete individual and only a concrete individual can be challenged by the Other. Only in concrete levels of individual interchange can we experience differences, and we need to experience them if we are not to be indifferent to the Other.

The relation of reflection and transcendence has to be understood at two levels. At one level, the ethical 'I' is confronted with the totally other, and its supercession of the realm of the 'self-evident' constitutes a unique individual experience in which no rational argumentation in institutionalised “dialogue” can be of much help. Here, reflection makes possible transcendence in its totality as the subject is confronted with the Other as an absolute otherness, to whom one can relate as an ethical 'I' who acknowledges her responsibility. However, as Levinas shows, this kind of reflection has no words and is prior to political involvement. But in contrast to Levinas, we think that what happens at this level is closely related to what happens at another level where reflection (as opposed to reflectivity) is realised: namely, within the public sphere and within dialogue about the good, in the framework of critical reconstructions and rational critique. We think that there is a distinction between these two levels but that they are always closely related. This follows from the point that the ethical 'I' can also become a partner in the dialogue, and that other participants are also confronted with nothingness, freedom and the quest for transcendence from the self-evident and from normalising education.

In today’s Western societies, the progress of technology and the globalization of capitalist attitudes and practices promote a kind of discourse about reflection and an actual practice called “reflection” which deserve our special attention. They are becoming central elements in a kind of education which is actually socialisation in a pejorative sense. They advance a bogus kind of critique which will ultimately provide justification of the foundations, practices and aims of current power relations and of the current realm of self-evidence. They promote an education committed to the production of subjects who will be neither interested in nor capable of fundamental reference to the otherness of the Other, of critique, nor of transcendence, or of essentially changing the present order of things. By contrast, this is what counter-education is about.

Counter-education, as a negative to institutionalised education, is committed to dialogue, negation and transcendence, and against normalisation. Therefore it answers to the challenge of a prevailing educational practice which serves and represents the current order of things. Counter-education reacts against the closure of possibilities enacted by the prevailing educational formation, in its formal and informal practices, in schools and also in social interaction and within culture at large. Counter-education seeks to defend and empower the reflective potentials of the subject against the self-evidence of the order of capitalism, against those practices of normalisation which secure and develop the present order and present critique, resistance and hope for essential change as irrational.

Functionalist and instrumentally-oriented educational theories and practices which serve the present order such as those offered by the Israeli Industry Association (Weis, Gaon, Apelbaum 1996) may offer to the student a ready-made and spurious form of autonomy which is complicit with, and rewarded by experiences of daily life,(4)  rather than positing the very concept of autonomy (autonomy as a condition forced on the subject, a realisation of her openness which is unpredicted in terms of the governing rationality).  They may even validate the cheerful abandonment of autonomy as an ideal. This generally occurs in conjunction with a promotion of individuality, critique, renewal and anti-traditionalism, yet also in a context of conservatism.

Some putative attempts at developing or realising the autonomy of the subject are in fact ultimately determined by its very negation and falsification. Autonomy is related neither automatically nor easily to the project of emancipation. Autonomy is supposedly promoted today in many functionalist-instrumentalist-oriented educational projects, under such slogans as “Developing skills”, “Advancing achievements”, “Excellence”  or “Sophisticated Consumption of Media” projects. In all of these, the subject is reduced merely to a potentially effective producer-consumer, yet acclaimed as a vital individual, the essential particle of the capitalist order, “the individual”. This  rhetoric of the“critical” or the “innovative” misleads many and is consumed under the name of “reflection”. It is what we choose rather to call reflectivity.

Within this framework, reflection is little more than feedback. It has no Utopian telos and the present order is its only source of yardsticks, aims and possibilities for self-critique. Of course the present order has its own “dynamic”, and “reflection”, in the sense of reflectivity, can be a response to it. But in this case it is a response to problems arising as part of the modern, instrumentalist ability to plan and foresee the future course of events. Reflectivity, in contrast to reflection, is not informed by “something” beyond the present order, something other, irrepresentable and unimaginable. It is inherently conservative. As an educational practice, it is committed to the standardisation of the individual and the circumscription of her intellectual possibilities. In other words, when developing the “reflective subject” and her potential as an advanced agent for the reproduction of the system, this kind of education manifests the height of its success in the reduction of the subject to an agent of the system, and thus in a Kantian sense to a mere object. There are at least two possible views as to how this minimization of intellectual possibilities is achieved. One is to see it as a form of standardisation of the individual. On the other hand, a Foucauldian analysis would emphasise that individualisation as a promotion of individual differences - almost a kind of de-standardisation - is functional for modern societies, which requre a diversity of human capital.(5) But both forms of analysis would concur in seeing the internal demands of the social order as subverting the possibilities for struggle over the ethical possibilities of the subject.

The real reason for the current success of a hegemonic rhetoric of reflection is the advance of capitalist globalization, presupposing as it does the development of technology within the orientation of instrumental rationality and with respect to the requirements of the market. But the kind of “reflection” admired by some postmodern educators ius no less problematic (Giroux 12993, p.x and Lankshear, Peters and Knobel 1996, p.173). The latter differ on many important points, yet in their feminist, multiculturalist, post-critical and post-colonial versions they share a dangerous conception of “reflection” which seems to us no more than reflectivity. Their common ground is a repudiation of the ethical 'I' (and of the potential for reflection within a range of possibilities for transcendence made possible by the encounter of the totally Other) and also an abandonment of the idea of the universality of reason, and of the humanist emancipatory project and an acceptance of the inevitability of marginalization, repression and victimisation - abandoning or ignoring the importance of struggling against that ‘inevitability’ itself. For all their critique of metaphysics, ontology and ethnocentrism, these versions of post-modernism collude in a new version of ethnocentrism (as in such cases as the postmodern justification of Afrocentrism or feminist separatism). They  repudiate the possibilities of a dialogue which is a moral, political and philosophical practice leading to the kind of reflection we have described in connection with counter-education.

These educational versions and concepts of reflection, in all their diversity and shared opposition to the system, ultimately profess a kind of subjectivism which is only too well suited to the globalization of capitalist production and consumption. This subjectivism is itself part of a market in which identities and knowledge are privatised and reified and reduced to commodities. Under such conditions, there is no room for the ethical 'I' nor for possibilities for reflection for the subject as a partner in any rational dialogue which could treat the question of the good in the public sphere.

Some ways of realising the human potential for transcendence are not reflective. Some are anti-dialogical and committed against reason and its universality, and therefore against universal emancipation as well. In practical terms they amount to hindering resistance to an order which systemically and rationalistically blocks any struggle for transcendence. In such an order of things, the autonomy of the Other is not valued or promoted, and injustices committed against her will not nourish solidary responses. Reflection, then, is a moral and political issue as much as it is an epistemological issue. And the two different projects also reveal opposing moral attitudes, that of education as normalisation (and within it, reflection as feedback, namely reflectivity) against that of counter-education as commitment to emancipation (and reflection as transcendence of the self-evident and in itself a commitment to the emancipatory project).

The potential for transcendence is a pre-condition for challenging injustice and for moral responsibility towards “the other”, and therefore also for a non-violent response to the otherness of the Other as a potential partner in critical dialogue.  That is why we should struggle to secure its realisation.
The sustained realisation of reflection is nothing less than a Utopia. Utopia or 'the Messianic moment' does not refer to a perfect future human condition but rather to an eruption of the totally other into normality which disturbs the self-evident and makes it possible for the subject to become a 'someone' and not a 'something', to enter reflection and transcendence even if only for an unredeemed moment. Utopia is not a reality which can be positively, fully and directly realised (Gur Ze'ev 1998 and Masschelein 1998). Any attempt to institutionalise reflection necessarily ends up in its transformation into its own negative, reflexivity. This is what happens to many postmodern, feminist, multiculturalist and post-colonialist oppositional educational strategies too, and not just within the hegemonic functionalist-instrumentalist educational project. But as the antithesis of reflexivity, reflection is conceptually intertwined with it and proponents of reflection should acknowledge the importance and the delusion of reflectivity. Reflection is inherently incompatible with current power games, themselves fertilised by injustice, misery and intellectual impotence and incompatible with the Utopian axis of reflection. However, present reality and its contradictions, no less than its scientific and technological advances, also contains some valuable occasions and resources for reflection when these are critically reconstructed within the emancipatory framework of counter-education.

The possibility of reflection is provided not only by the technological, social, and cultural possibilities of today. It must also refer to and make use of current conceptual possibilities, especially the most advanced of these. Enlightenment and liberal concepts are of vital importance to this project. However a counter-education which is committed to reflection as an alternative to reflectivity must also acknowledge the limitations of even the most advanced dialogical projects.

Enlightenment, liberal AND POSTMODERNIST programmes SUCH AS THE ONES SUGGESTED BY RORTY, CRITCHLEY, MCLAEN AND BURBULES WHO attempt to institutionalise OR SECURE reflection sometimes involve notions of dialogue which are too limited, because they too often abandon its Utopian axis. They remain committed to ideals of transparency and truth but their understanding of reflection overlooks its negative dialectics, the immanence of power in any positive quest for truth and that any such form of reflection may lack partners.

Reflection as we conceive it cannot be institutionalised or rationally sustained or located as an alternative to the norms and reality which it challenges. As part of counter-education it cannot be socially maintained by sacred violence of some kind without becoming reflectivity and without counter-education becoming normalising education. The Utopia of reflection, however, is actually realised from time to time in the most concrete way within dialogue or as political activism inspired by it. But even then, reflection is especially vulnerable and partial since it is stuated within the historical process and exposed to the influence of governing power relations. Reflection is realised as a sudden possibility by the ethical 'I' when addressed by the totality of the absolute Other. The infinite otherness of the Other emancipates the subject from power relations and from the constraints that bind her historical context, and this makes possible a less vulnerable form of reflection. Reflection makes its appearance as part of the encounter with the Other and with her suffering, and is always a burden, painful and demanding for the person who responds to the her fellow human being as 'someone'. This manifestation of the totally other, of the non-historical is ultimately a possibility that bursts in “from outside”, as it were. When it happens, it constitutes a radical alternative, a wholly different way of life to the triumph of the violence of normality, even if only for an escaping moment. This is why counter-education and reflection will never have the upper hand, yet this is also the reason why normalising education can never have complete triumph either, never overcome the dialectics of reflection and reflexivity and finally secure the human being as a something rather than a 'someone', a someone capable of reflection, responsibility and transcendence.
 
 

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Notes

(1) This text is the result of a long discussion between the authors. It would have been a completely different text if we would have treated the subject each seperately. We certainly do not agree on all the formulations and statements in this text, but we  accept the ambiguity which therefore remains present in the text. We felt it to be more important to react to the actual triumph of 'realism' in which every utopian inspiration seems to be absent, than to avoid all dissent between us.

(2) Throughout, we shall use 'self-evident' and its cognates to refer to those matters which empirically are taken to be self-evident in a given society; not to philosophical propositions (such as the Cartesian cogito) taken to have some kind of self-validating status - in other words, we use the term in an anthroplogical rather than metaphysical sense.

(3) By institutionalisation, we refer to the subjection of dialogue to institutional aims or requirements. There is, of course, a quite opposite use of the term in Habermas, for whom the 'institutionalisation of discourse' refers precisely to the protection of interaction from such pressures and its defence against them. See Nigel Blake (1995).

(4) This program is committed to develop "a reflective subject", "creativity", "flexibility" and "multi-horizontal thinking" as pre-conditions for successful invention, production, distribution, and to selling these developments profitably as commodities in the capitalist market. Here the market, its imperatives, and its yardsticks play the role of the traditional "absolute" or "God". The subject of this education is supposed to adjust him or herself according to the logic of the market, its gods, its imperatives, and its values.

(5) This is, of course, the central thesis of Discipline and Punish.