The X-Factor Performing Reflexivity as Indeterminate Praxis

This article addresses practices of reflexivity, drawing on a number of stimuli, including Zizek's formulation of Lacan's "prisoners game," whereby different circumstances generate a typology of reflexive responses from the prisoners in their competitive efforts to win freedom. The article also draws on reflexive performances based on literature and in history, and more extensively on the art of Rene Magritte. These various reflexive performances are then related to the reflexive "praxes" of the authors' doctoral study. We conclude that reflexivity is always part of a necessary uncertainty, whose "remainder" between the visible and the invisible, the present and the absent, generates an inescapably qualitative symbolon.