I am in every way sympathetic to the significance of the phenomenon referred to as reflexive transformation, understood as a symptom of something being art under contemporary conditions, as described by Juliane Rebentisch and Jacob Lund, among others. Still, I want to raise a few questions in direct continuation of these writings, since they hunt me while striving to activate the phenomenon in my analytic work.

Firstly, both Rebentisch’s and Lund’s writings do not directly take into account a decade of feminist and decolonial critique of the problematic precedence of reflexivity, rationality, and self-cultivation (bildung) over affect, irrationality, and ignorance both within the sciences, within politics, and in our everyday lifeworld^[1]1 I am particularly thinking about work done by Audre Lorde: Sister Outsider – Essays and Speeches (1984) in which she writes: “The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us – the poet – whispers in our dreams: I feel, there I can be free.” (p. 38). But also work done by Donna Haraway: “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism” (1988), Rosi Braidotti: Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women and Contemporary Philosophy (1994), Toril Moi: “I am not a women writer” (2008), Deborah Heikes: The Virtue of Feminist Rationality (2012), Edward W. Said: Orientalism (1978), V.Y. Mudimbe: The Invention of Africa (1988), Homi Bhabha: Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation (2004), and Walter D. Mignolo: “Prophets Facing Sideways: The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference” (2005), among many others.. While I understand that the intention might be the complete opposite, I find that appointing the ability within art to generate reflexive transformation as one of the few positive indicatives of something being an artistic practice “proper” intrinsically connects the phenomenon to modern ideals of a disciplinary, self-transcending, democratically abled self. As described by countless critics, this ideal self is imagined coming into being as a result of critical reflection that allows for the (unreflective) self to differentiate itself from its everyday lifeworld and the more or less urgent bodily needs attached to it.

Such a critique of Rebentisch and Lund is somehow “easy” and the potential discussion it sparks has been performed repeatedly over the course of the last 50-40 years, so no need to take it further her. What is more interesting, at least in my opinion, is to ask what consequences this implied precedence of reflexivity over more bodily circumstances has for the analytic potential of the term. In Rebentisch’s and Lund’s writing on the phenomenon, I find a lack of reflections regarding the more “practical” or "material" (in lack of better words) dimensions of reflexive transformation. Under which spatial-temporal conditions can an intense exchange between an interpreting subject and a sensemaking object come to qualify as reflexive transformation? E.g. How long does it take? Can the reflection take five seconds and fly away again, or does it have to be of a more substantial character? Allow me to draw in Lund’s references: Nelson Goodman points to the when of something becoming art, Rebentisch points to Kant’s mode of thinking as a process that establishes a reflexive distance between subject and surrounding lifeworld, and Lund also repeatedly writes about reflexive transformation as processes of sense-making and signification. It seems plausible to conclude that reflexive transformation is something that happens over time and in space, but I would like for us to have a more advanced language for talking about what conditions the time and space of such potential transformations.

While a part of Rebentisch’s project, at least to my understanding, is exactly to conceptualize the work of art as a situated and processual experience (erfahrung) emerging in-between objects and subjects, it is unclear to me how and when and where this process takes place. Inside the mind of the subject? Or is it predominantly a bodily experience? Can we talk of different scales of reflexive transformation? “God” or “bad” reflexive transformation (imagine a situation in which someone, by experiencing an artistic practice unfold, feels motivated to respond violently to her surrounding lifeworld)? Are the means which lead to reflexive transformation in a sense subordinate, if the result is reflexive doubt which might lead to transformation which again might lead to a better lifeworld for some or for all?

I would suggest that we talk of processes of destabilization effectuated through artistic practices, rather than reflexive transformation. In my opinion, destabilization signals a less hierarchic, less settled, more bodily anchored, dynamic and elusive movement taking place; but still, a no less important or potentially significant movement for both the experiencing subject and the sensemaking object.