Going Meta as Reflexive

A communication is reflexive when it makes prior communications the subject of communication, attending to them as communications, rather than to their manifest meaning or truth content. This is one of Watzlawick, Beavin and Jackson's (1967) senses of the term, "meta-communication," viewed broadly as any communication about a communication.(6) An example they provide is of a secretary responding to her boss's paradoxical injunction by commenting on the form of his communication, rather than staying within the frame (p. 197). This example is clearly different from uses of "meta-communication" to refer to self-referential messages, as in "This is an order," appended to a verbal command, or a no-nonsense look accompanying the command. Watzlawick et al. characterized our preferred sense of "meta-communication" as "an ability or inability...to step outside the circle" of prior communications (p. 197). Bateson (1955/1972) had earlier characterized such reflexive address by means of a different metaphor, that of a shift in levels of communication.(7)

To further illustrate the sense of meta-communications as reflexive, suppose that Lou and Sue are having an argument, expressed by rounds of elemental disagreements about their respective truth claims:

It's true

No way. The truth is --

That can't be. As I was saying--

Wrong!

Here the conversants are communicating about each other's communications, but it would be odd to say that either party meta-communicated reflexively, because each responds to the other's manifest content.

But suppose that Lou or Sue were to break the cycle of assertion and counter-assertion by saying, "We're not getting anywhere. Let's look the word up in the dictionary." The observation on the dyad's lack of progress would be a reflexive meta-communication and would count as a meta-move.(8).