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Abstract
In this paper, I argue that the recent work on mirror neurons illuminates the character of our capacities for a politics of resonant receptivity in ways that both help us to comprehend the damages of our contemporary order and suggest indispensable alternative ethical–strategic registers and possible directions for organising a powerful movement towards radical democracy. In doing so, neuroscience simultaneously contributes to our understanding of the possibility and importance of a more durable (less fugitive) radically democratic habitus. While the trope, ‘radically democratic habitus’, may seem oxymoronic in light of Bourdieu's extensive rendering of ‘habitus’, I suggest that research on mirror neurons discloses ways in which iterated practices and dispositional structures are crucial for democratic freedom.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author wishes to thank P.J. Brendese, Lia Haro, and Chris Heubner for their important reflections on an earlier draft of this essay.
Notes
1. William Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity American Style (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 11.
2. Ibid., 40.
3. Ibid., 15.
4. William E. Connolly, A World of Becoming (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 142–47.
5. Ilya Prigogine, The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature (New York: Free Press, 1997), 71.
6. John Holland, Emergence: From Chaos to Order (New York: Basic, 1998), 5.
7. Ibid., 5.
8. Prigogine and Stengers refer to resonant energy as ‘nonlocal’, insofar as it emerges between beings. It is thus perhaps emblematic that the discovery of ‘mirror neurons’—the energetic receptors involved in such resonance—likely happened not as a result of the intentionality of a subject-researcher, nor even within that locality we designate as the ‘human’ but rather accidentally in a chance observation of resonance between a macaque monkey and a human. As Vittorio Gallese, a neuroscientist deeply indebted to Merleau-Ponty, reached for something during a break in his research on a brain-wired monkey, he heard the computer unexpectedly register monkey-brain grasping activity even though the monkey was entirely still. (There are other versions of this ‘origin’ story involving other researchers, yet all seem to point towards ‘nonlocal’ interspecies serendipity.) Gradually, Gallese and numerous other scientists working in Giacomo Rizzolatti's laboratory in Parma were drawn to investigate this seemingly impossible trans-being neurological activity, and from this work eventually a whole field of inquiry emerged for which Rizzolatti received a Nobel Prize many years later, Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring People: The Science of How We Connect with Others (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008), 10–11.
9. Ibid., 152, 155.
10. Ibid., 133–4.
11. The dynamical interactive biocultural character of this development is further indicated by the growth of ‘new properties’ in monkeys’ mirror neurons as a result of their repeated exposure to humans using tools that the monkeys do not yet use nor comprehend ibid., 42. It is also indicated by the change in mirror neurons that occur in relation to practices, as I discuss below.
12. Carl Zimmer discusses the complexity of smiling and interpretations of smiling in Carl Zimmer, ‘More to a Smile Than Lips and Teeth’, New York Times, January 25, 2011. Smiles are not simply about harmony and love: they can be about happy emotion, relations of power, embarrassment and so forth. Chris Huebner brought this article to my attention, which was published the day after I presented a shortened version of this essay at Canadian Mennonite University, and he was pushing me to discuss additional complexities involved in resonance and mirror neurons. On this latter point, see my discussion of (and additional endnote on) political resonance below.
13. Iacoboni, Mirroring People, 111.
14. Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions, trans. Frances Anderson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 48.
15. Ibid., 50.
16. Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricoeur, La Nature Et La Regle: Ce Qui Fait Que Nous Pensons (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1998), 137.
17. Vitorio Gallese, ‘The ‘Shared Manifold’ Hypothesis: From Mirror Neuron to Empathy’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 8. In general, Gallese's writing appears to the most ‘philosophical’ of the group of scientists in Parma and is deeply influenced by Merleau-Ponty (2001), 33–50.
18. Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain, 137.
19. Ibid., 117.
20. Iacoboni, Mirroring People, 26.
21. Holland, Emergence: From Chaos to Order, 5.
22. The vitality of these relationships and the way in which we are disposed to enter them are further indicated by the fact that our pleasure is profoundly oriented to this interworld, as is manifest by the great joy babies, children and adults take in imitation games.
23. Iacoboni, Mirroring People, 51. Iacoboni is quoting from Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained.
24. Although I think Patchen Markell's concept of ‘acknowledgment’ is more complexly alloyed with ‘recognition’ than he theorises (and the term and its promise must thus unendingly struggle with ‘recognition’ to become that to which Markell gestures), I, nevertheless, find his discussion illuminating in and I am indebted to it here, Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
25. Iacoboni, Mirroring People; Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Inc: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
26. Iacoboni, Mirroring People, 171, 172.
27. Ibid., 157.
28. James M. Kilner, Marchant, Jennifer L., and Fristh, Chris D., ‘Modulation of the mirror system by social relevance’, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 1 (2006): 147.
29. Dimittrios Kourtis, Natalie Sebanz, and Gunter Knoblich, ‘Favouritism in the Motor System: Social Interaction Modulates Action Simulation’, Biology Letters 6 (2010): 760.
30. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
31. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 167.
32. Roman Liepelt, D. Yves Von Cramon, and Brass Racel, ‘How to We Infer Other's Goals from Non-Stereotypic Actions? The Outcome of Context-Sensitive Inferential Processing in Right Inferior Parietal and Posterior Temporal Cotex’, NeurolImage 43 (2008): 785; Marcel Brass et al., ‘Investigating Action Understanding: Inferential Processes Versus Action Simulation’, Current Biology 17 (2007) 2017–2021.
33. Harry Boyte, Commonwealth: A Return to Citizen Politics (New York: Free Press, 1989); Harry Boyte, Everyday Politics: Reconnecting Citizens and Public Life (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2005).
34. Michel Foucault, What Is Enlightenment?, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 50.
35. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 72.
36. Ibid., 94.
37. Ibid., 1.
38. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 601–06; Sheldon Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy”, in Democracy and Difference: Contesting Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).