82 CHAPTER THREE
alone) and determinism (fixing mirroring processes and the precognitive
and cognitive functions they are thought to support). It also treats our ca-
pacities for understanding one another’s intentions and felt experiences as
universal. It accounts for difference, misrecognition, and dissonance only
through pathology, with attention to cognitive disorders such as autism. In
this sense it is heedless of the complexities of lived experience, such as how
race, class, gender, and other social forces organize bodily experiences, dif-
ferentially affect our relations to spaces and objects, and infuse individuals’
perceptions of and feelings for others.
Biological Relationality
Beginning from the neuron outward means measuring what are perceived
to be fundamental aspects of intersubjectivity within an individual brain.
Obviously this approach risks solipsism and biological reductionism.
Other approaches to intersubjectivity (which have their own limitations)
begin externally, with the mutual interaction of body- subjects. In feminist
psychology, for example, theory of mind is a product of “collaborative con-
struction” that is “built out of experiential, pragmatic knowledge acquired
in an interpreted, social world” (Nelson et al. 2000, 76). The experiential
and pragmatic knowledge described in the embodied simulation model is
neither collaboratively constructed nor acquired through interpretation. It
is, however, at least in theory, shared and social. This biological sociality,
which does not require language and conscious effort, is precisely what
appeals to affect theorists, body- focused sociologists, and other scholars
interested in how subjectivity is “bypassed in favor of a direct linkage of
the social and somatic” (Protevi 2009, xi). Mirror neurons are social with-
out being cultural in either the intellectualist or poststructuralist sense;
they suggest the movement of information and feeling without need of
discourse. As Lisa Blackman notes of affect theory, however, this approach
“is in danger of reinforcing the very neuro- reductionism it is at pains to
avoid... [when it] retreats to the singular neurophysiological body in order
to explain the transmission of affect between people” (2012, 76).
To be genuinely social, biological mechanisms must be affected in some
way by social interaction, which always occurs within contexts. While they
should not be seen as “inscribed” by culture, to be social as well as mate-