I FEEL YOUR PAIN 83rial they must be entangled with collective patterns of experience. This
includes not only patterns that foster mutuality and empathy but also those
that differentiate populations, generate inequalities, and foreclose mutual
recognition. And their epistemic outcomes — the attunement, empathy, and
recognition they purportedly afford — cannot be monolithic and universal,
but must be modulated in some way through experience. In the absence
of these complexities the intersubjectivity we get from mirror neurons is
all epistemic harmony, universal empathy, and “domesticated affectivity”
(Slaby n.d., 2), without conflict, dissonance, difference — at best, a carica-
ture of sociality, and certainly not one that most affect theorists endorse.
An immediate impediment to a genuinely social analysis is the claim
that mirroring is biologically fixed or hardwired as the result of evolution-
arily adaptation. The early accounts of mirror neurons by the Parma re-
searchers and their collaborators lean heavily on evolutionary perspectives,
for example, when Gallese admonishes, “When trying to account for the
cognitive abilities of human beings we tend to forget that these abilities
were not modelled and put in place as such, but they are the result of a long
evolutionary process” (2001, 40; see also Gallese and Lakoff 2005). Initially,
mirror neurons and their associated functions appeared not only as innate
and automatic, but also unskilled. Although they operate in an intersubjec-
tive context, and supposedly perform functions that support intersubjectiv-
ity, the neurons themselves are not transformed by, but are already coded to
respond to, the actions of the other. A later hypothesis is that mirror neuron
systems are developmentally plastic. Infants are born with a rudimentary
mirror neuron system, which is “flexibly modulated by motor experience
and gradually enriched by visuomotor learning” in early life (Gallese et
al. 2009, 106). Iacoboni (2008) suggests that while most mirror neurons
are present at birth, some may develop afterward. Further, mirror neurons
are “partially coded by experience” and can acquire new properties later
on through learning (42). However, the need for a broader recognition of
plasticity is acknowledged by Gallese, who claims that the more we learn
about mirror neurons, the more we have to see them as situated in the per-
sonal histories of mirroring subjects. “By internalizing specific patterns of
interpersonal relations we develop our own characteristic attitude toward
others and toward how we internally live and experience these relations.
It can be hypothesized that our personal identity is^ —^ at least partly^ —^ the