86 CHAPTER THREE
for cognition and therefore provides a nonlinguistic basis for the enactment
of culture. But if bodily practices are inflected with and constrained by
external structures that organize their temporal, motivational, normative,
and spatial aspects, then so are embodied simulations. Lizardo writes, “any
social setting that acts directly upon the body for a given collective will
necessarily result in the sharing of similar ‘practical presuppositions’ about
the world. The reason for this is that any ecological and/or social technol-
ogies that serve to modify the body (Wacquant 2004) will also result in the
transmission and ‘embodied simulation’ (Gallese 2000) of other members
of the group of similar bodily techniques, and thus the ‘picking up’ of the
embodied concepts embedded in those patterns of practice” (343).
Lizardo is primarily concerned to address how the body “serves to highly
delimit the natural diversity of possible logics or ‘forms’ of practice” (346).
However, in the logic of Bourdieu and Wacquant, differences in social en-
vironments would create different outcomes. Boxing clubs and finishing
schools would result in different practical competencies (and, potentially,
different motor schema). Departing further from Lizardo’s argument here,
I think it also follows that such differences could also lead to embodied
conflicts and dissonance. I argued in the previous chapter that a focus on
embodiment requires that we reject, rather than adopt, generalized and
universalizing epistemologies. As Bourdieu recognizes, the bodies we bring
to interactions are not generic but historicized. What’s more, embodiments
are not all the same, even when we find them together in the same settings.
Embodied social interactions are not best understood as isolated and seam-
less couplings of matched beings, but rather as complex assemblages of
multiple actors and intersecting conditions.
In Gallese’s account, embodiment seems to be not so much a variable,
diverse situation as a stable and universalizing source of experience. Em-
bodied simulation theory assumes, for example, that a brain should echo
the neural firings of an observed person’s brain in certain conditions, or
that two different brains would generate the same intentional attune-
ment of an observed other. Failure to echo neurally another’s felt expe-
rience or intentions — in other words, requiring explicit effort to under-
stand them — means that one’s mirror neuron system is broken. Embodied
simulation theorists have advanced this as an explanation for autism and
are pointing to fmri studies that have found diminished mirroring in the