Philosophy of the Performing Arts

194 performance as art
without visually observing its own face.^15 Mirror neurons, it is claimed, are
involved in certain kinds of cross-modal neurological connections which
“translate” between our visual apprehension of the world and our acting on
the world through our motor systems.
Shusterman appeals to mirror neurons in defending the possibility, pro-
posed by Zeami Motokiyo, a renowned teacher of Noh theater, that an actor,
while acting, should not only “look ahead” to see the other actors, the audi-
ence, and his place in the full theatrical performance, but also “look behind.”
To “look behind” is to “see” how one appears to those spectators who are
behind one, and to modify one’s performance accordingly. Shusterman con-
siders three hypothetical accounts of how such looking behind might be
possible. First, an actor might use literal mirrors, properly configured, to
view his back in various postures, and note through proprioception how the
different postures feel. By associating different postures with their different
feels, the actor could then infer how he looked from the back from how his
posture felt. Second, an actor A could enlist another actor B to adopt various
postures and could observe these postures from behind. The mirror-neuronal
system would produce a firing of the same neurons in the observing A as
are firing in the posturing B , and this could generate in A “a proprioceptive
feel of that action, a felt understanding that the actor could confirm perhaps
by then imitating the posture and seeing whether his taking this postural
attitude indeed produces this kind of proprioceptive feelings” (Shusterman
2009, 142). The third possibility attempts, via a “highly speculative and
improbable” strategy, to make literal sense of Zeami’s talk about the actor
seeing himself as the audience views him from behind:
If proprioceptive feelings of posture could generate through mirror-neuron
systems a corresponding visual input of that posture, then in principle
someone very skilled in vivid proprioceptive awareness might be able to
generate a visual image in his mind of how his posture would look ... from
his own proprioceptive self-observation of his posture or movement.
(Shusterman 2009, 142)
We need to say something briefly about proprioception, which plays a
role in all three of Shusterman’s scenarios. We noted above that Merleau-
Ponty and Gallagher share a conception of the “body schema,” as the uncon-
scious basis of spontaneous bodily intentionality. This is to be contrasted
with what Gallagher terms the “body image,” a system of perceptions, atti-
tudes, and beliefs pertaining to one’s own body that are accessible to con-
sciousness. In the case of both body schema and body image, a crucial role
is played by proprioception, the means by which we obtain information
about, and awareness of, the positions and movements of our own bodies.