Philosophy of the Performing Arts

performance ii: audience and embodiment 197
arm and facial movements, especially for the neonate. But many of the most
significant movements bearing upon the aesthetic qualities of dance are leg
movements. Here no parallel evolutionary story is likely to be forthcoming.
This is not to say that there are not other kinds of mirror systems that are
more generally operative – for example, the system that relates action to
the imagining of action. If imagining is a neural activity, it seems plausible
that imagining performing a particular activity would activate those motor
areas of the brain enlisted in the performance of that activity. But this isn’t
evidence for a broader range of visuo-motor mirrorings.
Third, and crucially, both Montero and Shusterman assume that the firing
of mirror neurons provides the observer of a given action with propriocep-
tive awareness of that action, and not merely proprioceptive information. For
Montero, this is essential to her argument for third-person knowledge of
proprioceptive aesthetic properties. It is only if I am aware of those proprio-
ceptively given qualities of the movement that form the supervenience base
for the proprioceptive aesthetic properties that I can experience the beauty
of the movement. And for Shusterman, this is an explicit assumption in his
second strategy for explaining “looking behind.” In watching another person
adopt a posture, he maintains, I am proprioceptively aware of how the pos-
ture feels. But experimental work on mirror neurons provides no basis for
these assumptions. First, we have no way to tell whether the macaques whose
motor areas fire when given visual input of grasping behavior feel what it is
like to grasp. Gallagher himself notes that there is no evidence linking mirror
neuron activity to awareness: “studies of mirror neurons are clearly studies
of non-conscious , automatic processes that may or may not be experienced at a
conscious level, although they surely shape conscious behaviour” (Gallagher
2005, 221; emphasis in original). Second, given the role that mirror neurons
play in coordinating visual input and motor activity as part of “primary con-
sciousness,” it isn’t clear what purpose would be served by proprioceptive
awareness, since the relevant coordination proceeds at the level of the body
schema rather than the body image.^19
Fourth, as we saw, Shusterman’s third account of looking behind requires
that an actor’s proprioceptive awareness of the particular posture that he
adopts can stimulate his visual system to produce the (virtual) visual experi-
ence of seeing himself from behind adopting that posture. However, all of the
empirical evidence on mirror neurons runs in the opposite direction – from
seeing someone perform a given action to activation of the motor circuits
involved in the performance of that action. This is not a problem for Montero,
for whom the claimed mirror-neuronal connections at least run in the right
direction. But it is a serious problem for Shusterman.
To be fair, he acknowledges this anomaly in his explanation, granting that
there are no experimental studies that deal with proprioceptive generation