Observing the Observer: a theoretical discourse into empathy through the lens of mirror neurology We explore how mirror

neuroscience might cast a new light on Gilles Deleuzes concept of rhizome and Maurice Merleau-Pontys lived body, providing possible answers in the understanding of the way in which an observer can experience empathy. Our research focuses on the onlookers response triggered in the process of observing actions and expressions of emotions.
Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the

point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency. (9)
Write to the nth power, the n - 1 power, write with slogans: Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don't sow, grow offshoots! Don't be one or multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point! Speed turns the point into a line!24 Be quick, even when standing still! Line of chance, line of hips, line of flight. Don't bring out the General in you! Don't have just ideas, just have an idea (Godard). Have short-term ideas. Make maps, not photos or drawings. Be the Pink Panther and your loves will be like the wasp and the orchid, the cat and the baboon.(23) For Martin Puchner, Deleuze is interested in theatre because it is a live performing art involving the precarious form of presence that characterizes live human bodies on stage. (Puchner2002:526 in pg10) It seems odd that although Deleuze and Guattari culled the notion of assemblage in part from visual art practice in order to develop their theorization of the rhizome, they never mentioned the living artists who invented and developed assemblage.(Stiles1998 in pg14) Is it that, for Deleuze, the whole world is a stage with all of us performing to the rhizomatics of theatricality on the thousand plateaus? (pg15)

A philosophical concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, rhizome is what Deleuze calls an image of thought, being attracted more towards constructive experiments in schizophrenic or 'nomad' thought. Deleuze and Guattari use the term "rhizome" and "rhizomatic" to describe theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation. Definitions:

A rhizome can be at a vegetal and animal level, first through roots, bulbs and tubers, second through the animals function as shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or the weed. (5) Rhizomeroot assemblages are heterogeneous compositions of any complex system,

individual, social, geological.

To be rhizomorphous is to produce stems and filaments that seem to be roots, or better yet connect with them by penetrating the trunk, but put them to strange new uses.

Territorialization equals maintenance. Deterritorialization is dissipation, a move away from an arborescent context, which seeks to package things (concepts, objects, etc.) into discrete categorised units with singular coded meanings or identities, towards a rhizomatic zone of multiplicity and fluctuant identity, where meanings and operations flow freely between said things, resulting in a dynamic, constantly changing set of interconnected entities with fuzzy individual boundaries; to take the control and order away from a territory that is already established; breaking of habits Relative Deterritorialization appears when using psychoactives such as peyote, experientially triggering a loosening of the world view of the user, subsequently leading to an Antiredeterritorialization (remapping of beliefs, models); always accompanied by a reterritorialization. Absolute Deterritorialization is connected to the construction of a plane of immanence which in Deleuzes philosophy means a pure plane. Negative Absolute Deterritorialization appears with the subjectivation(coined by Michel Foucault) process= the construction of the individual subject. Reterritorialization is formation of habits. Line of Flight doesnt refer only to the act of fleeing or eluding but also flowing, leaking, and disappearing into the distance: the vanishing point, the transcendental point with multiple open ways. The body without organs/BwO (a term borrowed from Antonin Artaud): The human form is the carrier of a divine virus and that to liberate man it will be necessary to rebuild him without the organs which are the instruments of Gods oppression in a human form: measuring it, structuring it, articulating it; in other words judging it Organs render the body as slave rather than master. Artauds image of the body without organs therefore contests not only the ways that bodies are structured, but the ways in which they perform, biologically and socially. (pg 40-Laura Cull) Dramatic Reterritorialization often follows relative deterritorialization

As a model for culture, the rhizome resists the organizational structure of the root-tree system which charts causality along chronological lines and looks for the originary source of "things" and looks towards the pinnacle or conclusion of those "things." A rhizome, on the other hand, is characterized by "ceaselessly established connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles." The rhizome presents history and culture as a map or wide array of attractions and influences with no specific origin or genesis. The planar movement of the rhizome resists chronology and organization, instead favoring a nomadic system of growth and propagation.

1 and 2: Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.

A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.(5)

3. Principle of multiplicity: only when the multiple is effectively treated as a substantive, "multiplicity" that it ceases to have any relation to the One.

Multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose arborescent pseudomultiplicities for what they are.(6) EG1: Puppet strings, as a rhizome or multiplicity, are tied not to the supposed will of an artist or puppeteer but to a multiplicity of nerve fibers, which form another puppet in other dimensions connected to the first: "Call the strings or rods that move the puppet the weave. It might be objected that its multiplicity resides in the person of the actor, who projects it into the text." (6)

4. Principle of asignifying rupture: a rhizome may be broken, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines.

EG2: Two different species interact together to form a multiplicity. The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid's reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome. It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing its image in a signifying fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.). At the same time, something else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp.(8) EG3: There is an aparallel evolution, of the baboon and the cat; it is obvious that they are not models or copies of each other (a becoming-baboon in the cat does not mean that the cat "plays" baboon). At a submolecular level, we form a rhizome with our viruses, or rather our viruses cause us to form a rhizome with other animals.(8) EG4: The same applies to the book and the world: contrary to a deeply rooted belief, the book is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome with the world, there is an aparallel evolution of the book and the world; the book assures the deterritorialization of the world, but the world effects a reterritorialization of the book, which in turn deterritorializes itself in the world. (9) EG5: The crocodile does not reproduce a tree trunk, any more than the chameleon reproduces the colors of its surroundings. The Pink Panther imitates nothing, it reproduces nothing, it paints the

world its color, pink on pink; this is its becoming-world, carried out in such a way that it becomes imperceptible itself, asignifying, makes its rupture, its own line of flight, follows its "aparallel evolution" through to the end. (9) EG6: Having roots, the plants have always an outside where they form a rhizome with something else-with the wind, an animal, human beings (9) EG7: Music has always sent out lines of flight, like so many "transformational multiplicities"; musical form is comparable to a weed, a rhizome.(9)

5 and 6: Principle of cartography and decalcomania: a rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model; it is a "map and not a tracing"

The orchid does not reproduce the tracing of the wasp; it forms a map with the wasp, in a rhizome. What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious.It is itself a part of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation..(10) Rhizome always has multiple entryways. A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back "to the same." The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged "competence.".(11) PSYCHOANALYSIS-SCHIZOANALYSIS(no pretraced destiny) Little Hans, an example of child psychoanalysis: keeping on BREAKING HIS RHIZOME and BLOTCHING HIS MAP, setting it straight for him, blocking him, until they had rooted feelings in him, phobia. Freud explicitly takes Little Hans's cartography into account, but always and only in order to project it back onto the family photo. Creating Little Richard's geopolitical maps, Melanie Klein developed photos from them, made tracings of them. Psychoanalysis cannot change its method in this regard: it bases its own dictatorial power upon a dictatorial conception of the unconscious.. In both psychoanalysis and its object, there is always a general, always a leader, General Freud. Schizoanalysis, on the other hand, treats the unconscious as an acentered system, as a machinic network of finite automata (a rhizome), arriving at a different state of unconscious. (16) EG8: Amsterdam, a city entirely without roots, a rhizome-city with its stem-canals, where utility connects with the greatest folly in relation to a commercial war machine. (13) The East more rhizomatic than the West through the lens of the attitude towards forests and agriculture. American rhizome The rhizome: - connects any point to any other point -brings into play very different regimes of signs and even nonsign states. -is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. -is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. -has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills, is intermezzo -constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions having neither subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of consistency -is made only of lines: lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions, and the line of flight or deterritorialization as the maximum dimension after which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature

-is not the object of reproduction: neither external reproduction as image-tree nor internal reproduction as tree-structure. -is an antigenealogy: we evolve and die more from our polymorphous and rhizomatic flus than from hereditary diseases, or diseases that have their own line of descent. (9) -is a short-term memory or antimemory, opposed to long-term memory -operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots. -pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight - is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton -the conjuction of the rhizome is and -is made of plateaus.(19) coined by Gregory Bateson which is : a continuous, selfvibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end.(20) e.g.from Balinese Culture: mother-child sex games, quarrels between men any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome.(20) RHIZOMATICS =SCHIZOANALYSIS = STRATOANALYSIS = PRAGMATICS = MICROPOLITICS These words are concepts, but concepts are lines, which is to say, number systems attached to a particular dimension of the multiplicities (strata, molecular chains, lines of flight or rupture, circles of convergence, etc.). (20)

For Deleuze, the task of art is to produce signs that will push us out of our habits of perception into the conditions of creation. When we perceive via the re-cognition of the properties of substances, we see with a stale eye pre-loaded with clichs; we order the world in what Deleuze calls representation. In this regard, Deleuze cites Francis Bacon: we're after an artwork that produces an effect on the nervous system, not on the brain. What he means by this figure of speech is that in an art encounter we are forced to experience the being of the sensible. Art however cannot be re-cognized, but can only be sensed; in other words, art splits perceptual processing, forbidding the move to conceptual ordering.(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) In other words, the spectator suffers a process
of being deterritorialized and reterritorialised through his sensitivity, catharsis through hubris, empathizing.

Deleuze talks about the effect of sensation as the transcendent exercise of the faculty of sensibility, the muscle of empathy, sentiendum(feeling). Deleuze calls the privilege of sensibility as origin of knowledge, the truth of empiricism. You have to be forced to think, starting with an art encounter in which intensity is transmitted in signs or sensation, the subject being torn apart (the notion of cruelty Deleuze picks up from Artaud). But this presupposes freedom? Can we talk about freedom of feeling? Or are we Robotique creatures? Robotique empathy? Is there passive and active empathy? Does perception management bring to empathy management? Can you be conscious of the shock empathy, maybe the purest form of empathy?

Mirror neuron: a neurological approach to empathy

Giacomo Rizzolatti and Laila Craighero

DELEUZIAN MIRROR NEUROSCIENCE: could be a chained organization of motor

acts plus the mirror mechanism which enables the observer to understand the intention behind an action (the why of an action) by observing the first motor act of an action. The first is that individuals are endowed with a mechanism that makes them voluntarily share the fortunes of others. By observing others, we enter in an empathic relation with them.

The observed action enters into the observers motor representation and recalls his/her similar experiences when doing that action. It is an empathic recognition that makes the observer share the experience of the action agent.(2)
The mirror mechanism appears to be a mechanism particularly well suited for imitation.(3) If mirror neurons mediate action understanding, they should become active when the meaning of the observed action is understood, even in the absence of visual information. Neurons responding selectively to specific action sounds were named audio-visual mirror neurons (Kohler et al. 2002). Mirror neurons signal the action even in the absence of visual stimuli. It would be more complex to specify how the selection of a particular chain occurs.(9) There are various factors that may determine this selection. The first is the context in which the action is executed. The second factor that may intervene in chain selection is the type of object that the experimenter grasped. Typically, food is grasped in order to be eaten. Thus, the observation of a motor act directed towards food is more likely to trigger grasping-for-eating neurons than neurons that code grasping for other purposes. This food-eating association is, of course, not mandatory but could be modified by other factors. The third factor could be the repetition of an action. Different is the case for sensory-motor mapping mechanism. In this case, the recognition occurs because the observed emotion triggers the feeling of the same emotion in the observing person. It is a first-person recognition. The emotion of the other penetrates the emotional life of the observer, evoking in him/her not only the observed emotion but also related emotional states and nuances of similar experiences.(9) Disgust is a very basic emotion whose expression has an important survival values for the conspecifics. In its most basic, primitive form (core disgust; Rozin et al. 2000) disgust indicates that something (e.g., food) that the individual tastes or smells is bad and, most likely, dangerous. Because of its strong communicative value, disgust is an ideal emotion for testing the direct mapping hypothesis. It is very plausible that the mirror mechanism played a fundamental role in the evolution of altruism. (13)

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cull L., Deleuze and Performance Deleuze G. and Guattari F., A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalisme and Schizophrenie, AntiOedipus

http://danm.ucsc.edu/~dustin/library/deleuzeguattarirhizome.pdf

http://www.factoryschool.com/backlight/diagrammatica/index.html
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The Movement-Image The Time-Image