Enkinaesthesia

Susan Stuart's "Enkinaesthesia" is a very attractive notion. Let's check the outline of her idea.

Enkinaesthesia emphasizes two things: (i) the neuromuscular dynamics of the agent, including the givenness and ownership of its experience, and (ii) the entwined, blended and situated co-affective feeling of the presence of the other(s), agential (for example, human, horse, cat, beetle) and non-agential (for example, cup, bed, apple, paper) and, where appropriate, the anticipated arc of the other's action or movement, including, again where appropriate, the other's intentionality. When the 'other' is also a sensing and experiencing agent it is their - in this case, the pair's - affective intentional reciprocity, their folding, enfolding, and unfolding, which co-constitutes the conscious relation and the experientially recursive temporal dynamics that lead to the formation and maintenance of the deep integral enkinaesthetic structures and melodies which bind us together, even when they pull us apart. Such deeply felt enkinaesthetic melodies emphasize the dialogical nature of the backgrounded feeling of being.
[Stuart, S (2012). Enkinaesthsia: the essential sensuous background for co-agency. In Z. Radman. (Ed.), Knowing without Thinking, Palgrave Macmillan, p.167]

The self and the other has its own agency respectively, however, there is the background dimension that makes each agency possible. This dimension is mainly kinaesthetic and affective, since we mutually understand the intentionality of actions through our motor capacity. Enkinaesthesia is so-called and opposed to the word ‘Interkinaesthesia’ because it emphasizes the direct and non-dual experience of the other.

As Stuart also recognizes, Husserl’s theory of the Other, especially the theory of “Pairing” (Paarung), tried to describe that kind of dimension but his attempt was not enough successful.

Merleau-Ponty on Synesthesia (1)

For Merleau-Ponty, synesthesia is a phenomenon which requires us to reconsider the paradigm of sensation and perception. He writes;

From the perspective of the objective world with its opaque qualities, or from the objective body with its isolated organs, the phenomenon of synesthesia is paradoxical. The attempt is thus made to explain it without touching the concept of sensation: it will be necessary, for example, to assume that stimulations ordinarily circumscribed within a region of the brain (the optical zone or auditory zone, for instance), become capable of intervening beyond these limits, and that in this way the specific quality is associated with a non-specific quality. Whether or not there are arguments in cerebral physiology for this explanation, it does not account for synesthetic experience, which thus becomes a new opportunity to put the concept of sensation and objective thought into question. For the subject does not tell us merely that he has a sound and a color at the same time: it is the sound itself that he sees, at the place where colors form. This formula is literally rendered meaningless if vision is defined by the visual quale, or sound by the sonorous quale. But it falls us to construct our definitions in such a way as to find a sense for this experience, since the vision of sounds or the hearing of colors exist as phenomena. And they are hardly exceptional phenomena. Synesthetic perception is the rule and, if we do not notice it, this is because scientific knowledge displaces experience and we have unlearned seeing, hearing, and sensing in general in order to deduce what we ought to see, hear, or sense from our bodily organization and from the world as it is conceived by the physicist.
[Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945/2012) Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Routledge. p.237-8]

According to Merleau-Ponty, we have to learn to see, hear, and sense once again, by thinking of the meaning of synesthesia.

Interpersonal Coordination: Matching and Synchrony

People in conversation highly mesh their bodily movements with each other. For instance, turning their gazes on the same object to share attention, showing similar postures or facial expressions when conversing in tune, synchronizing the speed of speaking or voice inflection, mimicking unconsciously the others' gestures. Conversation is not only the exchange of verbal information but also is the embodied interaction. Nonverbal behavior as embodied interaction probably underpin and facilitate the verbal communications.

Bernieri and Rosenthal conceptualize this kind of behavior meshing as 'interpersonal coordination'. Interpersonal coordination is "the degree to which the behaviors in an interaction are nonrandom, patterned, or synchronized in both timing and form". It can be categorized into two basic types: (1) behavior matching and (2) interactional synchrony.
[Bernieri, F. J. & Rosenthal, R. (1991). Interpersonal coordination: behavior matching and interactional synchrony. in Fundamentals of Nonerbal Behavior. Cambridge U. P., pp.401-432.]

1. Behavior matching
Congruence and similarity of physical behavior between interactants. Two people conversing may posture similarly, lean forward and back, or have their arms or legs crossed in the same way. They may appear to be mirrored reflections of each other.

2. Interactional synchrony
Timing aspect of interaction such as shared rhythm, simultaneous movement, and smooth meshing of interaction. Some interactions occur in a rapid fashion, others are slower or more fluid. Based on the shared rhythm, the interactants are entrained to a certain behavioral cycle and show the simultaneous movements in body orientation, postural change, gaze, vocal activity, facial expressions and so forth. This synchronization enables to mesh interactions of each other.

From the phenomenological side, interpersonal coordination in communication might be re-interpreted from the viewpoint of intercorporeality.