Melody

Bergson understood the profound significance of the melodic character of our experience. Merleau-Ponty and Luria both developed the idea of “kinetic melody” to show how the melodies of the sense-making body’s movement are foundational for our enskilled being in the world. This has important implications for learning and skilled performance. I discuss the three dimensions of expressive movement proposed by Trevarthen⁠—the kinematic, energetic, and physiognomic⁠—as aspects of how we (learn) to move along with others and to move and be moved by them in and through the dialogically entangled kinetic melodies that we co-create with others. I draw on the concept of enkinaesthesia developed by Susan Stuart (2010). Stuart’s concept emphasises the phenomenological dimension that makes possible an agent’s felt kinaesthetic engagement with its world through the control of muscle tensions and bodily movement. The addition of the prefix en- in Stuart’s new term enkinaesthesia emphasises not just the felt kinetic-sensory dynamics of the individual agent, but the co-affective entwining, blending, and enfolding of the co-sensed and co-experienced enkinaesthetic melodies of sensing and experiencing agents whose bodily (and neural) dynamics are entangled with each other in relations of community and reciprocity. These melodies are the necessary underpinning of languaging.

Enkinaesthetic melodies refer to the deep co-affective enfolding of agents’ melodies to each other’s felt bodily dynamics in their dialogical encounters with one another. Rather than an individual-centred account of bodily feeling and the capacity of the individual agent to take an empathetic stance on how the other feels, Stuart’s term enkinaesthesia emphasises the dialogical nature of the feeling of being-with and the ways in which the lived temporality of our experience of each other’s voices and our recollections of these is characterised by our reciprocal capacity to envoice and reenvoice each other’s voice and other bodily melodies. In this way, we are co-constituted, co-constructed, and co-developed as persons by the reciprocal enfolding (and unfolding) of the vocal and other bodily dynamics of others to our own dynamics at the same time that others are affected by and entangled with our own bodily dynamics.

This chapter features three analyses: (1) dimensions of expressive melodies of movement in a wordless narrative between father and pre-linguistic infant; (2) micro-temporal phases in an episode of infant–mother interaction featuring concerted rehearsal and the orientation to social norms; and (3) the fracturing of melody and the collapse of empathy leading to the disintegration of a dialogic system and its degeneration into violence. I conclude the chapter with discussion of affective dynamics, feeling, kinetic melodies, and the musicality of languaging. The role of imitation and entrainment to melody and rhythm is considered in relation to the capacity for affiliation and empathy between persons.