Jointly coordinated affective activities are fundamental for social relationships. This study investigates a naturally occurring interaction between two women who produced reciprocal emotional stances towards similar past experiences. Adopting a microanalytic approach, we describe how the participants re-enact their past experiences through different but aligning synchronized gestures. This embodied dialogue evolves into affective flooding, in which participants co-produce their body memories of pulling down window blinds to block out sunshine. We show how the participants live this moment intercorporeally and how (...) multiple timescales are tied together in gesture, which is both an incarnation of body history and a novel expression of it. Thus, collaborative gesturing is a resource for experiencing together emotions re-enacted from body memories. Contributing to our understanding of the intercorporeality of human action, we provide an empirical investigation into how emotions and multiple timescales are nested in cooperative gestures. Data are in Finnish with English translations. (shrink)

Social interaction and experience are defined by their action possibilities; that is, they can be analyzed from the perspective of performative control (or lack thereof), namely their dynamics of activity and passivity. What I am able to influence in my environment and what lies beyond my reach determines my disposition and identity in relation to others. In this regard, media and communication devices are not only technical forms capable of modulating physical distance, but they can also transform the structure of (...) action possibilities, rearranging the relationship between who controls whom, between what is possible and not possible. From this standpoint, the present paper will suggest a different take on the well-known dichotomy presence/distance, reframing it through the opposition activity/passivity, or controllability/non-controllability, seen as a relevant perspective in investigating the nature of mediated experience. (shrink)