Screened Intercorporeality. Reflections on Gestures in Videoconferences

ABSTRACT This article brings a phenomenological perspective to the question of how bodily and inter-bodily experience is involved in interacting via audio-visual media like videoconferencing platforms. Contemporary discussions in interaction studies point to a certain suspension of bodily involvement in these mediated interactions, which leads to a visible loss of function in the case of gestures. Such observations have led phenomenologists to voice concern as to whether phenomenology is indeed still suited to account for the “digital world” in general. The following article addresses these concerns by first making the case for a phenomenological understanding of gestures, which develops Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intercorporeality by drawing from an intersubjective reading of Husserl’s threefold analysis of the body (aesthesiological, kinaesthetic and orientational). Subsequently, these reflections are used to describe the modifications, which occur when interacting “through” the screen in videoconferences, by showing that they are not just privative in nature.


1.
Six or seven years ago, a phenomenological analysis of videoconferencing in a philosophical journal was a mere curiosity, which could hardly expect its readership to be well familiarized with the phenomenon.Online conferencing was at that point still only a distant possibility for academics in the humanities, which could at most serve as an intellectually stimulating case study for testing philosophical concepts. 1To be sure, things have changed in the meantime dramatically, as we are now talking about something, which has been to a large extent the everyday experience of academicand not just academicencounters for the past almost two years.As such it has come to destabilize many of our taken for granted beliefs with regard to how we do and how we ought to interact within and without academia.Consequently, it is indeed not just a hackneyed saying any more to claim that the analysis of such peculiar forms of mediated social interrelations also sheds light on the "normal" or "ordinary" structures of intersubjectivity, be it only because these years will no doubt have left some enduring marks on what will count as "normal" academic interaction in the future.
The following reflections deal with the question of embodied sociality and more specifically with the nature of gestures within the videoconference setting, for instance at online conferences.In doing so, they come to intersect with two significant trends in recent literature.On the one hand, they follow recent attempts in phenomenological philosophy to come to terms with the "digital world".As is well known, this term encompasses a large variety of phenomena, including among other things virtual avatars, social bots or algorithm driven communication, which generate new forms of experience that await their phenomenological description.At the same time, such phenomena seem to challenge classical phenomenological accounts of the life-world, which rely mostly on concrete everyday experiences in the flesh. 2 Inevitably, the question looming here is also whether phenomenology still offers a suitable tool for considering such phenomena, wherein the role of embodied face-to-face intersubjectivity, which represents its core resource, seems to be becoming more and more marginal, and this is of course a question that concerns the phenomenology of videoconferencing as well.
On the other hand, this paper also intersects with a new trend in the interdisciplinary field of interaction studies, which are increasingly interested in exploring forms of bodily engagementone even speaks of a "bodily turn" 3 herewhile explicitly drawing from phenomenological precursors like Husserl or Merleau-Ponty up to the point of even embracing some of their key concepts like that of "intercorporeality". 4 Significantly, in this context, the question of technologically mediated interactions is also a subject of concern under the general heading "intercorporeality beyond the body" 5and it is precisely in this vein that the present paper also addresses the question of how intercorporeality in general and gesturing in particular come to play and ought to be conceived when interacting over videoconferencing platforms like Zoom, Google Meet and others.

2.
The concept of intercorporeality was initially introduced by Merleau-Ponty in an attempt to creatively interpret Husserl's understanding of intersubjectivity in relation to bodily experience.The basic tenet of this attempt, which he most explicitly undertakes in the 1959 essay The Philosopher and his Shadow, is that of making explicit some of the unthought and only anticipated implications in Husserl's thinkingthe halo of potentialities accompanying any philosophy like its "shadow"and it is in this regard that he arrives at the following famous passage, wherein Merleau-Ponty draws a parallel between the experience of the I's own two hands touching each other (and the reversibility of touching and being touched that this involves) and shaking hands with an alter ego: The reason why I have evidence of the other man's being there when I shake his hand is that his hand is substituted for my left hand, and my body annexes the body of another person in 2 A recent fruit of these inquiries is the upcoming event of the German Society for Phenomenology.https:// digiphaen2022.ophen.org(last accessed 05.01.2022). 3See Gugutzer, Body Turn, 9-54. 4 Some of the recent titles, which strongly engage phenomenological inspirations in various interdisciplinary endeavours, include that "sort of reflection" it is paradoxically the seat of.My two hands "coexist" or are "compresent" because they are one single body's hands.The other person appears through an extension of that compresence; he and I are like organs of one single intercorporeality. 6viously, this does not amount to a clear-cut description of intercorporeality.It is, in fact, nothing more than an analogy, a metaphor for coming to terms with the entanglement of my and the other's bodily experience in such situations of mutual contact.While Merleau-Ponty's later work and especially his unfinished manuscript, The Visible and the Invisible, can be said to lay out a much more complex and rigorous account of intercorporeality, albeit without systematically developing the concept as such either, which is only mentioned a few times in scattered notations throughout the work, these reflections have not yet been widely received in contemporary interaction scholarship.However, despite not taking their cue from a full-fledged structural analysis of intercorporeality, recent empirical interaction studies adopted the term in a remarkably fruitful manner.This has, in the meantime, led to an impressive body of case studies, which chart the most various forms of the phenomenon ranging all the way from hugging, motor coordination in various workplace environments, object-mediated interactions with children or primates, cultural specificities in mutual touch and gesturing behaviour, or bodily attunement in team sports. 7Of course, for a phenomenologist interested in bodily interaction and gesture these materials are an extremely rich source of attentive observations, which could serve as possible examples for phenomenological reflections.At the same time, however, one cannot help but notice that this accumulation of descriptions visibly lacks a structuring principle.For, in pointing at the various facets of intercorporeal experience, they ultimately involve divergent understandings of intercorporeality and miss a more encompassing, or perhaps say: philosophically articulated, synthetic view to bring some comprehensive order into this diversity.
To be sure, I am here myself only interested in a particular modification of bodily interactionnamely the one which occurs when gesturing in the mediated context of online videoconferencesbut I nonetheless want to start my considerations by proposing some more general remarks with regard to how one could integrate these diverse views of intercoporeality, which proliferate in contemporary interaction studies.Thus, I indeed think that, if Merleau-Ponty originally sketches out his conception of intercorporeality as a sort of avowed overinterpretation of a Husserlian motif, it is in fact in Husserl's own multifaceted account of bodily experience that one can also find a key for expanding and structuring Merleau-Ponty's concept of intercorporeality as well, a concept which he (and, with him, some of the interaction scholars following his lead) initially seems to restrict solely to the sphere of direct bodily contact, that is: mutual touch.Husserl, as is well known, already in the second book of his Ideas develops a threefold account of the body and bodily experience.He discusses the body for one "aesthesiologically", as the locus of sensations, that is: as the sentient body, which integrates the various sensuous fields of sight, hearing, touch, olfaction and so on. 8Secondly, he addresses the body as the "immediate organ of the will", that is: as a system of "I can", of kinaesthetic possibilities of movement and action (which as such, of course, also attract corresponding modifications in the sensuous fields with their unfolding). 9And finally, he describes the body as the main perspectival frame of reference, the point zero of orientation, 10 wherein this aspect also co-determines both the subject's range of kinaesthetic possibilities as well as the organization of their sensuous fields.In brief: Husserl's account indeed attempts to cover the various aspects which structure bodily experience, in a way that also accounts for their systematic interconnection, and while Husserl himself does not explicitly apply this theoretical framework in his interpretation of bodily grounded intersubjectivity, it nonetheless appears to me as a still very promising guideline for organizing the various forms of intecorporeality touched upon dispersedly in contemporary research on bodily interaction.
In taking this path, one would of course have to similarly specify a threefold concept of intercorporeality, which can be easily determined following Husserl's schema.Thus, one would first have to outline an aesthesiological intercorporeality, which includes all phenomena pertaining to the sphere of shared sensorial fields.Of course, various differences arise here between, say, the immediately collective character of hearing a sound that resonates openly in shared public space, and the complexities entailed by the fact thatin difference to hearingthe act of gazing is itself visually available to the other, such that joint visual perception presupposes the mediacy of visually perceiving one another while visually perceiving.To be sure, Merleau-Ponty's own famous discussion of mutual touch while shaking hands as an extension of intrasubjective tactility would refer to precisely this mode of intercorporeality.And it is obviously this same sense of intercorporeality, which is at play both in recent research on "haptic sociality" 11 , outlining the shared bodily experience of mutual touch as this comes to the fore in hugging, for instance, as well as in an extended version (with the inclusion of emotions in the sphere of bodily sensations) in Thomas Fuchs' concepts of "interbodily resonance" and "interaffectivity". 12ollowing Husserl's classification, one would secondly have to speak about a praxeological intercorporeality, which deals with the intercorporeal aspect of joint action and joint movement.This was more recently very aptly also termed as "interkinaesthesia". 13 The phenomena at play here involve intersubjective variations of the "I can" as "we can", ranging all the way from coordinated movement and responsive postures to body mirroring, whereas it is clear to see that there are numerous connections, which tie these aspects to those of the first category.It suffices to think of classical dancing, for instance, where the coordination of movement is realized by means of mutual bodily contact and touch 14 , that is: aesthesiologically, or similarly of the questions related to interbodily memory 15 , which basically involve both aspects: shared sensorial content (including emotions) and shared routines of action and movement.
Thirdly and finally, one would also have to understand intercorporeality as a social modification of perspectival orientation.Starting from Husserl's grounding insight -which lies at the core of his account of intersubjectivity in the Cartesian Meditationsthat, if the individual subject experiences objects oriented in relation to the point zero of their own body, the alter-ego doesn't only bring into play a further similar point zero of orientation for their surrounding objects, but instead (so goes Husserl's argument) their second perspective comes to complicate the ego's own perspectival experience as well. 16A concept like that of "interattentionality" is intended as a means to come to grasp with this multifocal, pluri-perspectival space of intersubjective experience, wherein the ego's "point-zero" of orientation is permanently challenged by the focalizations of others. 17f course, it is plain to see that these three forms of intercorporeality and their corresponding manifestations are interrelated.As such, they can only be dissociated in a strictly heuristic perspective.Moreover, the topic of gestures, which is my main subject of interest here, is precisely a striking case in point in this regard, for gestures are indeed something that has to do ostensibly with all three aforementioned categories.
For one, gestures are expressive in Thomas Fuchs' broad understanding of interbodily sensing.They presuppose an affective intertwinement between my expression and the other's resonant impression thereof in a continuously unfolding, circular process of mutual incorporation.Thus, regarded as an intercorporeal phenomenon, my gesture, expressive of my affective state, induces an affective state in the other, which expresses itself in the other's posture, gaze, gesture or facial mimic, which in turn triggers my affective response in a "circular interplay of expressions and reactions running in split seconds and constantly modifying each partner's bodily state". 18Of course, one already finds a similar thought in Merleau-Ponty's early considerations concerning the interbodily reception and understanding of gestures: "The communication or comprehension of gestures comes about through the reciprocity of my intentions and the gestures of others, of my gestures and the intentions discernible in the conduct of other people.It is as if the other person's inhabited my body and mine his." 19 Secondly, gestures are precisely in their complementary inter-bodily unfolding, that is: as occurrences within such cycles of mutually resonant feedback, intekinaesthetic phenomena.Insofar as they are intercorporeal expressive movements, they are performed from the onset in sequences of reciprocally attuned bodily behaviours, wherein each interlocutor's changes of posture, glance, and bodily expression precipitate some general choreography within the social interaction.Just think about how speakers in conversation often use pauses in speech to attract the attentive gaze of the addressee, 20 or how moments of mutual gaze are supported, claimed and avoided during each and every conversation.In brief, gestures in this broad sense are never just isolated movements within a social context, but part of a communicative flow, wherein each element responds, comments upon, displays agreement or rejection with other social behaviours, eliciting further motor activity in return.As such, gestures are not properly grasped as fulfilments of a subjective volitional intent, that is: as the intentional activity of an ego plain and simple, but primarily as a product of inter-motor engagement, that is as part of a social continuum of bodily movements.
Finally, gestures are bodily movements, which primarily make sense in a social context of multiple orientations.A gesture is not defined solely in relation to one's own "point zero of orientation", but instead it is from the outset "recipient designed". 21A wave, a pointing gesture, or an iconic display intended to suggest the size or shape of the discussed object are thus performed by their subject, as a clearly shaped and understandable pattern of movement, in being addressed, turned towards the other in specific ways, positioned in the multi-perspectival, open field of mutual interaction.Gestures are, in other words, from the onset objects constructed to work within a plurality of perspectives, in relation to multiple points zero of orientation.They are not the ego's perspectival object and then simply also the object of an alter ego, but instead they are originally constituted for and within a multi-focal situation of social interaction, being thus intercorporeal in this third sense of the term as well.All three aspects play into one another in each and every moment of live mutual interaction.

3.
One point of concern, which proves remarkably persistent in the discussions surrounding this rich, dense form of intercorporeal engagement, is that such descriptions may perhaps hold true with regard to live, face-to-face social interaction, but they certainly don't apply when that interaction is filtered by media, as is the case most ostensibly with videotelephony and videoconferencing.Regardless of how smooth and accurate the audio-visual representation of the other in such contexts may beso the argument usually goesinteractions via media still lack one decisive element, which is the actual intercorporal relationship between the interlocutors, leading, very bluntly put, to a form of disembodied communication. 22his point is made forcefully and with substantial evidence already in the early 1990s in a remarkably visionary paper by two sociologists, Christian Heath and Paul Luff, under the explicit title "Dis-embodied conduct: Communication through video in a multimedia office environment".This was 1991, to be noted, more than a decade before Skype, at a time when videoconferencing technologies were still at a rather experimental stage and hardly affordable for the general public.Accordingly, the discussion here is about using videoconferencing tools within the closed environment of a high tech office building for facilitating collaborative work.What is lost and what is gained when co-workers can interact directly from their desk via video and sound with one another instead of moving around through the office space in order to seek live physical contact?What the two researchers basically do to answer this question is extensively observe online behaviours by the interlocutors in this context with a specific focus on their use of gesturing.In doing so, they implicitly contrast their findings to the case of natural, face-to-face interaction, which had already been documented extensively in prior literature with regard to aspects like the coordination of speech and gesture for securing mutual attention.What this research discovers beforehand is that, when videoconferencing, interlocutors primarily tend to treat their interaction as if it were a situation of live co-presence, that is: they assume being able to make use extensively of their visible conduct in general and gestures in particular during communication, but that conduct by and large seems to lose its effectualness when performed via audiovisual mediation.It is worth quoting their reported findings extensively in order to both get a feel of the helplessness of early users of the medium when confronted with deceived intercorporeal expectations, but also take note of some of the authors' structural observations, which could be repeated verbatim in contemporary research as well: Despite having the facility to witness a co-participants visual conduct (…) many actions, which are performed non-verbally, do not achieve sequential performative significance in the interaction.In particular, gestures (…), which are systematically employed in face-toface communication (…) to organize how the recipient participates, prove in large part ineffectual.For example, a speaker will attempt to produce a description and (…) use gesture to gain a visually attentive recipient.The gesture becomes increasingly exaggerated and meets with no response, the description reveals various linguistic difficulties and it may even be abandoned.Even gestures, which are not (…) concerned with organizing co-participation lose their sequential significance.For example, gestures which illustrate (…) objects (…) referred to in the accompanying talk appear to achieve little communicative significance when performed through video.For some reason (…) the technology transforms the ability of certain forms of conduct to engender action from another. 23e two authors of the study have some thoughts as to why exactly this is happening.In their view, this is the case in brief because gestures are, in audio-visually mediated communication, both more and less present than in real live face-to-face interaction.On the one hand, gestures are in a normal situation of live communication not performed in the direct view of the other, but instead they rather occur and function fleetingly at the periphery of the interlocutors' visual field of attention.This obviously changes in videoconferencing, where the gesture has to be displayed overtly on centre screen to be noticed at all, while the surplus in visibility only ruins its necessarily discrete and casual functionality.On the other hand, however, videoconferencing also reduces the gesture in that it cuts it off from a mutually shared environment, wherein it is naturally embedded, by only making it available as a mere abstract detail of a movement on screen.While both these observations, which point at radical challenges to the effectiveness of gestural communication via medial displays, have been widely confirmed and further explored by subsequent research to our present day, it would be useful for our purposes here to consider, what this entails specifically for the intercorporeality of such interactions in general.
In this regard, it seems fairly easy to show that all three aspects of intercorporeality, that I have pointed out earlier, are still for today's versions of videoconferencing platformsand not just in the case of the primitive formats available in the 1990saffected and undercut by the audio-visual mediation of the interaction.Thus, for one, audio-visual mediation obviously rules out physical contact, so that no direct "haptic socialitity" of the sorts described by Merleau-Ponty in his discussion of shaking hands can possibly occur.Of course, this does not affect only the sense of touch, but all aesthesiological fields in general, including for instance our olfactory access to bodily odours, which comes with physical proximity.The same applies for hearing, where this seems less apparent, insofar as current videoconferencing applications only allow for one speaker to emit sound at a time.As a consequence, overlapping speech, conceived as a communicative phenomenon, which plays out in a shared, collectively constituted acoustic environment, becomes impossible.Moreover, this privative modification is perhaps nowhere more pervasive than in the case of sight, insofar as the lack of visual coordination brings into play significant consequences.As has been noted frequently in existing literature,24 the discrepancy between the position of the camera and the depiction of the interlocutor on screen makes actual eye contact impossible in video-mediated communication.For, in looking the other in the eye when I watch their screen appearance, I actually look away from the camera and thus fail to be perceived by them as onlookers, and vice versa: while looking into the camera, the others may perhaps feel looked at, but this is only an illusion that my non-responsive behaviour to their visual conduct can make apparent at any time.While this point seems to merely expose a lack of aesthesiological coordination in the field of visual perception, it actually has far wider reaching consequences.For this lack of visual reciprocity generally also impedes on the interplay of attention between interlocutors, making shared orientations and the mutual attunement of perspectives experientially problematic.Of course, this finally also affects motor coordination and the possibility of interkinaesthetic engagements, and it is generally plain to see that such a massive set of privative modifications, which systematically affects all three dimensions of intercorporeality, could not possibly leave the functioning of gestures unaltered.

4.
Mediated communication thus obviously differs from live body-to-body interaction in significant ways.However, grossly claiming, like Byung-Chul Han in one of his recent essays, that "the digital medium divests communication of all tactility and corporeality"25 and that therefore intercorporeality is plainly severed here, would also be an overstatement.For, following our line of inquiry, it might well be the case that the features of mutual interaction in videoconferencing are not just a privative modification of normal intercorporeal behaviour, but instead they pertain to a communicative situation in its own right, which has its own blend of hybrid intercorporeality and finds its expression in specifically shaped gestures that demand for a more thorough phenomenological description and analysis.This is exactly the suggestion I would like to entertain in the following, by, on the one hand, again making use of Husserl's threefold schema of the aesthesiological, kinaesthetic and perspectival body as a guiding thread, and by, on the other hand, more astutely also looking at the screen itself as a medial object, which plays an integral part within the communicative processes here involved.
(a) For one, it is clear in an aesthesiological perspective, that our sensory fields are disjoined while videoconferencing, as we are not in direct contact with one another but separated by the screen.However, the screen is not just a hindrance to our mutual engagement in person, that is: something that screens us off from one another, but also the element that ensures our virtual interaction by providing for a shared field of mutual audio-vision in the first place.To be sure, considering the screen itself as a shared object of perception poses some serious difficulties.For the screen is neither plainly given audio-visually to all interlocutors in the manner of an object present in front of an assembled collective (like a movie in the cinema), nor just a particular form of the ubiquitous presence of broadcast media objects (the same programme running on innumerable TV sets).Instead, the videoconference screen rather shares aspects of both aforementioned examples, insofar as here each participant watches their own device (as in the case of television), but identifies the represented screen as a joint object here and now (as in the cinema).In difference to the cinema, however, joint vision in videoconferencing is not achieved in the same unique perspective of an audience facing the screen, but instead the screen is here perceived quasi from different "sides": while I watch the screen from here also having you directly in sight over there, you view it from there in looking towards me, such that the screen ultimately appears as something imaginarily, but not physically present between us.
While videoconferencing, we therefore perceive each other across this constructed imaginary common field which is the "the screen" and while we normally ignore the screen itself in intentionally traversing it to see and address the other, this intermediary space of shared audio-visual occurrences nonetheless becomes foregrounded each time the expected transparency of the medium fails, say because of glitches, freeze-frames, loss of connection, etc. Significantly, such incidents, which highlight the presence of the medium as a condition of our shared audio-visual contact, are at the same time revealing for the mutual comportments and gestures of the participants that it engenders.Indeed, interlocutors frequently tend to read such malfunctions, for instance, the immobile posture of the other resulting from a freeze frame, initially in straightforward intentionality as an abnormal social behaviourone wonders, for instance, why the other is so motionlessonly to subsequently re-interpret them as a feature signalling a disturbance of the medium.
Thus, the screen can generally act here as a sphere of shared aesthesiological intercorporeality only insofar as it works and, in doing so, recedes into the background, while on the contrary its presence becomes obtrusive and shines through whenever it disallows shared audio-vision.On closer scrutiny, however, the medium and its features are as such at all times discretely involved in formatting the mutual relationship between the participantsjust think of how the absence of overlapping speech in videoconferencing sessions impacts on the selection of next speakers during a free multi-party conversation.
As a prime consequence of this, gestures on videoconferencing platforms can themselves be described as characteristically hybrid in that they generally allow an apperceptive shift from being apprehended straightforwardly, as social phenomena of person-toperson interaction entertaining a sensory-expressive continuum of communication between interlocutors, to being mere technological artefacts, generated within the human-machine interaction, as soon as the medium itself as condition of possibility of that interaction takes centre stage.The concept of screen-generated expressivity would perhaps be an apt category to grasp this.
(b) Of course, aesthesiological communication is only limited to audio-vision in videoconferencing and does not involve, for instance, the kind of haptic sociality, which determines in-person interaction already in virtue of the mere proximity between bodies anticipating the possibility of contact even when no touch occurs.When thus considering the interrelation between participants here in abstraction from the medium, tactility indeed seems to be lacking from videoconferences entirely.Instead, taking the screen into view as an essential part of the communicative process again reveals a different aspect, which is ultimately also indicative of the second, kinaesthetic form of inter-bodily experience pinpointed above in accordance to Husserl's classification.
Indeed, videoconferencing is far from a disembodied exchange in this regard: it is a hands-on engagement with technology, which includes among other things continuously fumbling with ones equipment.Media scholars have long coined the concept of "viewsing" 26a term which conflates viewing and usingto define the specific behaviour of subjects in relation to digital media, as they appear in contrast to traditional forms of cinematic spectatorship.In this sense, the interrelation of participants at videoconferences is itself never just a matter of mutual audiovisual perception, but also one of active, practical engagement.Moreover, this dual aspect of viewsing is also micro-expressively recognizable in the behaviour of participants, who constantly appear to be actively preoccupied with their screen while also displaying attentive participation to the discussion, and it also reflects on the interkinaesthetic aspect of their mutual engagement.For, while the coordination of movements again seems to be a feature ostensibly lacking from screen-mediated interactions (if one focuses solely on the mutual behaviour of the interlocutors in relation to one another), taking into account the screen immediately highlights the form of mediated interkinaesthesia, which comes into play here with our synchronized practices of viewsing, that is: our socialized hands-on engagement with a medium that is at the same time (at least in part) also our common aesthesiological object.
In videoconferencing, we are viewsing together, and while this may at times lead to some forms of actual coordinated movement among interlocutorsjust think of how adjusting my camera affects all the others' view of myself in a form of vicarious joint kinaesthesia, or to how sharing my screen with a long, small-lettered quotation may determine everyone to move closer to the screen in a synchronized change of posture the main point here is that such examples are never to be read plainly as a form of direct body-to-body attunement.Instead they necessarily co-involve the screen as a central part of that mutual engagement.In this regard, videoconferencing indeed resembles other forms of object-mediated interactions, which have been extensively researched in recent literature (from child play 27 to doctor-nurse interactions in handling medical instruments 28 ).At the same time, it stands apart from such other examples in that the object involved here is precisely a medium, i.e. something that strives for transparency and is not supposed to become foregrounded as an object of distinct attention, while it nonetheless tacitly determines both our expressive and practical behaviour. 26Harries, 'Watching the Internet'. 27Andrén, 'Children's Expressive Handling of Objects'. 28Heath and Luff, 'Passing Touch'.
As such, the medium again imprints on our gesturing as well.To be more precise, gestures performed during videoconferences are in this respect also specifically hybrid in that they interfuse object-oriented and intersubjectively addressed comportments in displaying attunement simultaneously to both the other and the piece of equipment.29I would propose the concept of screen-directed social gesturing to pinpoint this.
(c) In viewsing Zoom, one has multiple options for controlling not just how the others appear on screen, but, more profoundly: how the communicative process itself is shaped.One can mute oneself or others as "host", disconnect the camera or simply exit the meeting by a click, engage in private chatting, lower or increase volume, change display styles from "speaker" to "grid" view or use manifold other special effects, while all of this deeply affects how we interrelate.In brief: how the interaction unfolds is itself also an object of technical choice in handling the medium and, among other things, as I already mentioned, this also allows for ensuring a somewhat heightened form of coordinated attention by using the "share screen" function.This point is particularly relevant as it brings us to the third and final aspect of intercorporeality to be pinpointed here, namely the question of shared orientation and joint attention.
Indeed, videoconferencing is frequently associated with a certain lack of mutual attention, which generally curtails the interplay of perspectives between the interlocutors. 30In contrast to offline conferences, for instance, where experienced speakers can immediately sense whether they have the room, as the attention of others manifests itself bodily in the tense silence that pervades, in videoconferences one can hardly avoid a certain impression of disinterest.This, of course, relates to the point mentioned above, since divided attention certainly also results from the interlocutors' fumbling with the screen, but there are at least two more aspects to this, which specifically define the form of interattentionality here involved.
On the one hand, the point is not that participants at videoconferences are plainly inattentive, which may or may not be the case, but that they share by design in a mode of synoptic attentionality, which favours dispersion.Their grid view, in particular, looks strikingly like the desk of a security control room and this perspective invites the mind to wander in, for instance, freely probing into the private living rooms of others, or aesthetically admiring the framing, scenography and shot composition as if in front of a gallery of self-portraits (which they also are in a certain sense).While such viewing practices of course evade the conference proper and lead to inattentiveness, they also help illustrate the specificities of the "global" attention required here, which brings about a viewing relationship to other participants entirely different from the normal mutual orientation within a real-live conference.To be more precise, the videoconference setting defines a social situation wherein one can constantly observe one another unawares, pose for one another and stage ones appearance, or appreciate how the others perform and pose, even if one is not the official object of attention.
On the other hand, considering the screen also points us to the peculiar shift in the inter-relation of perspectives that occurs here.For, indeed, what we see on screen is not the point of view of either participant, us included, but rather that of the screen itself, which reflects us.To be more precise, the point zero of my screened experience is not my own body, or the body of another, but rather the screen itself looking back at us, which defines each of our perspectives in turn and synthesizes the totalized view of us together, that we share.Just as I see myself in my self-display window from the perspective of the screen, as I do when regarding myself in a mirror by looking back at myself here from a reflected vantage point over there, when videoconferencing, I see all the others appearing in my grid view in a similar mirrored perspective.Moreover, thus seeing everyone together on screen becomes possible only in relation to a synthetic perspective, which corresponds to neither of the participants' physical point of view in particular, but defines an ideal position in between us, which would correspond to that joint intentional screen-space discussed earlier.
Thus, I as speaker have a synthetic view of the others as an audience, just as we as listeners achieve a joint awareness of being addressed only insofar as we all participate primarily at the synoptic perspective of all of us generated on screen.Correspondingly, the synthesis of our interrelated perspectives, which normally defines the third aspect of intercorporeal experience I discussed earlier, is here also re-shaped by the screen, and it is specifically in relationship to this set-up that gestures performed while videoconferencing are posed, conceived and acted out.I would specifically term this aspect the screen-centred orientation of perspectives.

5.
The outcome of these reflections can be easily summarized in a twofold perspective.On the one hand, they suggest some points of reference for a phenomenology of the videoconference screen as an intercorporeal object.In this regard, the screen appears simultaneously as an interaesthesiological field of shared audio-vision, as an object of hands-on social viewsing, and as a means for achieving complex interrelational perspectives.These intercorporeal affordances thus appear as constitutive for the videoconference screen as a particular type of intentional object, while our reflections here would qualify primarily as a media-phenomenological contribution.On the other hand, one can also look at this from a different angle and note that, in videoconferencing, the screen as an interaesthesiological, interkinaesthetic and interattentional object becomes itself a constitutive element determining a specific form of intercorporeal encounter.To be more precise, we are dealing here with a configuration of intercorporeality wherein social intentionality is founded on object apperceptions and constantly interferes with them.As seen before, this leads, among other things, to specifically shaped gestures within the interaction, which seem to be aesthesiologically, motorly and attentionally divided between the medium itself and the social interlocutors.
To be sure, this argument may raise some doubts.For how come, one might askif videoconferencing indeed puts into play such a remarkable new form of socialitythat online conferences are most frequently so dissatisfying and frustrating an experience?Of course, there are various reasons one could cite for this, ranging all the way from the obvious communicational deficiencies of the medium (which have been largely blamed for the mounting "Zoom fatigue") to the fact that videoconferences tend to reduce unplanned social interactions (which are integral to the conference experience and to all social encounters in general) to a rationalized schedule wherein informal sessions are at best included in plan (and usually turn out quite stale).Instead, perhaps the more fundamental problem here is not that videoconferencing is so poor at substituting for our real life conference experienceand for our in person interactions in generalbut rather our very expectation that it does so (or that it eventually will, given certain technical improvements).For what this actually implies is our desire to ultimately disregard the medium itself and communicate directly with the others as if it wasn't there, while it is, one might argue, precisely this neglect of the medium that makes us experience technological constraints unawares as mere frustrating hindrances, which only truncate our social interrelations.
What this observation implies can perhaps best be highlighted by means of an example.During the most pressing months of lockdown last year, dancers and body practitioners all around the world were, just like academics in the humanities, also forced to take their activities online.For them, this was, to be sure, even more of a blow, insofar as it was clear from the onset that the medium was completely unsuited to immediately substitute for their in-person sessions, lessons and training.Instead of turning this into a permanent source of complaint and frustration, however, many of them, on the contrary, engaged in a long streak of experiments with learning how to do body work on videoconference platforms together, while appropriating the medium itself in that effort.The latest issue of The International Journal for Screendance 31 offers a fascinating look at these efforts, documenting various choreographic initiatives and movement seminars from the past year, which have played with including mobile phones, laptops and cameras in a meaningful way in their exercises in order to achieve a different form of social body-in-situation awareness, which overtly incorporates audio-visual media.Now, granted this may not work as well for philosophical conferences (which were our implicit guiding example in this discussion of videoconferencing as a medium), with their more rigid formats and patterns of interaction, and it may not even be necessary to the same extent, given that inter-bodily awareness should perhaps not be their sole focus of interest anyhow.Instead, the main lesson to be learned here is rather that understanding the medium, reflecting upon it and building some sort ofultimately also bodily and inter-bodilymedium awareness has become an unavoidable task for all of us under these circumstances.And, while the present paper was among other things supposed to demonstrate how well equipped phenomenology is in general for performing such a task, these concluding considerations also show why a phenomenology of media in particular (or of the "digital world", if one prefers it) can no longer remain just a marginal undercurrent in contemporary phenomenological reflection and discussion.This is the case, for one, because, in dealing with digital media, fine-grained phenomenological analyses can discover new variants of our everyday forms of experience, which also structurally expand our regular understanding of those issues in general, as has been shown here extensively with regard to mediated forms of bodily interaction.But it is also the case, moreover, because media are increasingly permeating and infusing all our processes of work and leisure, our modes of handling objects and interacting with others, modifying them in subtle ways that should be accounted for when phenomenologically engaging our actual "being in the world" here and now.