“Inter-enaction”. Surprise at the Source of Enaction and Micro- Phenomenology

What is the part of surprise in an micro-phenomenological explicitation interview? To what extent is the relation between the interviewee and the interviewer based on surprise? How is the novelty of experience as it is emerging during an interview providing us with a genuine criterium for its success, e.g. its validation? With these questions occur some aspects of surprise that were still not identified by researchers working in the field of micro-phenomenology, though it seems to play a central part.

In this contribution, I shall explore the role that surprise plays in intersubjectivity at work in the micro-phenomenological explicitation interview, and I will reconsider in this light the varelian epistemology of enaction. The latter indeed was identified along the decades with expressions such as the emergence of meaning, creation, production, sense-making, sensory-motor dynamics, perception-action scheme or generativity, and all these words spontaneously refer to surprise. Where enaction is therefore frontally opposed to representation and to the already given, which do not favor, to say the least, the emergence of the surprising.