But First, Let’s Jam
A New Materialist Twist on the
Ontology of Play•
Loretta Fois

The author follows a new materialist approach to consider the informal andcollaborative creative gathering called jamming as creative play, and she
makes a case for the jam as a transformative event of genuine intrasubjective
dialogue. She uses Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism and Hans-Georg
Gadamer’s ethics of play to argue for the jam as an ethico-socio-politicalevent that supports the communal and creation-centered aspects of our collective existence and offers an opportunity for learning responsibility (or“response-ability,” as Karen Barad calls it) and accountability. She concludes
that jamming, like creative play, offers the kind of cooperative underpinnings
essential to our relational and ontological makeup. Key words: agential realism; Hans-Georg Gadamer; jam session; Karen Barad; play as an ethical,
social, and political activity; shared agency

Introduction
Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being,
and he is only fully a human being when he plays.
—Friedrich Schiller

If play, as Schiller writes, is essential to the human condition, how canit move us toward a more profound interconnectedness with self, others, andthe environment? Is play a personal experience, or is it inclusive, reminding usthat existence is not an individual condition? Is there something created amid
play that provides a sense of meaning?
Viewed through a relational-ontological lens, creative play can encourage
an ethical response to the world and its inhabitants. However, it is more thanthat. “Play,” according to Eugen Fink, “is always a confrontation with Being.
In the plaything, the whole is concentrated in a single object. Each game is an233

American Journal of Play, Volume 14, number 3 © 2022 by The Strong
Contact Loretta Fois at lfois@raritanval.edu

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P L AYattempt at existence, a vital experiment that encounters in the plaything theessence of unyielding reality” (Fink, Saine, and Saine 1968, 23). In a culture thatstrongly embraces autonomy and largely views existence through a humanistic
lens, a deeper understanding of the impact of creative play helps further theimportance of collaboration and the shared conditions of the material-discursive
spaces of the world. Brian Sutton-Smith asserts that play is a genetic gift, anevolutionary task with an experiential reality at its roots. He argues that “play’s
positive pleasure typically transfers to our feelings about the rest of our everyday existence and makes it possible to live more fully in the world, no matter
how boring or painful or even dangerous ordinary reality might seem . . . inthis way play genetically refreshes or fructifies our other, more general, being”(Sutton-Smith 2008, 97).
In this article, I investigate a new materialist approach to jamming by diffractively reading the work of Karen Barad through Hans-Georg Gadamer’s ethics of play. I conclude that the jam is an ethico-socio-political event of genuine
intrasubjective dialogue that supports the communal aspects of our collective
existence and offers an opportunity for learning responsibility (or “responseability,” as Barad writes) and accountability.
The term “play” has various broad definitions. Sutton-Smith’s genetic gift
offers a buttress against life’s challenges, exercising “physical or mental or social
adaptations that translate—directly or indirectly—into ordinary life adjustments” (Sutton-Smith 2008, 118). Play can be a type of preparation for adulthood (Dewey), an expression of exuberant energy (Schiller), a means of social
and intellectual development (Piaget, Vygotsky), or a recapitulation of ancestral
activities (Hegel, Ziller, Hall). Gordon Burghardt (2011) characterized play withthe following five criteria; play is not fully functional in the form or context inwhich it is expressed; it is spontaneous, pleasurable, and voluntary; it is incomplete, exaggerated, awkward, or precocious; it contains repeatable actions that are
similar, but not rigidly done; and it is done in safe and stress-free environments.
This last criterion mandates that we cannot assign a particular outcome,like winning a game, to play. In “What Exactly Is Play, and Why Is It Such aPowerful Vehicle for Learning?” Gray (2017) states, “play, at least human play,cannot be defined in terms of the motor activities involved; it must be definedin terms of the motives and attitudes that underlie the activities” (219). Gray’s
statement is significant because what might look like competition to one person
could be play to another and vice versa. However, the motive for play should
never be competition, and it should never be stressful. Creative play may include

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elements of competition, such as in a game jam, but the primary goal is to create
and not to win. Thus, in keeping with Burghardt’s criteria, I define creative play
as noncompetitive. Burghardt’s criteria allow for play as intentionally ambiguous and inherently dichotomous. It is serious, but it is not. It is unstructured,and it is bound by rules.
Play pushes the boundaries of our capabilities and aptitudes by allowing us
to deal with the unknown in safe nonconsequential ways. It also reminds us thatexistence is not an individual condition. While on the surface, play can occur
in personal solitude, there is always a human or nonhuman “other” counterpart
engaged in the exchange. In using the term other, I am employing the Gadamerian term, not the contemporary definition of “otherizing” as viewing a person
or group as innately different from oneself. For Gadamer, the other is self-otherentwinement: “To live with the other, as the other of the other-this basic humantask applies to the micro- as well as to the macro-level . . . where the highest andmost elevated aim that we can strive for is to partake in the other, to share theother’s alterity” (Gadamer 1989, 28–34). One cannot play alone.
Although we see play in nature, animals, and objects, research leans toward
the opinion that the human capacity for imagination is much more developed
and open to change and possibilities than that of animals (Bronowski 1967;
Suddendorf and Dong 2013). Although findings have shown primates can roleplay, suggesting the presence of abstract thinking and imagination, there appear
to be limitations to imaginative thinking in animals. Imagery is the factor thatelevates the human mind over that of the animal. Given these factors, I limit
my discussion on the use of imagination in this article to human beings, andI maintain that creative play must have a human element. Nevertheless, I contend that human agency is not the only agency required in creative play. Why?
Because in play the inseparability of nonhuman elements such as sound, movement, animals, and material objects come to the forefront through validating theembodied dynamics of human and nonhuman factors. Shared agency is not an
intentional act of human beings alone but happens through and between the participants. Nonhuman objects, claim Taguchi (2010), “also put things in motion
by means of [their] own agentic force and materiality. Thus, new possibilities for
intra-action with other matter and organisms will emerge” (64, italics added).
According to Barad (2007), the neologism “intra-action” is used “in contrast to
the usual ‘interaction,’ which assumes that there are separate individual agencies
that precede their interaction, the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct
agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action.” (33)

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P L AYThe poietic act of creative play reveals new possibilities and truths thatenter our visual, aural, and tactile space. We do not know the significance andvitality of this play-filled moment until the participants enter a new paradigm
relationship. “Play,” says Eugen Fink, “is a basic existential phenomenon, justas primordial and autonomous as death, love, work, and struggle for power, but
it is not bound to these phenomena in a common ultimate purpose. Play, so to
speak, confronts them all—it absorbs them by representing them. We play atbeing serious, we play truth, we play reality, we play work and struggle, we playlove and death—and we even play play itself ” (Fink, Saine, and Saine 1968, 22).
Play is fundamental to existence, not an ancillary luxury reserved when nothing else is on the to-do or to-be list. It is a space to flourish, and the jam session
becomes a starting point for moving us into a web of deeper intraconnectedness
with humans and nonhumans.

Defining the Jam Session
Jamming with other people will create energy and excitement that you canfeed off, and which will help push you to do things you’d never dream ofdoing by yourself.
—Dimebag Darrell

The jam was initially defined as a meeting of musicians, especially jazz musicians, who improvise, experiment, and play for enjoyment. Over time, the term
has come to refer to an informal and collaborative creative gathering. A quickinternet search for the terms “creative jam” or “jam session” reveals various jam
opportunities in dance, theater, painting, photography, and corporate and religious arenas. The software company Adobe (2021) has even caught on, calling its
training sessions “creative jams” and claiming that “a Creative Jam is one of themost immersive ways for people to learn Adobe tools and advance their digital
literacy” (n.p.). In “Why Meetings Fail and JAM Sessions Succeed,” Jason Moccia,
CEO and Founder of OneSpring, discusses why he replaced the typical businessmeeting with the jam and lists ten factors that make jam sessions “phenomenallysuccessful.” These include flow, ownership, and free thought (Moccia 2011).
Jams contain a sense of shared ownership and agency where, as Belitski andHerzig (2018) describe, “the collective product rises and falls with the willingnessof each [participant] to engage in this truly democratic process of trading leadership and supporting roles and contributing towards the common good at every

But First, Let’s Jam

moment” (510). This participatory experience allows an intra-action between
the participants, passing the leadership role from one player to another. Like
creative play, a jam can be a genuinely egalitarian event. According to SuttonSmith (2008), “If we accept the assumption that play emerges as an imitative
mediation of the reflexive-reflective adaptive duality, then it should follow thatthe nature of play can be described as a dynamic duality of contending forces,that is as dialudic” (116). In a jam, players and playees, subject and object, I andthou engage in a ludic dialogue.
One of the most appealing elements of a jam is that it can involve people
with varying levels of expertise and ability, making for a truly democratic experience. While some jams are for professionals, in many jam sessions, the participants need not be professional artists. Frequently, those who attend music
jams, such as drum circles, or movement jams, such as Contact Improvisation
sessions, have no formal training or background. The only prerequisite is theindispensable ingredient of group awareness and the ability to tune in and listen to the environment, allowing for a fluid relationship between humans andnonhuman objects such as musical instruments, visual art supplies, literature,or (as in movement) gravity and the floor. Lars Brinck (2014) states that “theprocess of jamming involves being flexible and open to changes and possibilities, prioritizing one’s . . . attention, relating what you [see and] hear to what you
know and know you can do, and on maintaining an equilibrium of . . . tasks”(67). The collective improvisational jam is creative play at its finest, a “circularand spiral social process of iteratively changing foci, of openness to change, andof continuously reflecting and balancing one’s way of engagement” (147). In a
jam session, the creative play comes from being and doing, not the result. While
there may be genial rivalry, winning is not the goal, and competition is generally
frowned upon in jam sessions. Jamming, like play, does not necessarily lead toa product, though it may. Instead, it is nourishing and spontaneous, allowing
us to express our unique responses to a given situation.

Jams in Movement, Music, and MoreNow jamming—which is about collaborative improvisation—has to do withgetting people together to be creative musically. But it is a very powerful
metaphor for understanding the grammar of the creative process. It applies
to business and to other pursuits as well.
—John Kao

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Contact Improvisation (CI) is a dance and movement research practice in which
participants negotiate their physical boundaries, allowing them to blur and literally entangle. CI sessions, or “contact jams,” are improvisational movement
sessions involving contact, touch, and weight sharing with a partner or partners.
In an interview with Curtis (1995), Steve Paxton, the creator of Contact Improvisation, describes CI as “an improvisational state of mind partially determinedby another’s improvisational state of mind; the contact is not a state of mind
but a physical exterior event. The two blend like double circles of ripples seen
when two stones are dropped in a pond” (69). In a contact jam, there is ongoing
intra-activity. Solo dancing is nonexistent; one dances with another human but
can also partner with the floor or gravity. CI movers use the Stand (or the Small
Dance) to understand this entangled exchange. The Stand is simply standing
still, suspending your movement, and tuning into being moved by the earth’s
pull under your feet. Godard and Bigé (2019) describe the Stand as a dialogue:“Through this very internal experience, what is discovered is something else thansolipsism: constantly bathed in gravity, we discover that we are streaming movements that are not ours; movements through which the Earth moves us (gravity’s pull) and movements through which we respond (our anti-gravitationalreflexes). . . . The micro-movements of the Small Dance are thus the signs of aforce we are constantly in dialogue with, and yet we keep forgetting (or repressing) in our everyday experience” (94). Rather than looking from the individual
or solely human experience, the CI jam offers a more inclusive understanding ofrelationships. Through the arrangements and entanglements between bodies andgravity, CI jams provide a practice of creative play as an intra-action by which
one shares in the world. The bodies, gravity, and earth are no longer objects with
their own boundaries and agencies but become a space for ongoing intra-actionsof adaptability with the material-discursive world. In a jam, all bodies, not justhuman bodies, are essential through their continual intra-action.
Like a CI jam, a musical jam is an open-ended improvisational play session.
Music jams happen in formal or informal settings—restaurants, clubs, schools,
and pick-up events such as outdoor gatherings and private houses. The jam iswhere musicians can try out innovative ideas, make mistakes (which can turninto new ideas), and move through them without fearing rejection by a producer
or auditioner. Analogous to the CI jam, where there is a sense of shared agency
between the mover, gravity, and the earth, a musical jam has shared agency thatemerges through the performative actions of the bodies of musicians, instruments, and sound. According to Showen and Mantie (2018), a musical jam isBut First, Let’s Jam“an aesthetics of intra-action [that] necessitates a dispersed and intrinsic notionof musical agency rather than an individualistic one; an emergent and nonteleological phenomenon that involves a decentered musical agency distributed
among players, samples, instruments (conceptualized broadly as any tool used insound production), sensations, and listeners/concert-goers along with ancillaryobjects that accompany the concert, club, or listening experience” (397–98). All
the musical bodies, tools, and ancillary objects serve as catalysts, responding toand through one another, thus offering the possibility of new musical inventions.
In a jam, all players intra-act, even the so-called observers. Audience members are active participants, sometimes finding their way into the jam circle, andare as crucial as the “creating” participants (Pinheiro 2014). Agency is always
being exerted, and it is impossible to remain at a distance and spectate without
entanglement. Even spectators who appear disconnected are still present, affecting the other participants simply by their physical presence as they are superposed with other agencies and slip into a stream of intra-action. This dialogic
relation places the experience of a jam as embodied communication suggesting
what Showen and Mantie (2018) call “a kind of reversibility of player/played andcause/effect in the musical phenomenon where the locus of agency rests not
in individual players, listeners, or other musical matter but in their combined
intra-activity” (398). As we will see, passivity is impossible in an agential realist
view of the jam, relationships, and play.
Another example is a photo jam, a collaborative exploration where thegoal is not the final product but, to quote photojam.net, to “give feedback, get
feedback. Learn, inspire, grow.” In a photo jam, the photographers play off eachother’s movements and positions. As one person changes positions, another
responds by imitating that position, complementing it, or opposing it. Not only
are the participants entangled with each other, but they are also entangled with
their cameras and the environment. As shadows and light play and change, thephotographers respond by altering their camera settings, position, angle, andcomposition. The human and nonhuman elements of the camera, participants,
shadows and lights, and other environmental factors affect the photographers’
responses and perceptions. Participants in a photo jam contribute to new possibilities and reveal something about each other. They are no longer separate
entities. Instead, they need each other to be complete. Furthermore, they learn
about the other from this jam event. Our histories, preferences, and inherent
natures all come into play during a jam.
In the increasingly popular game jam, participants create a playable video

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P L AYgame (usually within specific time constraints). Game jams offer an opportunity for students and professionals to experiment with game design and further their skills. While some game jams are competitive, many are not, but allemphasize a spirit of creativity, collaboration, and community. Moreover, they
are spontaneous play. Similar to a musical jam session, game jams produce a
product with little prior preparation. The goal is simply to develop new material
and practice game coding. As with the previous two jam examples, a game jam,like play, is “valued for [its] subjective, experiential qualities (play in which one
flows, for example, or is in the zone, or simply has vivid feelings)” (Sutton-Smith
2008, 118). In all these examples, the jam is one of the most distinctive ways ofapproaching creative collaboration. In a jam, as in creative play, we dive in andparticipate.

A New Materialist Twist on the Jam
To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence.
Existence is not an individual affair.
—Karen Barad

The creative play of a jam is a material-discursive practice in which traditional
notions of subject and object are questioned, making it particularly well suited
to be explored through the lens of new materialism. As an interdisciplinary
field of inquiry, new materialism adopts a nonanthropocentric realism, one inwhich binaries such as matter and meaning, nature and culture, and human andnonhuman are implicit in each other. It also recognizes the inherent activity ofmatter as dynamic, agentive, and active. “New materialism,” writes Dolphijn andvan der Tuin (2012), “is a cultural theory that does not privilege matter overmeaning or culture over nature. It explores a monist perspective, devoid of the
dualisms that have dominated the humanities (and science) until today, by giving
special attention to matter, which has been so neglected by dualist thought” (85,original italics). According to Gamble, Hanon, and Nail (2019), a performative
approach to new materialism refuses “any presumption of something external tomatter—including human meaning—that guides, structures, or grants meaning
to its behaviors [where] the performances of humans are not external to thoseof the rest of the material world” (112).
At this point, I offer a brief overview of the theory of agential realism

But First, Let’s Jamfrom Karen Barad [who uses the pronouns they/theirs—eds.] and then provide
an affirmative reading of Hans Georg Gadamer’s ethics of play by diffractively
reading it through the work of Barad. A diffractive methodology is particularly
well suited for this work because it “not only appears to transcend the level ofcritique, ultimately based in a Self/Other identity politics, but in Barad’s regard
also can be regarded as a boundary-crossing, trans/disciplinary methodology”(newmaterialism.eu). I diffract notions of relational ontology, shared agency,
and thirdness. On the surface, Barad’s posthumanism may seem incompatible with Gadamer’s theory, but a more critical examination reveals a common
dynamic relational ontology. Both theorists share the concept of destabilizationof cartesian dualism and the idea that agency is created between and within the
dialogic relationship. Furthermore, through agential cuts, Barad allows temporary boundary making between subject and object, opening possibilities for
Gadamer’s to-and-fro movement to occur within the cut.
Agential realism uses quantum physics, particularly the phenomena of
intra-action and quantum entanglement, to reenvision our perceptions of how
we are influenced by matter, meaning, and the world around us. Barad’s (2007)
starting point is the philosophical foundation of quantum physicist Niels Bohr.
They apply their background in quantum physics to reason that matter is notsubstance, but rather doing, and that agency is distributed over both humans
and nonhumans as “a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment, not somethingthat someone or something has” (178). In applying Bohr’s philosophical views,
they invite us to look at our world through a performative lens “which takes
account of the fact that knowing does not come from standing at a distance andrepresenting but rather from a direct material engagement with the world” (49,
original italics).
Through the ideas of quantum mechanics, agential realism offers us a viewof society as intraconnected in contrast to the view that every human is an atominteracting externally. Barad proposes that our existence demands a codependent
relationship between humans and other-than-humans. Agential realism reverses
the fragmentary cartesian order that separates the world into different parts withrigid categories and subcategories. These parts have divided the world, society,and culture into us and them and ins and outs. A verticalization of structures
exists in which one category exercises control over the others—oppresses theother and exploits the other. Quantum physics, in which seemingly autonomous
individual particles become entangled with each other and intra-act instantly,
argues against this division. As Barad (2007) says, a “quantum ontology under-

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P L AYmines the strict dichotomy between discrete individuation (objects) and continuous connectivity (relations)” (77). Werner Heisenberg (1999), a pioneer ofquantum mechanics, wrote, “one has now divided the world not into different
groups of objects but into different groups of connections. In an earlier periodof science one distinguished, for instance, as different groups, minerals, plants,
animals, men. . . . Now we know that it is always the same matter, the same various chemical compounds that may belong to any object, to minerals as well asanimals or plants; also the forces that act between the different parts of matterare ultimately the same in every kind of object. What can be distinguished is akind of connection which is primarily important” (107).
Barad (2007) uses the term intra-action, “the mutual constitution of entangled agencies” (33), to explore what Heisenberg calls “a kind of connection.”
Intra-actions occur whenever objects (human or nonhuman) become entangled.
This creates a shared agency in which the distinction between subject and object,
I and thou, player and playee is blurred. Entangled intra-relatings leave “marks”
on bodies that reverberate throughout our lives. We are affected by and throughthe other.

Relational Ontology:
Gadamer, Barad, and Agential Cuts
Through others we become ourselves.
—Lev S. Vygotsky

Both Barad and Gadamer argue against the view of the self and its privilegedinteriority of the mind common to classic Romanticism. Instead, both engage ina dynamic relational ontology where play (like jamming) exhibits a being-withothers, an intra-action that requires connectivity of participants, both humanand nonhuman. The painter becomes one with the canvas, the brushes, and thepaint just as the dancer does with the floor, the space, gravity, inertia, the air,the choreography, and the audience.
Although Gadamer and Barad acknowledge the existence of subject andobject, they hold differing perspectives on this concept. For Gadamer, the subject(“I”) is separate from the object (“Thou”), and the object exists in a relationshipwith the subject. In Barad’s post-Newtonian theory, both subject and object exist
only in relation through each other. When Barad (2007) writes that “individuals
do not pre-exist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and asBut First, Let’s Jampart of their entangled intra-relating” (ix), they are not stating that we do notexist before a specific intra-action but that we exist because of the existence ofgiven intra-action. Barad’s concept of agential separability, which is enacted only
within a particular intra-action, allows us to experience determinate boundaries and properties of entities and grants us “the possibility for differentiation
without individuation” (378).
For Barad, the inseparability of subject and object can be resolved throughthe concept of agential cuts. As Colclough (2016) describes it, “the cognitive‘split’ that constitutes the ‘I’ is a discursive practice called the agential cut; theconception of separability between one ‘thing’ and ‘another’ that grants the illusion of agency” (n.p.). An agential cut, says Barad (2007), is a boundary-making
practice that cuts things together and apart and creates determinate boundaries“affecting a separation between ‘subject’ and ‘object’” (334). However, they do
not separate the phenomenon into independent entities, as in a cartesian cut.
Neils Bohr (1963) wrote, in “classical physics, the interaction between object andapparatus can be neglected or, if necessary, compensated for, [but] in quantum
physics this interaction thus forms an inseparable part of the phenomenon”(4). By applying an agential cut, we permit a correlation between Barad’s andGadamer’s interpretations of subject and object, allowing us to examine theirviews on shared agency and nondualism.

Shared Agency in the Jam
An agent is a being with the capacity to act, and “agency” denotes the exercise
or manifestation of this capacity . . . agency is virtually everywhere. Wheneverentities enter into causal relationships, they can be said to act on each otherand interact with each other, bringing about changes in each other.
—Markus Schlosser

In a traditional philosophical sense, say for Hume and Aristotle, the term agency
denotes the use of intention, but not so for Gadamer and Barad. For them,agency is not an intentional act of human beings alone but happens throughand between the continuously changing relationships of the participants. In the
essay “Play as the Clue to Ontological Explanation,” Gadamer (1985) analyzes
aesthetics around the notion of play and questions the cartesian subject-object
model, which has dominated much of our philosophical thinking. “Gadamer’s
concept,” writes Vilhauer (2010) “of play carries with it an implicit attack on

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P L AYthe traditional conception of the human being as the independent ‘subject’ who
observes and knows (by making properly corresponding pictures or representations of them in his mind) the alien ‘objects’ of the world” (26).
Barad’s intra-active approach complements Gadamer’s and highlights how
both the material and discursive, the human and nonhuman, are constantly
entangled in a cocreative process, a distributed creative agency. For Gadamer,
play, by its very nature, requires a dialogic, I-Thou relationship with the other,a flow of back-and-forth movement he calls in German Bewegung. For instance,
in a child’s play with a ball, there is a dialogue between the child and the ball.
Vilhauer (2010) describes Gadamer’s three approaches to the I-Thou relation
as the scientific approach to the other, the psychological approach to the other,and the open approach to the other. As Gadamer (1985) describes it, creative
play resides in the open approach in which “each person opens himself to theother, truly accepts his point of view as valid and transposes himself into theother to such an extent that he understands not the particular individual but
what he says” (347). Gadamer’s view of play finds meaning and agency throughothers. He “teaches us to recognise how understanding itself only takes place ina dynamic, interactive, interpretive process of working through meaning withothers” (Vilhauer 2010, 32). This correlates with Barad’s performative matter,
which is a “doing,” a coalescing of agency. Gadamer’s play is a Baradian intraactive process where agency and meaning unite through the relationship.
As I mentioned, for Gadamer, play is a dynamic event, a bewegung. He“insists that . . . we should not expect to find this process locked inside any oneof the players . . . rather, we should expect to find the process developing in
between different players as a shared experience that depends upon both player’s
contributions.” (Vilhauer 2010, 33, original italics) For Barad, this in-between
is an intra-action of flow between subject (or agentially active) and object (thatwhich is acted upon) enacted within the phenomenon. As we saw, the boundary
making of an agential cut permits a delineation, allowing us to place Gadamer’s
bewegung within the phenomenon, thus opening the possibility for a sharedexperience between the differentiated players. This, according to Vilhauer (2010)
recognizes the importance of each participant and “grants [them] equal footing as our interlocutor and partner in the play-process of articulating truth”(83). Vilhauer’s “equal footing” advances a dialogue in which participants moveand react to each other, an essential element of creative play and the jam. The
dialogue can be between the musicians and the groove; the photographer, thecamera, and the surroundings; or the visual artist, paint, canvas, and the brush.

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Each participant affects the other, and interaction (or intra-action) occurs.
In contact and music jams, indeed in all types of jams, the intersectionof Gadamer’s I-Thou and agential realism’s entangled entities comes to theforefront through the validation of the embodied dynamics of humans andnonhumans. The jam becomes an experience in shared agency where all objects
are renewed by the intra-action. To use the child and ball example, a child
responds to the ball by running and jumping. A ball “responds” to a child byaltering its shape because of being squeezed, bounced, moving through theair, rolling on the ground, and responding to gravitational forces, friction, andpressure. This response alters how a child catches or misses a ball, how fast or
slow a game becomes, and many other variables that are intra-dependent. The
participants play and are, in turn, made by play. The same is true of the jam.
By placing humans in a collaborative relationship with nonhuman participants, the jam emerges as a space for a collective agency of ludic behavior.
Human beings are important participants in this process, but they are only
that, participants, not the only protagonists of the entanglement. Throughthe decentering of the human, there is a more profound awareness of all contributors as essential to the process, allowing a more substantial likelihood forequally distributed power. Participation shifts and morphs, and—as Kimmel,
Hristova, and Kussmaul (2018) observe—“the creative process is constitutivelytransactional and evolves through continuous perception” (21).

Thirdness: A New Creation
There is no longer a vis-à-vis, an opposition between subject and object, but
the constitution of a third entity: neither you, neither me, neither us, but at
the interstice between these three pronouns, a third-included.
—Godard and Bigé

The genesis of creative play involves the use of imagination, and, as the nameimplies, something is created amid this play. In the Barad and Gadamer intraaction, we create something rather than uncovering something that is there to
be discovered. While play is an unfolding of the unknown where the goal is playitself (Fink, Saine, and Saine 1968; Gadamer 1985; Schiller 1967), somethingelse emerges during the play process: a “third entity,” as Bigé and Godard (2019)
wrote. This thirdness is a concept with many names: third mind, third-included,
in-between, common third, and middle voice. In “Ways of the Jam: Collective

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P L AYand Improvisational Perspectives on Learning,” Lars Brinck (2014) discusses
Mørck’s (2006) common third as it relates to the jam: “Through the lens ofsocial practice theory Mørck argues for the fact that the participants’ growing participation in practice is directed not towards individual development orincreased cognitive or other individual capacity—neither for themselves or any
other—but towards a third entity, a ‘common third.’ In the case of jamming . . .
participation is directed towards the collective development of a strong groove
through a collective provision of still new action possibilities” (91). In a jam
session, a third could be a groove, a new perception, a creation, energy, or theinterstitial space generated by the contact itself (as in CI). This thirdness cannot
exist independently. It is produced through the intra-active coagencies of theparticipants. Additionally, thirdness always establishes a community since it is
the common ground, the shared focus created by all participants. As Albright(2013) writes, “The point created by joining of two energies . . . is that whichbecomes the focus of their mutual attention. [This] mutual pouring creates anenergetic dialogue that continuously loops between the partners” (242). The
agential thirdness that occurs through the jam session offers an opportunity forconnectedness and “response-ability.”
Cynthia Nielsen (2021), in “Gadamer on Play and The Play of Art,” describes
his use of the middle voice in grammar to illustrate this third: “Unlike the active
voice, which emphasizes the subject as the agent of the activity, and the passive
voice, which emphasizes what is done to a subject, the middle voice occupies the‘space’ between activity and passivity and gives rise to a co-constitutive event.
Here the co-constitutive event that comes to presence through the players—whothemselves are taken up in the spirit of the game and move in concert with its
rules and practices—is the game itself ” (143).
The third is a new entity, a new creation. This creation can be an event,a concept, or a real artifact. In many ways, this thirdness is what we long forwhen we engage in a jam. As an act of creation, it brings new consciousness
and an awareness of the other. There is a delight in getting lost in play, in an
atmosphere of mutual freedom with mutual dependence, in an intra-active toand-fro movement that is not tied to an end goal. Without this intra-activity,
play has no agency, purpose, or meaning. When we jam together, genuine intrasubjective dialogue leads the participants to a new cellular-level insight. In thisspace-matter-time of jam as creative play, a new agency appears that was never
there before. The essence of the jam emerges. When we use the jam session as a
metaphor for our daily life, it, like creative play, facilitates a reaction and responseBut First, Let’s Jam

to the creation-centered aspects of our collective existence.
Through shared agency as a thirdness, Barad’s entanglement reemerges as a
new materialist twist on Gadamer’s play process, one in which “two beings who
were at first separated are now in meaningful, communicative contact with eachother; alienation is overcome through shared understanding” (Vilhauer 2010,67). Barad’s (2007) subject-object relationship, in which “matter and meaning
are mutually constituted” (152), resonates with the Gadamerian understanding of play, in which participants are “not as fundamentally separate from theworld, but primordially in contact with the things and people of the world . . .
[revealing] that what we understand is not a dumb, mute ‘object,’ but the meaningful subject matter (Sache) of a shared world that is presented, articulated andinterpreted together with others” (Vilhauer 2010, 28, original italics). Through anagential realist lens, Gadamer’s concept of sache (or matter) expands to include
the active participation of all objects, whether the objects are real (such as animals, toys, art supplies, music) or have symbolic meaning. The acknowledgmentthat sache, this matter, is in a perpetual give-and-take, cross influencing, andconnecting, disrupts the traditional ideas of causality. Who is in charge no longer
applies when we play creatively, and no one person or object holds all the agency
or power. All the components become significant, and, through equilibrating
the relationship between I-Thou, we bring our perception of reality into a more
profound space, a new actuality of what it means to coexist in the world. We
permit “matter its due as an active participant in the world’s becoming, in its
on-going ‘intra-activity’” (Barad 2003, 803). Barad’s actively participating matter
is a playful counterpart to Gadamer’s meaningful subject matter (sache). These
concepts help us envision participants as beings-in-relation constantly echoing
and complementing each other.
The jam is the ideal space for engaging in a new materialist interpretationof play and a new reading of Barad’s concepts of entanglement and intra-activity
through the human experience of play as expressed by Hans-Georg Gadamer.
Through this diffractive practice, the jam emerges as a space where the subjectobject engages in a relationship of shared discovery, inviting us to relate to the
Other in more connected and supportive ways. In the entanglement of the jam,relationships are inescapably central, and the jam becomes a metaphor for what
Kirby and Brolin (2016) describe as “the very process in which the world issocially structured and one affirms the sacred order of the universe itself ” (13).
It is not a tool for becoming human; it is becoming.

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P L AYThe Jam as an Ethico-Socio-Political Response
Improvisation cultivates a self-open to possibility that can translate
to other areas of life and is thus politically profound.
—Sara Houston

If the jam is a cocreative process, one in which there is shared agency and power,
then it also can provide an ethico-socio-political opportunity by implicating amore profound “response-ability” to the relationships around us. Through thecollective jam experience, the subject-object and us-them relations collapse.
Both Barad and Gadamer shatter our assumed anthropocentric view by assertingthat all the elements involved are agentially intra-active through entanglement.
This entangled view has both ethical and socio-political implications. Througha Gadamerian lens, “the human being is not [seen as] a spectator at a distancefrom the world, nor as a subject standing over and against the world, but as a
dialogical creature who is engaged being-at-play-in-the-world with others” (Vilhauer 2010, 29). Again, we see common ground between Gadamer and Barad in
Barad’s (2007) statement that “we don’t obtain knowledge by standing outside
the world; we know because we are of the world. We are part of the world in its
differential becoming” (185). In reconceptualizing the role of relationships inthe creative play of a jam, I suggest that, through the entanglement of our creativity, environment, and histories, we experience a change of self. The processof jamming is the process of being “re-formed” and always “re-forming.” It reenvisions our conceptions of how we impact the environment and each other,necessitating an ethical response.
If the personal is political, then jams are, as Karen Nelson, a CI pioneer,
wrote, “a political movement from the inside out, organizing to break the code ofspace and distance between people” (Kaltenbrunner and Procyk 2004, 60). Thissuggests that CI (and other creative jams) have sociopolitical implications, supporting its use in broader community contexts. Bigé and Godard (2019) argue
that “Contact Improvisation is potentially one of the most political practices
one can imagine. Why? Because it is a practice where we have the opportunityof losing ground, a practice of stepping down from our identity pedestal. It isa political space because the condition for politics is that subjectivity is not theresult of subjection or subjugation . . . and this is what is experimented withthrough Contact Improvisation: radically, a space without subjects” (98).
The argument that play is a political space requires us to question how peo-But First, Let’s Jam

ple are affected and changed through this space without subjects. What impact
does the abolishment of subject-object hierarchy have on questions of power andequity? How can the jam be a site for effective ethico-socio-political practice?
The truth of the matter is that inequality does exist in many jams. Likeother types of communities, not everyone at a given session may have the same
standing. Many dynamics are involved, including the personalities and historyof the players (individually and collectively), gender, age, race, physical andmental abilities, and skill level. As with any community, boundary making andboundary maintaining are embedded into the culture of the group. While playencompasses fluidity and permeability with boundaries, parameters are always
in place. As Howell (2021) comments,“A common misconception about improvisation is that it is entirely free, without boundaries. As practicing improvisers,
we know that it is the creative parameters placed on the improvisation that makeit an intentional creation, an articulate communication between musicians” (2).
These boundaries can include as well as exclude, as each boundary-making
decision or cut we make leads to a separation that entails responsibility. But
what if we were to create and apply parameters or boundaries that facilitate
more equity, representation, and accessibility in jamming? Boundary-making
practices can address racism, ageism, ablism, neurodiversity and gender issues,and economic power issues. They are, as Barad (2007) writes, “about taking
issue with human exceptionalism while being accountable for the role we playin the differential constitution and differential positioning of the human among
other creatures (both living and nonliving)” (136). If the jam session is a journey
into new materialism, as previously discussed, it can allow an affirmative andnondualistic approach to power relations and ethics. This translates into jams
as an opportunity to shift behaviors, challenge gender, age, disability, and raceroles and engage in social, economic, and environmental “response-ability.”
In Barad’s agential realism, “we are responsible for the world within which
we live, not because it is an arbitrary construction of our choosing, but because
it is sedimented out of particular practices that we have a role in shaping” (203).
Much like the open approach to the Other in Gadamer’s play, there is a “responseability” and accountability for the relationalities we share. Indeed, “the entanglements we are a part of reconfigure our beings, our psyches, our imaginations,
our institutions, our societies” (Barad 2007, 383). Baradian and Gadamerian
understandings of relationships (and thus play) advocate shifting our behavior
to a more open, listening, and respectful approach toward the Other.
Perhaps we can approach the conversation of behavioral shifts in the same

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P L AYway we come to a jam session; as an experimental playing field for ideas. As awoman involved in Western theater dance, a feminization of dance genres has
allowed me to be in the majority. But as a mature-aged dancer, I have experienced
an ageism engendering prejudice. However, in the world of music (another arenain which I live), the mature musicians’ embodied knowledge and artistic talentis admired and revered. In the dance world (as in other body-based art forms),
there tends to be an inequitable treatment for those who do not conform to bodytypicity or those who are nonneurotypical. Furthermore, sexism and genderbased inequity exist in many creative settings across genres, conditions, or playspaces. In my experience, the jam asks us to play experimentally and find an
entangled ground that permeates with the other. This opens us up to learningin conversation. “Not only subjects but also objects are permeated through andthrough with their entangled kin; the other is not just in one’s skin, but in one’s
bones, in one’s belly, in one’s heart, in one’s nucleus, in one’s past and future.
This is as true for electrons as it is . . . for the differentially constituted human”(Barad 2007, 393). We must let go of our ego, listen, and process the ideas ofothers as we work together to achieve a common goal. By setting our ego aside
and becoming “permeated through and through with [our] entangled kin” (393),
we learn to listen.
We are capable of being listeners and actors and allowing these roles tochange in the intraplay of play. Perhaps this is the most important lesson we cantake from a jam session—listening as “a means of grasping the agencies of inclusion and exclusion that already necessarily inhere in the act” (Fairbairn 2022,
90). Our theory needs to become practiced through an intraplay of listeningthat allows for an antioppressive lens through which the exchange is about open
willingness. Unless we develop this open willingness, we will never fully realize
the inclusion of those historically excluded. We will experience what Gadamer
calls a “closedness to the Other” (Vilhauer 2010, 136), and our jam becomes an
exercise in dominating another person, a group, a team, an object, or the environment. In contrast, when we engage in listening and acting from a position
fully immersed with the other, we focus on openness toward the other and accept
what they can creatively bestow. The jam becomes a restorative process where
we can contribute and be more fully responsible for shaping the world and allits participants. The jam, as a way of being in the world, can cultivate renewed
equity and offer what Sutton-Smith (2008) calls a “form of human salvation in
our earthly box [by serving as] a healing function . . . a major method of becoming reconciled with our being within our present universe” (124).

But First, Let’s Jam

Conclusion
Play does not have its being in the player’s consciousness or attitude, but on
the contrary, play draws him into its dominion and fills him with its spirit.
—Hans Georg Gadamer

This article argues for creative play and jam sessions as opportunities to challenge the individualistic world view and find an intradependent connection thatenables us to relate to nature and society in more cohesive and supportive ways.
A diffractive reading of Gadamer through Barad unearths onto-epistemologicalsimilarities between these two theorists. Both offer relational, as opposed to individualistic approaches, acknowledging the fundamental condition that we are
related to the other. In our jam, we reimagine our everyday space as communal.
Both agree that the “Other” must be recognized, teaching us to see ourselves
as beings in the process and not the sole beings of the process. In our jam, werely on others to complete our existence. Both promote a case for the role ofthe nonhuman and its centrality to the process. Through the jam, we shatter theboundaries of mind-and-body, nonhuman-and-human, and us-and-them dualisms. Finally, both see the collaborative intraaction between all participants as
a place where a shared agency and a new creation arise, encouraging an ethicaland sociopolitical response.
Through shared agency and entanglement, we are called to listen to theother, paying attention to those oppressed and discarded by dualist thought.
Jamming is an ethico-socio-political response that raises questions about our
response-ability to the relationships around us and helps us better understandhumans as embedded in and dependent on those relationships. Undeniably,play has the capacity for change and transformation through dialogue. “In orderto enter this dialogue, we need to approach the Other with openness, stand‘ready’ to hear something new, ‘listen’ to the Other’s claims with seriousness, and‘allow’ that Other’s claim to challenge and enrich our own thinking” (Vilhauer
2010, 94). The jam, indeed, all creative play, is a transformational process thatchallenges anthropocentric individualism and serves as a catalyst for “listening
for the response of the other and an obligation to be responsive to the other”(Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 69). As a framework for dynamic change, thejam offers us an opportunity to grasp agencies of inclusion and exclusion as we
explore what really matters.

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