A Patchwork of Withness: More-Than-Human Ensembles

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Towards A Politics of Multiplicity: Reimagining the Future of “Ensemble” in Art and Education

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the notion of “withness”, or a sense of a creation of an embodied intersubjectivity (Anonymized, 2023), as a key feature of what it means to create with and through ensemble. I propose to expand the concept of “withness” – and with it, the concept of ensemble – to include the more-than-human with which a performance, or even an idea of one, comes into being as a dynamic unfolding of transmaterial connections (Barad, 2015). At the same time, I trouble understandings of “inspiration”, “copying”, and “collaboration” as distinct types or stages of a creative process and show how they blur and flow into each other within the scope of artistic practice.

A key feature of ensemble work in the performing arts is its situatedness in a particular context, which is directly shaped by the positionalities of the various ensemble members. Expanding ensemble to the more-than-human, which includes human+digital/cyborg (Haraway, 2013) participants (e.g., the YouTube video of an artist’s performance) means taking into meaningful consideration the fact that contexts are never fully settled and that identities are always dynamically (re) negotiated (Braidotti, 2019). Thus, Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of agencement, typically translated as “assemblage”, is more applicable as agencying (Massumi, 2025) since the process of ensemble-making always involves considerations of power, both at the interactional level and its material-discursive influence at the macro-levels of institutions and society.

For this exploration, I look at the process of creating a patchwork denim garment (Fig.1) for possible future drag performance by a queer student of color as a "materiality in its entangled psychic and physical manifestations” (Barad, 2015, p.393). By taking a rhizomatic and felt approach (Springgay, 2019), I trace moments of withness across the months in which this human+more-than-human agencement developed as a project in a course on sustainable fashion as sculptural art. I engage with postqualitative methodologies as I consider fieldnotes, photographs, student writing and multimodal compositions on course assignments, interview recordings, and moments of video data to be parts of its own patchwork, each containing certain qualities of the immediate withness felt at the moment of encounter.

A conventional view of this patchwork would inform us that multiple forms of sustained engagement with the more-than-human, what is typically described as inspiration or imitation, helped the student develop and grow his skill in an artistic practice. However, I argue that central to this growth was the relational thinking-feeling-doing with the more-than-human that can be characterized as becoming-with ensemble. This is evident, too, in the relationships that continued and strengthened for the student beyond the course, with humans and more-than-humans alike.

By using postqualitative and critical posthuman approaches, this work contributes to developing methodologies in non-representational research. Broadening the notion of ensemble to include the more-than-human challenges deeply embedded hierarchies around which knowledge and whose contributions count toward the common goals of artform and classroom. A relational look at engaging with more-than-human sheds new light on the issues of positionality and power within ensembles.

Author

• Anastasia Y. Goodwin, Vanderbilt University