Radical Associativity

Similar to Barad’s notion of entanglement (see intra-action) and da Silva’s use of this (see singular) this notion does not start from separation and move towards collaboration but acknowledges that we are always already bound in webs of connection that sustain and restrict us. The task is to affirm these ties, which stretch across time and space, rather than fall into a fiction of a paranoid individualism. Donna Haraway has named this kinship:

"My purpose is to make “kin” mean something other/more than entities tied by ancestryor genealogy. The gently defamiliarizing move might seem for a while to be just a mistake, but then (with luck) appear as correct all along. Kin-making is making persons, not necessarily as individuals or as humans. I was moved in college by Shakespeare’s punning between kin and kind—the kindest were not necessarily kin as family; making kin and making kind (as category, care, relatives without ties by birth, lateral relatives, lots of other echoes) stretch the imagination and can change the story...

I think that the stretch and recomposition of kin are allowed by the fact that all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense, and it is past time to practice better care of kinds-as-assemblages (not species one at a time). Kin is an assembling sort of word. All critters share a common “flesh,” laterally, semiotically, and genealogically. Ancestors turn out to be very interesting strangers; kin are unfamiliar (outside what we thought was family or gens), uncanny, haunting, active."

Donna Haraway, Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin, 1995.