# Go Visiting 

**Published by:** [Go Visiting](https://paragraph.com/@erink/)
**Published on:** 2023-02-01
**URL:** https://paragraph.com/@erink/go-visiting

## Content

Go Visiting is drawn from a concept (really, more of a turn of phrase) by cultural theorist and philosopher Donna Haraway; in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016) Haraway envisions a future where going visiting is cultivated practice that is central to a world that is “active, alive, and generative.” Haraway introduces what it means to go visiting in a chapter about her experience meeting and working with philosopher and ethologist Vinciane Despret, who Haraway describes as “allergic to denunciation and hungry for discovery, needy for what must be known and built together, with and for earthly beings, living, dead, and yet to come” (127). Despret’s practice, wherein she “thinks with other beings, human and not,” informs Haraway’s thinking about how cross-species alliances, partnerships and collaborations contribute to the kinds of productive relationships that are needed to make a world beset by poverty, famine, war, climate change, multispecies genocide, (and, and, and), habitable. For Haraway, go visiting, really, is a very simple prompt—it asks of the individual to consider how to cultivate an existence that recognizes the symbiosis of their self in relation to other beings. To do such work, she explains we must [train] the mind and imagination to go visiting, to venture off the beaten path to meet unexpected, non-natal kin, and to strike up conversations, to pose and respond to interesting questions, to propose together something unanticipated, and to take up the unasked-for obligations of having met (130).Haraway acknowledges, rightly, that this is not revolutionary work; go visiting does not reinvent the wheel—it’s not particularly disruptive or even original to suggest that the individual should consider the world outside of themselves, recognize the subjectivity of another, and think alongside them in order to live in companionability with them. Go visiting, though, strikes me as significantly central to any individual’s activity in web3. I’m drawn, in particular, to go visiting as a practice in relation to my own experience in the space: after a year and more of exploring—through nfts, the ubiquitous PFP project, various tokens, & DAOs—I have been struck by the central tenet of the importance of community; this term is sticky—it signifies differently and variably across uses and can point to something consequential or otherwise complete gossamer. In its most general sense, “community” within web3 refers to individuals who believe in some shared goal, experience, or outcome. They have self-selected together in the name of this goal and so signal their membership to their chosen communities via on-chain tokens. The purpose of the tokens can be specific (financialization or professional membership) or limitless (social membership or public goods protocols). A number of thoughtful people and groups have already started to think through what these communities mean and how they are formed and for what reason. For instance, Other Internet’s ethnographic studies of web3 communities and Metalabel’s tooling for squads have particularly influenced my thinking about what it means to go visiting in web3—both recognize that the emergent modes of “meeting” that blockchain technology engenders expand our worlds in ways that have social—not just economic—effects. Their already-in-progress work prompts us to think about how collaborative and generative communities form and to better specify when (and why) the word community is being deployed. In this widening context of community, go visiting is a powerful practice that web3 and blockchain technology re-engenders anew as it opens wider, broader, and more expansive possibilities to go visiting and meet, in Haraway’s words, “unexpected, non-natal kin.”Go Visiting & Kinship in Web3Kinship, in any form, is a narrative—it is a story that relates individuals to each other and to their communities, to their past, and to their future. In the West, kinship practices are rooted in biogenetic, heteropatriarchal traditions. This dominant, biogenetic kinship story encodes people within certain subjectivities and obligations—you are a mother, you are a daughter, or you are a sister. The individual’s placement within this lineage renders that person subject to certain obligations of care and concern. Historically, biogenetic kinship has contributed to the myth of human exceptionalism, the primacy of the heteropatriarchy, and the inevitable elaboration of all the -isms (racism, colonialism, capitalism, etc., etc.) that constrain an individual’s ability to go visiting in the embodied, “real” world. Scholars have tracked, for instance, how the dominance of biogenetic kinship has historically elided and destroyed forms of racialized kin; drawing on the work of Saidya Hartmann and Hortense Spillars, Nancy Bentley (2009) identifies kinlessness as the defining condition of slavery in the American South, where kinlessness was an inheritable condition imposed in order to “isolate and extract the sheer materiality of a human population—their bodies, labor, and reproductive capacities—from the sphere of the familial” (Bentley 271). Through the late 20th and early 21st century, the significance of biological ties to Western forms of family has been poked, prodded, and remade as individuals sought to acknowledge the myriad of ways (historically and contemporaneously) that humans construct kinship ties beyond blood lineage. Indigenous kinship traditions, for instance, recognize humans as one of a multiplicity. Daniel Heath Justice (2018) explains that the social hierarchies that characterize the West’s interpretive authority and that have justified centuries of “expansion, invasion, expropriation, and exploitation” are dispersed, throughout Indigenous kinship traditions, into diverse and interdependent relations (depending on the tradition, these relations may include plants, animals, or the elements) that make up Indigenous kinship systems (40). In his introduction to All My Relations (1990), Thomas King elaborates how the “web of kinship” that Indigenous people enact extends “to the animals, the birds, to the fish, to the plants, to all the animate and inanimate forms that can be 8 seen or imagined” (ix). For King, the doing of kinship recognizes the interconnectedness of these relations and the complex subjectivities of other-than-human neighbours. The doing of kinship in these terms encompasses the feelings and actions that foster the impulse of individuals to care for one another, to recognize interdependence, and to create new co-identities that are rooted in new kinship practices, relationships, and cultural forms. While blockchain promises trustless permissibility and efficiency, it is important to always insist on reading the ways that humans shape the technology that brings them together (or draws them apart) in the name of kinship. Blockchain enables individuals and communities to organize themselves in new ways; it engenders new systems of meeting and thus enact new expectations of care and obligation that always undergird the broad web of kinship that humans, animals, and other-than-humans are subject to. DAOs, for instance, function as on-chain governance structures that are built on a broad concept of community. These communities emerge in relationship to (and with the help of) blockchain technology. Within a DAO, kinship functions a lot like a biogenetic tie; the DAO’s token verifies an individual’s membership in a community, just as DNA signals the individual is part of a particular family. DAOs, then, inevitably function as kinship containers, where they both rely on and iterate extra-biological obligations that characterize new, creative kinship structures—to me, they demonstrate potential for blockchain to harbour “non-natalist kinnovations” (Haraway 209). This follows contemporary thinking about kinship, wherein the concept of kinship has expanded to recognize how kin is not solely rooted in biological ties but is made and chosen. To go visiting recognizes the significant human component of creating kin through and on and with blockchain, as well as the crucial, experiential dimensions of kinship that tie individuals to one another. In this iteration, go visiting is a practice that seeks to “train the mind” to consider how blockchain initiates novel forms of on-chain kinship and how those individuals who participate, build, and exist within web3 ecosystems are inevitably initiated into this new, emerging web of kin—and thus, in the words of Haraway, inevitably “take up the unasked-for obligations of having met.”Image: Important Conversation, Shoshanah Dubiner, 2012. www.cybermuse.com Bentley, Nancy. “The Fourth Dimension: Kinlessness and African American Narrative.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, 2009 Haraway, Donna. Staying with Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016. Justice, Daniel Heath. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. Wilfried Laurier Press, 2018. King, Thomas. All My Relations. McClelland & Stewart, 1990.

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