"How has the question of ‘how things hold’ come to such importance? This question grows out of the turn to the concept of ‘assemblage’. In earlier social theory in both ecology and anthropology, ‘communities’ were the focus of social cohesion. Worried that this concept overemphasized a taken-for-granted social solidarity, scholars in both fields have turned to assemblage, a more loosely imagined grouping. But this opens the question of how entities in an assemblage relate to each other. With growing evidence of symbiosis and interdependence from ecologists and evolutionary biologists (Gilbert and Epel 2015; Margulis 1981), theorists have reimagined the assemblage not as a static set of autonomous elements but as a dynamic process of ‘becoming with’ (Haraway 2008). The image of the knot has emerged as a way to imagine cohesion without a prior assumption of collective solidarity. Donna Haraway (2003: 6) has described the world as 'a knot in motion.' Deborah Bird Rose (2012: 136) writes of 'embodied knots of multispecies time.'Tim Ingold (2015) imagines knots as nodes in meshworks of lifelines. The word ‘knots’ offers a vivid image of interconnection within the assemblage. How do knots work? This article suggests that knots form through attunements in which humans and non humans can align with each other through timing to make living in common possible. In this way, concepts of assemblage and of coordination require each other. Juxtapositions of beings gain force as assemblages when relations of coordination are thick within them."
HOW THINGS HOLD A Diagram of Coordination in a Satoyama Forest by Elaine Gan and Anna Tsing