The blur between body, relation, and language is not a lack of definition but a space of resonance. Symbiotic fictions are narrative and epistemically critical practices that explore new forms of kinship and knowledge. They operate at the intersection of biology, literature, ethics, politics, and speculative theory, where meanings continuously affect one another rather than settling. Rather than stabilising identity, they focus on permeability, processuality, and situated interconnection—echoing Donna Haraway’s call to make “oddkin,” establishing unexpected, non-genealogical forms of kinship.^1
“Symbiosis is not a strategy. It is a poetic fissure in the concept of the self.”
(found in a damaged document, author unknown)
An Epistemic
Inquiry into Posthumanist Thinking
In the spirit of Wild Research—a mode of inquiry that resists institutional control and embraces open-ended, entangled, and situated methodologies—symbiotic fictions create space for non-linear, hybrid, and multispecies ways of knowing. Kinship here is not a pre-given structure but a fragile, performative relation between human and nonhuman, organic and technological entities. Anna Tsing emphasises that life and meaning emerge precisely from uncertain entanglements:
“Unpredictable encounters transform us; we are
not in control, not even of ourselves.”^2
Symbiotic fictions treat cognition as a relational event. They counter demands for clarity with a practice of resonance—a form of thought that touches rather than separates. Rosi Braidotti’s theory of nomadic subjectivity illustrates how such approaches dissolve fixed boundaries of the self, replacing them with relational, embodied becoming.^3.
Language as a
Symbiotic Medium
If symbiosis is more
than a biological metaphor, language itself
becomes a space in which meaning arises through
mutual dependency. Writing thus becomes an
experimental site of collaboration: body and
concept, voice and materiality, syntax and
sensation form temporary alliances.
Critique, Liberation, and Indeterminacy
Paul B. Preciado reminds us that knowledge becomes emancipatory only when it recognises and dismantles the normative structures that confine it—especially those surrounding the subject:
“We must dismantle the structures that confine us—only then can we begin to acknowledge the multiplicity of identities within us.”^4
Indeterminacy is understood not as a problem but as a condition of knowing. Symbiotic fictions enact an epistemic critique that subverts traditional notions of objectivity, clarity, and order.
Poetic coda
In artistic, scholarly, and activist
contexts—particularly within posthumanism,
multispecies studies, and decolonial
archives—such symbiotic narratives appear as
fragments, gestures, and tentative attempts to
imagine ways of living together that are not
grounded in control or dominance. Symbiosis thus
emerges as a political, poetic, and speculative
practice—a starting point for radically
relational world-making. Symbiotic fictions and
Wild Research are deeply intertwined: both seek
forms of knowledge that are interdependent,
fluid, and open to uncertainty.
Symbiosis is not a state. It is a movement—a becoming-with the other that transforms and recognises us.
Footnotes:
1. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 2–5.
2. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 20.
3. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), chap. 1.
4. Paul B. Preciado, An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing, trans. Charlotte Mandell (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020), 41.
