“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.
Symbiotic Fictions, in this context, are not
mere metaphors, but narrative and
epistemologically critical approaches that
imagine new forms of kinship and knowledge. They
operate at the intersection of biology,
literature, ethics, politics, and speculative
theory. Rather than asserting fixed identities,
these fictions are concerned with porosity,
processuality, and situated
interconnectedness—resonating with Donna
Haraway’s call to “make oddkin”, to establish
unexpected, non-genealogical forms of kinship.¹
Aligned with the
ethos of Wild Research—a mode of inquiry that
resists institutional control and embraces
open-ended, entangled, and situated
methodologies—Symbiotic Fictions carve out a
space for nonlinear, hybrid, and multispecies
modes of knowing.
Here, kinship is not
seen as a pre-given structure, but as a
performative, often fragile relation between
entities—human and nonhuman, organic and
technological alike. This line of thinking
recalls Anna Tsing’s reflections on precarity,
in which she argues that life and meaning emerge
precisely through uncertain entanglements:
*“Unpredictable encounters transform us; we are
not in control, even of ourselves.”*²
This perspective is not neutral. It shifts the focus from unity to relation, from representation to resonance. As such, Symbiotic Fictions enact a form of epistemic critique: they subvert traditional notions of objectivity, clarity, and taxonomic order—similar to Rosi Braidotti’s notion of nomadic subjectivity, which dissolves static boundaries of identity in favour of a relational, embodied becoming.³
Rather than stabilising knowledge,
Symbiotic Fictions generate a
space of possibility in which perception, care,
and relation are understood as epistemologically
potent. As Paul B. Preciado argues, knowledge
becomes emancipatory only when it recognises and
dismantles the normative conditions that govern
it—particularly those surrounding the very
notion of the subject: *“We must dismantle the
structures that confine us—only then can we
begin to acknowledge the multiplicity of
identities within us.“*⁴
In artistic, scholarly, and activist contexts—particularly within posthumanism, multispecies studies, and decolonial archives—we can observe how such symbiotic narratives take form: as fragments, as gestures, as attempts to imagine modes of living-together that are not grounded in control or dominance.
Symbiosis thus emerges not as a metaphor, but as a political, poetic, and speculative practice—and as a starting point for a radically relational understanding of world-making. Within this framework, Symbiotic Fictions and Wild Research become deeply intertwined: both seek forms of knowledge that are interdependent, fluid, and open to uncertainty.
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.
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