Sympoiesis

Nicoletta Isar

Related terms: ecological philosophy; eco-phenomenology; environmental humanity; earthling; worlding-with; metamorphosis; differential becoming; connectivity; adaptation; communication; the intelligence of matter.

The word “sympoiesis” derives from the ancient Greek sún (‘with, together’) and poíêsis (‘creation, production’), meaning ‘making-with’ or ‘becoming-with’. Sympoiesis was a constitutive notion of the ancient Greek linguistic corpus of natural philosophy used by Atomism and the Pre-Socratics to study the physical universe in its complex interplay of relations. It was a literary term to describe knots and ties in the relational ontologies of plots by Aristophanes or Euripides (synpoíesis tín tragôdían), as well as in arts to describe, for example, the work of the sculptor as sympoieisthai agalma metátinos.

Beth Demster first introduced sympoiesis (Demster 2000) in the field of environmental humanity to offer a heuristic tool to oppose autopoiesis – a term theorized by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (1980). Her theory was designed to help conceptualize systems without clear and definite boundaries, but having proper identity, such as ecosystems and natural cultural systems. But it was Donna Haraway who made the term famous within the field, in her effort to overcome the human exceptionalism that permeates the Anthropocene narrative. Her sympoietic stories of the Chthulucene promote and resurface complex worldly entanglements and assemblages until then neglected or considered collateral. It is not simply the Anthropos that did it all, but also, and not least, a multiplicity of bacteria and critters who co-create the world (Margulis and Sagan 2002). Far from having just one main character, Haraway’s stories about diverse multispecies find in the sympoietic texture the verb to oppose the traditional mimetic and organicist narratives. In her stories, Harraway advances into a different world with different characters linked by ties and knots engaged in process-relational ‘ontologies’. As she describes this ‘worlding-with’: “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties” (Haraway 2016, 12). Haraway’s imaginative fiction reveals a universe anticipated by the often-quoted story by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) of the wasp-orchid relationship image in which the wasp and the orchid do not form an organism. They are not functional parts of a greater whole that subsumes them. Rather they are in a relationship of differential becoming (our emphasis):

The line or block of becoming that unites the wasp and the orchid produces a shared deterritorialization: of the wasp, in that it becomes a liberated piece of the orchid’s reproductive system, but also of the orchid, in that it becomes the object of an orgasm in the wasp, also liberated from its reproduction. A coexistence of two asymmetrical movements that combine to form a block, down a line of flight that sweeps away selective pressures. The line, or the block, does not link the wasp to the orchid, any more than it conjugates or mixes them: it passes between them, carrying them away in a shared proximity in which the discernibility of points disappears (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 293-294).

The paired figures of the wasp and the orchid illustrate a series of concepts, such as the rhizome, becoming, de- and reterritorialization. Orchids display the sensory characteristics of female wasps to attract male wasps in a kind of ‘courtship dance’ described by Deleuze as ‘against nature.’ While tempted by this lure, the wasps move from flower to flower, engaged in the reproductive apparatus of the orchid, while the pollen is transferred to their bodies. Deleuze and Guattari call this a becoming: a becoming-orchid. This is not an act of imitation, but an actual incorporation of the body of the wasp into the orchid’s reproduction. This is also true for the orchid becoming-wasp, not by copying the wasp, but by entering the zone of indiscernibility through a series of de- and re-territorializations. In his Phenomenology of perception, Merleau-Ponty argues that desire and sexuality are fundamental for being-at-the-world (être-au-monde), and to understand how things and beings can exist, one should see how a being or a thing exists through desire and love. Merleau-Ponty postulates the existence of a fundamental erotic perception:

There must be an Eros and Libido which breathes life into an original world, gives sexual meaning or value to external stimuli and outlines for each subject the use he shall make of his objective body (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 156).

Deleuze-Guattari opened for the first time this orientation of desire as an ontology of change, albeit different from Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of flesh, recognizing that not only human acts are creative (poiesis), but that the entire cosmos is engaged in a creative becoming. This co-becoming evoked by Deleuze-Guattari may be associated with sympoiesis.

In a world of changing planetary boundaries, decomposing ecosystems, and disappearing lives, sympoiesis brings a new vision, provides a necessary term, and introduces a new theoretical frame for a new approach to multiplicity. But sympoiesis is not merely a theoretical tool for defining the natural order as sympoietic. Rather, it becomes a new way of engaging with the living, the being and the becoming-with of the multiple, the divergent and the heterogeneous. As Elisabeth Grosz remarked in her book The Incorporeal:

The better one understands the universe in its complexity, in the connections that link each thing to every other, the more adequate one’s ethical relation in and to it. Ethics does not spring directly from our understanding of the world. Rather, it comes from our affective bonds to and connections with other things in the world, relations that exist and give coherence to the world (Grosz 2017, 7).

In a clarifying definition of the term, Haraway writes: Sympoiesis is a simple word; it means ‘making-with.’ Nothing makes itself; nothing is autopoietic or self-organizing. […] Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, and historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company (Haraway 2016, 58). Worlding-with, as Haraway muses, is a new and much-needed mode of being in the world. Our survival depends on our capacity to imagine and perform new ways of living. A ‘worlding-with’ is called for, ultimately, each earthling with each other, with other species, and with the Earth. The recognition of sympoiesis as a principle and a mode of being in the world, as ‘worlding-with’ and ‘earthling-with’, would be a new recuperative way of being and of worlding, where everyone and everything (both human and more-than-human) are deeply interconnected. It is an emergent vision in eco phenomenology and environmental studies meant to oppose the reality of the climate crisis with its extinct species and cultures, dying oceans, rivers, and wild critters, with ever more intensifying and destructive cycles of heat, droughts, and wildfires. In one of his recent books, Metamorphoses, Emanuele Coccia projects an intriguing vision of “the animate world [a]s a world of architects” (Coccia 2021, 155). The world is not something that pre-exists natural species, but something that each species reshapes in its image, and in which each species relates to others as an architect of the world. This is however not a mere relationship between species and space, a form of life and its world. “It is the paradigm of the interspecies relationship” (ibid. 156). Thinking of the world that surrounds us (environnous) in the light of philosophical theory, Coccia performs a radical turn or a veer (en virant) which reveals not only what is known as the ‘environment,’ but a conspicuous metamorphic flow. Metamorphosis is for him the evidence that “all the life that exists around and outside us is the same as the life that lies within us, and vice versa” (Ibid. 173). He evokes here the Amazonian thinker, Ailton Krenak who says that life is not something around us, but something that flows through us and from both inside and out. There is no environment – nor any environing life – but only a flow, a continuum of which we are a metamorphic action” (Ibid.). This mode of thinking is in line with David Abram and Salazar’s eco-phenomenology, both thinkers indebted to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of flesh and the memory of the Indigenous cultures, concerned, on the one hand, to “return us to our senses,” “inhabiting a sensuous world that has been waiting for years” (Abram 1996, 63).  On the other hand, aiming at the sensorial connection with the landscape in the sense of a larger flesh, the bond with the Earth, and the earthly body (Salazar Sutil 2018, 69). Sympoiesis is intimately related to metamorphosis as a twofold self-evident truth concerning presence and transformative succession: “every living thing is in itself a plurality of forms – simultaneously present and successive – but none of these forms truly exists autonomously and separately, because they are always defined in immediate continuity with an infinite number of others that come before and after” (Coccia 2021, 9). Like metamorphosis, sympoiesis is a force that allows every living thing to be staged simultaneously and successively across several forms. It is the breath of life that connects forms, allowing them to pass one into the other (Coccia 2021, 10). Each time we attribute a human trait to a plant or an animal, we recognize that there is something within us, which is not exclusively human (ibid. 176). “We are plant, we are rock, we are mineral, […] we are earthly flesh” – we are earthlings – partaking of the same living tissue, writes Salazar Sutil (Salazar 2018, 106). Mattering is an endless process of vital and deathly impulses, life-death being an inescapable pulse of the material world (ibid. 108). Carbon is what all living beings leave after death:

Earth then becomes the endless medium out of which life emerges continually and into which it returns after death. Ashes to ashes, bone to stone, human to humus, flesh to slush” (Ibid. 105-106).

Similarly, Haraway reiterates: “We are compost, not posthuman; we inhabit the humusities, not the humanities.” This is what we are in the sympoietic sense of its tangling: “Critters—human and not—become-with each other, compose and decompose each other, […] in ecological evolutionary developmental earthly worlding and unworlding” (Haraway 2016, 97).”

However, as Stanton Marlan has remarked, focusing on movement and transition from one state of transformation to another is not enough. It runs the risk of not seeing with that dark eye that sees blackness (and suffering associated with it) for itself and not simply as a passage to whiteness, change, and generation (Stanton 2008). A different picture is revealed by the contemporary project ANARCH conducted by the Belgian artist Gast Bouschet – a mixture of word and image that documents a four-year-long transformative retreat in the heart of the Ardennes Forest - one of Europe’s ancient ‘killing fields’ and the site of intense industrial exploitation:

Poisonous beauty hovering in suspense, over the abyss. The awakening of a deeper identity. A complex relational field of both terror and redemption. A roar of raw elemental power. The light of blackness itself (Bouschet 2023, 1).

The ceaseless processes of emergence, death, dissolution and putrefaction implicate the artist/sorcerer in the alchemical Nigredo under the Spell of the Black Sun of Saturn.

In Bouschet’s words, a radically different perspective on the world’s sympoiesis opens:

Saturnian Alchemy is dirty and belongs to the earth, it does not avert impurity but rather lures disruptive powers into physical things and bodies. The aim is not the purification of matter and consciousness but the transmutation into the multiplicity of non-human otherness. The microbial communities that live inside of us chemically alter our brains and change our moods. And what evolutionary biologists call the “necrobiome” will one day transform us into something that can be looked upon as “our” chaos, a fertile massa confusa that produces new lifeforms (Ibid.).

Empedocles advised us long ago that listening carefully to his “undeceptive” (ouk apatêlón) discourse, including his talk about Love (Philótês) and Strife (Neikos), will increase our wisdom about how the kosmos is structured and it works, and inform us truthfully about how things are. We are explicitly told that this process of desire and hatred running through all things is blameless (amempheos), and without these forces, nothing would be at all.

In conclusion, a few words on the ‘erotic’ side of sympoiesis as a ‘worlding-with’ phenomenon. Here, forms and appearances establish connections and communication between different beings, not only different of the same species, but different in terms of species, and ontological domain (plants, insects, dogs, humans). The biology of the flowering plants offers us a good illustration of how the elements in nature are yearning for each other because of the force of love acting within or upon them. Empedocles’ term pothein or ‘desiring’, denoting strong emotion, is scientifically fully valid. As a cosmic attractor, argues Coccia (2019, p. 100), the flower becomes a laboratory of conjunction and mixture of what is disparate, in which reproduction is no longer a relation between individuals of the same species, but a relation that must pass through other individuals from other species. The reproduction of the phanerogams (a species of spermatophyte or seed plant) is an “open wedding” (from the Greek phanero-meaning ‘make manifest’; and gamos = ‘union’, ‘wedding’). It is no longer an occult or private act because it has to pass through the world. Sex is the most worldly and cosmic thing (Coccia 2019, 101). The sympoiesis of plant life becomes an aesthetic adventure thanks to flowers which transform the world into a stage of an explosion of forms and colours with their myriads of hues and fragrances – an intoxicating experience. The ‘worlding-with’ between bees and flowers has been observed since antiquity by Aristotle. It has lately been researched scientifically in modernity and postmodernity, revealing an ineffable imaginary, otherwise hardly visible, with incontestable capabilities of learning, adapting and performing intelligent functions. New studies confirm the collective intelligence of honeybee colonies. A Day from the Life of a Bee looks like the most enticing spectacle – a synesthetic and sympoietic performance. Pollination as the process of transporting pollen among plants, necessary for its reproduction in the vegetable world, depends on the symbiotic relationship between pollinators and pollinated plants. Honeybees are recognized as the major pollinator workhorse and the essential components of terrestrial ecosystems. The honeybees' scouting for flowers relies on both vision and scent. As flowers are ephemeral critters, to ensure sufficient honey for the colony, other bees must be swiftly directed to the same source. When scout bees return to the hive and meet others, they perform intricate dances with their tails and abdomens, known as a waggle-dance. The entomologist and pastor Ernst Spitzner (1788) had observed this ‘ballet of the bees’, later recalled by Frisch:

When a bee has come upon a good supply of honey anywhere, on her return home she makes this known in a peculiar way to the others. Full of joy she twirls in circles about those in the hive, from above downward and from below upward, so that they shall surely notice the smell of honey on her; for many of them soon follow when she goes out once again (Frisch 1993, 6).

This ‘waggles dance of the honeybee,’ one of the most complex behaviours in the animal world, was decoded and scientifically investigated by the Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch, who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology with Austrian Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen from the Netherlands. Further research has recently shown that Honeybee Waggle dance is a Model of Swarm Intelligence, a language of communication, and a superior mode of adaptability to environmental change through dancing (Okada, Ryuuichi et al. 2023). Bees are the largest group of pollinators in the world. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that bees are responsible for the pollination of 70% of the human food crops that provide 90% of the world’s nutrition. As they collect nectar, the flower’s pollen coats their bodies, and the bees carry it to other plants. However, scientists ascertain that bees are dying for a variety of reasons—pesticides, drought, habitat destruction, nutrition deficit, air pollution, and global warming. Air pollution affects the chemicals that flowers produce to attract bees, which destroys scent trails provoking disturbances in communication. Unless action is taken to boost the health of bee populations, global food shortages may soon become a catastrophic reality.

A suitable closing word would perhaps come from Jaqueline Sordi’s dialogue interview with the author Ailton Krenak, the first Indigenous person elected to join the Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Letters):

Our planet is so wonderful. We cannot lose sight of the fact that life is everywhere. No one is a separate cocoon in the cosmos living this experience alone. You experience this with all the organisms that are in the planet’s biosphere. It is as if we were diluted in everything. We need to relearn how to walk softly on Earth. When we learn to walk like this, we will experience wonder and nothing else will be needed. We must accept Nature’s invitation to dance with life. If we could have an organic mindset, which connects us with bees, ants, the grass that grows, the trees that shake in the wind, that shed their leaves and bring forth new shoots, we would understand that everything is constantly sprouting, growing, dying, being born (Sordi 2024).

References

Abram, David. 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Random House.

Bouschet, Gast. Forthcoming. “ANARCH: Immersion in the Alchemical Nigredo Readings, Peter Mark Adams.” Metamorphosis – Ecstases of Matter and Image, edited by Nicoletta Isar.

Coccia, Emanuele. 2019. The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture. Trans. by Dylan J. Montanari. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Coccia, Emanuele. 2021. Metamorphoses, Trans. by Robin Mackay. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Dempster, Beth. 2000. “Sympoietic and Autopoietic Systems: A New Distinction for Self-organizing Systems,” In Proceedings of the World Congress of the System Sciences and ISSS. Edited by J. K. Allen & J. Wilby, Toronto.

Grosz, Elisabeth. 2017. The Incorporeal. Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism. Columbia University Press.

Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.

Lindauer, Martin. 1985. “The Dance Language of Honeybees: The History of a Discovery.” In Experimental Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology: In Memoriam Karl von Frisch 1886–1982, 129-140. Eds. Hölldobler B, Lindauer M. Sunderland: Sinauer.

Margulis, L. and D. Sagan. 2002. Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origin of Species. New York: Basic Books.

Maturana, H. and F. J. Varela. 1980. Autopoiesis and Cognition. The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Owoc, Mieczyslaw L. 2022. “Collective Intelligence of Honeybees for Energy and Sustainability.” In Artificial Intelligence for Knowledge Management, Energy, and Sustainability, 102-116. Eds. Eunika Mercier-Laurent and Gülgün Kayakutlu. Springer Nature Switzerland.

Salazar Sutil, N. 2018. Matter Transmission: Mediation in a Paleocyber Age. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Sordi, Jaqueline. 2024. It’s Not the End, We Have Several Possible Futures: Interview with Indigenous author Ailton Krenak, ed. Latoya Abulu, Mongabay Brazil, 30 July 2024.

Stanton, Marlan. 2008. The Black Sun: The Alchemy and Art of Darkness. Texas A&M: University Press.

Von Frisch, K. 1993. The Dance Language and Orientation of the Bees. Translated from the German by Leigh E. Chadwick. Preface by Thomas D. Seeley. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University