Sympoiesis
Updated 2026-08-03
INTRODUCTION
English translation pending.
CORE DEFINITION
Sympoiesis, meaning making-with, is Donna Haraway's term in Staying with the Trouble for collective, boundary-crossing becoming. It is posed against autopoiesis, the self-producing system that defines itself by closure. Haraway's claim is that no living entity is self-made: humans are permeated by bacteria, viruses, technologies, and environments, and evolve together with them. The constraint is that this is not a metaphor for teamwork but a claim about ontology and evolution.
SCAFFOLDING EFFECT
Reduce cognitive load
- Co-Becoming Frame: ask who else is inside this system rather than treating it as a bounded independent unit. - AI Framing: replace the question of beating AI with the question of co-evolving with it. - Boundary Check: test whether a claimed autonomy is actually a dependency that has been hidden.
Anchor fast decisions
Nothing that lives is closed. Every organism's metabolism, genome, and behaviour depend on other species, so its capacities are partly located outside its own body. Treating an entity as self-sufficient therefore misplaces its causes, which makes cooperation look like an add-on rather than the mechanism that produced the entity in the first place.
MINIMUM ACTION
In progress 0/1Practice this model in one real situation:
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Source support: Explicit
- wiki.p2pfoundation.nethttps://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Sympoeisisverified
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