In this chapter I will discuss Haraway's notion of sympoiesis and will examine different modes of cohabitation or hybridisation with non-human others. Such concepts as sympoiesis, or the holobiont, question the notion of the biological individual and also change our understanding of what it means to be human. As Richard Grusin pointed out, ‘we have never been human’, for the reason that ‘the human has always coevolved, coexisted, or collaborated with the nonhuman – and that the human is characterized precisely by this indistinction from the nonhuman’ (Grusin 2015: ix–x). We have never been human, because we have always been dependent on other species living within or beyond our bodies. However, the question that still needs to be answered is whether all forms of coexistence are profitable and welcomed. How does one define the limit at which this coexistence is collaborative and productive (‘posthuman’), and beyond which it becomes damaging and lethal, in other words, ‘posthumous’, e.g. coming after life? (Weinstein and Colebrook 2017). For this reason, the interrelations between different life forms should be discussed together with the concepts of immunity and contagion. The notion of immunity expresses an ambivalent character of life: on the one hand, it protects an organism against everything that is beyond its boundary; on the other hand, it helps to collaborate with other organisms and to create a new community, or an ecosystem. In this sense, immunity can be thought as a possibility for a new community connecting human and non-human beings. At the end of this chapter, I will examine different modes of interspecies communication in contemporary art practices.

Sympoiesis as ‘Making-With’

Haraway's discursive interventions, from cyborgs to symbiotic creatures, deconstruct the myth of the organism as a natural wholeness. Instead, she persuasively demonstrates that every living being is a multiplicity, an assemblage, which might be arranged and rearranged in many different ways. In this respect, Haraway, without acknowledging it, elaborates further Deleuze and Guattari's attempts to disarticulate the idea of an organism and open it to becoming and ‘unnatural participations’, which was discussed in Chapter 3. For Deleuze and Guattari, an organism is an assemblage-like construction, the body without organs, which demonstrates the disorganisation of the organism and the denaturalisation of nature.