Compost Kinship
Planetary interdependencies invalidate “methodological individualism and human exceptionalism” as ethical, disciplinary and epistemological commitments. The stories these commitments bear are “literally unthinkable” in our time, in both scientific and social registers. As a result, sympoeisis dislodges autopoesis (self-forming and self-sustaining systems) in rethinking our world as always a ‘making’ (poeisis) ‘with’ (sym). In this regard, scholars like Donna Haraway and Kim Tallbear have foregrounded “kinship” as a framework for acknowledging that no one “acts alone; assemblages of organic species and of abiotic actors make history”, where “kin” highlights forms of relationality expanded beyond those bound to “ancestry or genealogy”.
“Kin” is described as an assembling word; a relational understanding without the premise of familiarity, foreknowledge, or resemblance. Entities, whether human or otherwise, “interpenetrate one another” establishing “sympoeitic” ensembles: we “become-with each other, compose and decompose each other,” leading Haraway to call herself a “compostist,” not a humanist, nor a posthumanist. As a regenerative process, composts are metabolic exchanges between organic material fueled by oxygen and nitrogen, forging not only an ensemble of diverse forms of life, but serving as the basis of nourishing future life. “Compost Kinship” (or kinship as compost) is an interdependent perspective from which to invent other stories without the rehearsal of human exceptionalism, and a means through which to model multispecies coexistence, towards practices of ecojustice.
Author: Patricia Reed