Introduction. The Dynamics of Symbiosis: From Emergence to Dissolution
Introduction. The Dynamics of Symbiosis: From Emergence to Dissolution

Summary/Abstract: This introduction argues that the “symbiotic turn” in the Environmental Humanities and Posthumanities has produced a normative narrowing of the concept of “symbiosis.” Symbiosis has progressively been conflated with cooperative relationality at the expense of Heinrich Anton de Bary’s (1879) founding biological formulation, which encompassed mutualism, commensalism, and parasitism without privileging any single case. Drawing on Lynn Margulis’s endosymbiotic theory and Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), this special issue resituates symbiosis as a temporally dynamic, asymmetrical, and often precarious process rather than a static state or normative ideal. Its outcomes range from the emergence of stable new entities to the irreversible dissolution of the relata that entered the relation. Eight contributions — spanning Object-Oriented Symbiosis (OOS), digital bio-narrative design, fungal and yeast ecocriticism, arboreal ecofiction, coastal econarratives, nuclear teratology, and new materialist performance — are sequenced along a spectrum running from engineered emergence, through zones of ambiguity and antagonism, to the forced or deliberate dissolution of the bounded self, collectively demonstrating that the dynamics of symbiosis designate a range of relations whose ethical, ontological and political implications cannot be reduced to a single register. The special issue declines to resolve the central tension it stages between the object-oriented insistence on the persistence of relata and the dissolution thesis affirming the unmaking of individuation as a valid symbiotic endpoint, proposing instead that this disagreement constitutes the field’s most productive site of ongoing inquiry.

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