Nothing Makes Itself: Thinking with Haraway's Challenge to "One"

A reflection on sympoiesis and what it means to think without bounded individuals

"Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing." This simple statement from Donna Haraway's chapter on sympoiesis carries a radical challenge that keeps unfolding the more I sit with it. It's not just about collaboration or interconnection; it's a fundamental questioning of what we mean when we say "one" anything at all.

Sympoiesis means "making-with," and Haraway uses it to describe how entities emerge through relationality rather than self-contained processes. When she writes about creatures like Mixotricha paradoxa, that extraordinary being carrying hundreds of thousands of bacteria and spirochetes in symbiotic relation, she's showing us something unsettling about the nature of identity itself. This creature is "not one, not five, not several hundred thousand" but something else entirely: what she calls a holobiont, an "entire being" that is whole precisely because it is multiple.

What stops me is how this challenges the basic unit of analysis that underlies so much of how we think about learning and teaching. Education assumes "the individual student" as its fundamental building block, designing curricula for individual minds, assessing individual performance, tracking individual progress. Learning spaces may be less like discrete containers and more like holobionts, emergent, entangled, and co-composed. What we call "learning" might emerge through "knots of diverse intra-active relatings" (where intra-action, as used by Barad and Haraway, signals mutual constitution rather than interaction between pre-existing entities) rather than individual cognitive processes.

This isn't just saying that learning is social; it's questioning whether there are discrete individuals to be social in the first place. When Haraway describes holobionts as entities that "hold together contingently and dynamically," she's pointing to something stable enough to persist but always in process, always constituted through ongoing relationships with others. Educational encounters become temporary assemblages where human participants (students, teachers, administrators) are entangled with more-than-human ones, the material infrastructures, technological systems, seasonal rhythms, historical sediments in knowledge, and even the building itself, all participating in what we call education.

The implications ripple outward. If there's no bounded individual student, what are we assessing? If there's no autonomous teacher, what does pedagogical authority mean? If knowledge isn't something individuals acquire but something that emerges through relational processes, what does it mean to "deliver" content?

This shift from individuals-in-relationship to relationality as primary changes how we might pay attention in educational spaces. Instead of focusing on what individual students are learning, we might attend to the qualities of relation that make certain kinds of thinking possible. Instead of designing for individual outcomes, we might create conditions for collective emergence. Instead of managing separate entities, we might participate in ongoing processes of worlding-with.

I'm thinking about how management education, in particular, is built around the fiction of bounded organisational units, discrete companies competing or collaborating in markets, individual leaders making strategic decisions, separate departments coordinating their efforts. Organisations might be more like holobionts: temporary assemblages of human and more-than-human participants, emerging through dynamic entanglements that can't be reduced to the intentions or actions of individual actors.

Traditional pedagogical categories don't disappear, but they become contingent, practical arrangements rather than fundamental realities.

The "student" and "teacher" become provisional positions within larger assemblages rather than distinct entities with fixed properties. Assessment becomes a way of attending to the health of whole systems rather than measuring individual performance. Learning objectives become invitations for collective experimentation rather than predetermined outcomes for individual achievement.

What draws me to this thinking is how it changes the quality of attention we bring to educational encounters. When you're not looking for bounded individuals, other things become visible, not just the obvious social dynamics, but the infrastructures, inheritances, and rhythms that shape learning in quiet but decisive ways.

There's something both humble and radical about thinking symbiotically. Humble because it means acknowledging that we're not the authors of our own learning—we're always being made and making others through encounters we can't fully control. Radical because it suggests that the basic categories through which educational institutions understand themselves might be provisional arrangements rather than natural facts.

Haraway's concept of "making-with" offers a different starting point for pedagogical practice. Not managing individuals or facilitating relationships between separate entities, but participating responsibly in ongoing processes of collective becoming—worlding-with, as in co-creating the conditions of reality alongside others, human and more-than-human. Not extracting learning from educational encounters, but contributing to the conditions that make certain kinds of emergence possible.

This feels particularly urgent in management education, where so much depends on learning to think beyond the logics of bounded competition that have brought us to our current crises. If we could help students understand themselves not as future individual leaders but as participants in ongoing processes of collective worlding, what kinds of practice might become possible?

I don't think this means abandoning all the practical categories that make educational work possible. But it might mean holding them more lightly, understanding them as tools for particular purposes rather than descriptions of fundamental reality.

The question becomes not how to optimise individual learning but how to participate skillfully in the relational flows through which we make each other up. Perhaps the real provocation is this: what if every time we enter a classroom, we're not meeting separate individuals but joining a holobiont already in process? What if teaching is less about delivering content to discrete minds and more about learning to sense and respond to the collective becoming already underway?

This reflection emerges from engagement with Donna Haraway's chapter "Sympoiesis" in "Staying with the Trouble" and its implications for thinking beyond bounded individuals in educational practice.