Nature/Culture — Fields of Difference — Composting

Responding to the two terms that Haraway offers in “A Cyborg Manifesto”—nature/culture and fields of difference—the essay offers a third: composting. Composting is not the bifurcation-and-subordination approach to difference of master-model dualisms, nor is it the flattening or unifying move that stealthily returns in neutralized fields of difference. Composting is a different approach to difference. As a material labor whereby old scraps are transformed into nutrient-rich new soil, composting tends differences through practices of care and attention. This entry elaborates earlier collaborations on composting as a feminist scholarly practice for planetary futures. It explores how in response to environmental crisis, radical differences such as feminism and anticolonialism are drawn into strange economies of value where such differences are named but not claimed by environmentalisms that end up neutralizing their liberatory potential.