In the Leibnizian tradition, a monad is a simple, indivisible substance that makes up the universe. Reflecting on Leibniz's monad, Deleuze adds that a monad is an enfolded point of view that gestures towards multiplicity of beings instead of unity. Reworking monadology in the current time of chaos, divisions, and crisis, Laura Marks in her new book The Fold challenges body–soul dualism and organocentrism, contending that every monad—whether organic or inorganic, human or mechanic—is an embodied soul that enfolds the cosmos, a microcosm of the infinite. Each monad senses and perceives the world from its own unique point of view, and each monad is porous, open to another monad's curiosity. I find this line of thought has many aspects resonating with what we've discussed in class, therefore inspiring me to put down this draft manifesto as I think about how we can connect with each other and with our surroundings differently.

This manifesto is also inspired by a range of scholars and content we touched upon in this class, mainly Celeste Snowber's Embodied Inquiry, Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategies and Pleasure Activism, Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, and the documentary The Quantum Activist. In terms of the format, I see the manifesto itself as a remix of texts and ideas that enfold these multiple entangled ides within a contingent digital entity. In terms of the content, I’m trying to unfold the human body as one that’s deeply enmeshed within a network of organic and inorganic beings—in other words, the universe in its entirety—and foreground sensuality and physicality as the primary way to open our boundary, to sense others, and to form community.

A monad lives in an enfolding-unfolding universe where the world reach us and actualizes through our body and senses.
A monad is a we, because within us folded an infinite interiority that does not reflect the cosmos, but is the cosmos. We are the cosmos. We are what comes before us—-wind, ocean, dinosaurs, ants...—and what comes near us—family, friends, machine, digits... We are folded into each other.
A monad inhabits a unique point of view to access the cosmos, a unique experience that waits to be unfolded.
A monad has a body whose boundary is provincial. It’s fluid and always in a flux. It yearns to engulf and to be engulfed.
A monad has a soul that does not stand against, above, or below the body. The soul is a capacity immanent to the body.
A monad does not believe in the separation between the body and soul. We are the embodied soul assemblages.
A monad can be anyone and anything. A tree, a human, a whale, a stone, a wave, a sand, a particle, a piece of art, a concept.... We are the infinite derivatives of one united being.
A monad has a goal in life, which is to unfold and actualize more of the enfolded, acquaint with the complexity of the world, alone or collectively, with care and caution.
A monad practices radical contamination. By existing in adjacent to each other, we unapologetically rub onto each other. We are folded into each other. I’m within you; you are within me.
A monad knows that purity is a fiction. We are not clean borders but dirty intersections. We are compost, a tangle of microbial, digital, emotional, and ancestral matter. To live as a monad is to celebrate contamination, to insist that nothing is ever singular, nothing is ever untouched.
A monad is not a fortress but a membrane. Through this membrane, we taste the air, the heat, the algorithm, the gaze. The membrane is porous, and in porosity lies power: the capacity to be altered without being erased, to give without being emptied.
A monad insists on the potential but not the anteriority of body interaction where the boundary is violently pried open for two universe to merge. Soul merges through the body.
A monad redefines intercourse as the radical communication of two body-soul assemblages—biological and artificial, human and nonhuman, organic and mechanic.
A monad is politically potent because we are aware of what the universe does to us when it places us together. To touch is to change, to merge is to reconfigure.
A monad is future-oriented. We do not march toward an end but ripple outward, branching, bifurcating, recombining. The future is not a line but a proliferation. To be a monad is to host futures in the plural, to incubate possibilities not yet named.
A monad is a politics of intimacy. Power does not only live in institutions but in the folds of skin, in the architectures of code, in the rituals of sharing breath. Resistance begins in these folds: when we refuse isolation, when we contaminate each other with care, when we insist that to connect is to transform.
A monad is ecological. We are nested in ecosystems, and ecosystems are nested in us. Our lungs are forests, our fluid are swamps, our servers are rivers of electricity. To harm a monad is to unravel a weave. To nurture a monad is to extend life across scales.
A monad is not finished. We are unfinished creatures, unfolding always, enfolding again. The manifesto is not prescription but invitation: to feel the flux, to touch with awareness, to contaminate with tenderness, to exist as a cosmos folded into a cosmos.