Humans and the Mushroom : What’s Left?
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: on the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015 ( Part 1: What’s Left? pp 13–43)
The Mushroom at the End of the World was written by Anna Tsing Lowenhaupt in 2015. She is an anthropologist based in the Netherlands, who traveled to Oregon to discover the assemblage within the highly coveted matsutake mushroom, which is the subject of the book. She uses the matsutake mushroom to talk about how the state of precarity that our world allows us to explore the ruins and what thrives in the blasted landscapes that have become our home (Tsing,2015). Throughout the book, Tsing attempts to answer the question of how one thrives in these damaged landscapes, caused by capitalism, by pulling people into the maze that she has found (Ibid).
In Part 1 of the book: What’s Left which will be discussed throughout this piece, she talks about the interwoven rhythms that make up the matsutake mushroom and the scalable economies. She stresses that these landscapes are not damaged by humans directly but rather by capitalism hence challenging the common definition of the Anthropocene being that the damage was solely carried out by humans. She challenges this definition because capitalism already alienates societies: both human and non-human ones hence she seeks to draw attention to the assemblages that connect us in this mosaic of humanity.
While the mushroom is the fruit that grows in the forests made by our destruction, the mushroom is also commodified and cohabited by a diverse range of people from gourmands to Hmong fighters and even Finnish nature guides. This is becoming kin with kind and the sympoiesis of different organisms. This symposium also translates to how different people connect to the assemblage of the matsutake mushroom, or different peoples rather this world of ruins.
Despite the damaged landscapes due to the anthropocene, she stresses on the importance of making use of things in the anthropocentric landscapes of our destruction or she calls it the state of precarity. She defines precarity as the condition of being vulnerable to others (Tsing,2015,pg 20). This percarity is in the form of being thrusted into the assemblages that not only shift us but shift everything around us. She writes that while precarity is a condition of our time, she writes of the need to survive it through cooperation. She writes that collaboration means working across differences, which leads to contamination. Without collaboration, we all die, and we need to make do with the destruction of capitalism (Tsing,2015, pg28).
Even the environment in which the mushroom thrives is a result of contamination for the forests in which the mushroom thrives in is created by contamination which transforms it in the process, hence the mushroom being a product of contaminated . It is for this reason, she highlights the importance of noticing. She connects the art of noticing to highlight the importance of noticing the relations in contaminated diversities. These temporal relations in the midst of destruction and the wars that ravaged the communities connect to the forests and the mushroom.
She also talks about scalability which she defines as the ability for a project to change smoothly without any project in changing frames (Tsing,2015, pg38). She argues that while scalability is not a feature of nature, the matasuke is dependent on scalability due to these ruins as both the matsutake mushroom and ecology are dependent on the interactions between scalability and its undoing. In the assemblage of the mushroom, the scalability is not smooth because of its contaminated landscapes but gather strength in the communities that rely on it and bind it.
She concludes the part by talking about smell and the interactions that humans have with the mushroom. Like Haraway and her example of Jim’s Dog, humans and the fungi share such here and now transformations through encounters in which these encounters have different meanings through the transnational trajectories in the assemblage of the mushroom(Tsing,2015, pg47). The mushroom is there , emerging from the encounter: smell it and maybe we will understand the fruits of this damaged anthropocene.
This essay was for a module: Approaches to Theory which was convened by Dr Gaik Cheng Khoo
