ENGL 4010: The Mushroom at the End of the World (SP23)

The Mushroom at
the End of the World
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Yet progress stories have
blinded us. To know the
world world without them,
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this book sketches openended
assemblages of
entangled ways of life, as
these coalesce in
coordination across many
kinds of temporal rhythms
(viii).
KnowledgeSeeker, “Blooming Mushroom Time lapse”

The Mushroom at
the End of the World
Part one

What do you do when your world starts to fall apart? I go
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for a walk, and if I’m lucky, I find mushrooms. Mushrooms
pull me back into my senses, not just—like flowers—
through their riotous colors and smells but because they
pop up unexpectedly, reminding me of the good fortune of
just happening to be there. Then I know that there are still
pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminacy (1).

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To appreciate the patchy unpredictability associated with
our current condition, we need to reopen our
imaginations. The point of this book is to help that
process along—with mushrooms (5).

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What if, as I’m suggesting, precarity is the condition of our
time—or, to put it another way, what if our time is ripe for
sensing precarity, what if our time is ripe for sensing
precarity […] Precarity is the condition of being
vulnerable to others (20).

Patterns of unintentional coordination develop in
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assemblages. To notice such patterns means watching
the interplay of temporal rhythms and scales in the
divergent life ways that gather. Surprisingly, this turns out
to be a method that might revitalize political economy
as well as environmental studies (23).

We are contaminated by our encounters: they change
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who we are as we make way for others […] Everyone
carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option.
One value of keeping precarity in mind is that it makes us
remember that changing with circumstances is the
stuff of survival (27).

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To listen to and tell a rush of stories is a method […] A
rush of stores cannot be neatly summed up […] Arts of
noticing are considered archaic because they are unable
to “scale up” in this way (37).

What is the story of a smell? Not an ethnography of
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smelling, but the story of the smell itself, wafting into the
nostrils of people and animals, and even impressing the
roots of plants and the membranes of soil bacteria? Smell
draws us into the entangled threads of memory and
possibility (45).

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Smell is elusive. Its effect surprise us. We don’t know
how to put much about smell into words, even when
our reactions are strong and certain […] Might smell, in its
confusing mix elusiveness and certainty, be a useful
guide to the indeterminacy of encounter (46)?

Tsing
It is not surprising, perhaps, that U.S. scientists have
studied the smell of matsutake to see what it repels
(slugs), but Japanese scientists have studied the smell to
consider what it attracts (some flying insects) […] What if
noses—as in my experience—change (51)?

The Mushroom at
the End of the World
Part two

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Fungi are thus world builders, shaping environments for
themselves and others (138).
Neither the fungus nor the plant can flourish without the
activity of the other (138).

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Scalability

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Capitalism is a system for concentrating wealth, which
makes possible new investments, which further
concentrate wealth. This process is accumulation (62).

This is what I call “salvage,” that is, taking advantage
of value produced without capitalist control. Many
capitalist raw materials (consider coal and oil) came into
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existence long before capitalism. Capitalists also cannot
produce human life, the prerequisite of labor. “Salvage
accumulation” is the process through which lead firms
amass capital without controlling the conditions
under which commodities are produced. Salvage is not
an ornament on ordinary capitalist processes; it is a
feature of how capitalism works (63).

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Pericapitalist economic forms can be sites for rethinking
the unquestioned authority of capitalism in our lives. At the
very least, diversity offers a chance for multiple ways
forward—not just one (65).

Instead, I would look for the noncapitalist elements on
which capitalism depends […] Women learn to sew
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growing up at home; salvage accumulation is the process
that brings this skill into the factory to the benefit of others.
To understand capitalism (and not just its alternatives),
then, we can’t stay inside the logics of capitalists; we need
an ethnographic eye to see the economic diversity
through which accumulation is possible (65).

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Traders as translators become masters of salvage
accumulation (70).

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The concept of assemblages—an open-ended
entanglement of ways of being—is more useful. In an
assemblage, varied trajectories gain hold on each
other, but indeterminacy matters. To learn about an
assemblage, one unravels its knots (83).

The Mushroom at
the End of the World
Part three

Tsing
In capitalist logics of commodification, things are torn
from their lifeworlds to become objects of exchange.
This is the process I am calling “alienation,” and I used
the term as a potential attribute of nonhumans as well as
humans (121).

Things become stand-alone objects, to be used or
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exchanged; that is their value. This kind of value upsets
economic common sense—and that I why it’s good to
think with […] Things, then, do not just have value in
use and commodity exchange; they may have value
through the social relationships and reputations of which
they are part (122).

They need to recognize what they are shaping and
represent it to the exporters. Re-sorting helps them
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know the mushrooms […] As inventory, matsutake allow
calculations that channel profits to exporters and
importers, making the work of organizing the commodity
chain worthwhile from their perspective. This is salvage
accumulation: the creation of capitalist value from
non capitalist value regimes (128).

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It is time to reimbue our understanding of the economy
with arts of noticing.
Thinking through salvage rhythms changes our
vision (132).

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This machine is not a total institution, which we spend our
lives inside; instead, it translates across living
arrangements, turning worlds into assets. But not just
any translation can be accepted into capitalism. The
gathering it sponsors is not open-ended (133).

Many people think fungi are plants, but they are actually
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closer to animals. Fungi do not make their food from
sunlight, as plants do. Like animals, fungi must find
something to eat. Yet fungal eating is often generous: It
makes worlds for others […] Fungi are thus world
builders, shaping environments for themselves and
others (137-38).

One of their most surprising findings was that many
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organisms develop only through interactions with
other species […] Even we proudly independent humans
are unable to digest our food without helpful bacteria, first
gained as we slide out of the birth canal. Ninety percent of
the cells in a human body are bacteria. We can’t do
without them (141-42).

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Whether or not other organisms “tell stories,” they
contribute to the overlapping tracks and traces that we
grasp as history. History, then, is a record of many
trajectories of world making, human and non human
(168).

The Mushroom at
the End of the World
Part four

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resurgence
Resurgence is the force of the life of the
forest, its ability to spread its seeds and roots
and runners to reclaim places that have been
deforested (179).

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serendipity
There was nothing to do, they said, but deal with
each dilemma as it arose. Since there was no
good alternative, they just kept trying (194).

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ruin
How can we peer into history of ruination without
positing just one forest history in which all
forests are merely stops along the way (206)?

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science as translation
There has been less attention to the messy
process of translation as jarring juxtaposition
and miscommunication (217).

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flying spores
[S]pores open our imaginations to another
cosmopolitan topology […] Spores are hard to
pin down; that is their grace (227).

The Mushroom at
the End of the World
Part five

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To find a good mushroom, I
need all my senses (241).
Seana Gavin’s “Mindful Mushroom” (2020) from the exhibition “Mushrooms: The Art,
Design and Future of Fungi” at Somerset House, London, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.

Being in the forest this way might be considered
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dance: lines of life are pursued through senses,
movements, and orientations (241).
Following the traces of animal lives, we entangle and
align our movements, searching with them (247).

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Calm but fevered, impassioned but still: the picker’s
rhythm condenses this tension in a poised alertness
(242).

Humans cannot control matsutake. Waiting to see if
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mushrooms might emerge is thus an existential
problem. The mushrooms remind us of our dependence
on more-than-human natural processes: we can’t fix
anything, even what we have broken, by ourselves.
Yet this need not enforce paralysis (257).

Here again is that edge, both inside and outside capitalism. When a
new commodity chain arrives, this man grasps it not through industrial
discipline but through personal talents—and as one of many
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precarious possibilities. On the one hand, this is capitalism;
everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. On the other hand,
entrepreneurship is shaped by the rhythms of the Finnish countryside,
with its mixture of silent deprivations and enthusiasms to improve. Any
commodity that moves downstream along that chain will have to
be disembedded from those connections in a messy process of
translation. There is room here for imagining other worlds
(280-81, emphasis added).

Sometimes common entanglements
emerge not from human
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plans but despite them. It is not
even the undoing of plans, but
rather the unaccounted for in
their doing that offers
possibilities for elusive
moments of living in common
(267).
Alex Morrison’s “Mushroom Motif (Black and Ochre)” (2017) from the exhibition
“Mushrooms: The Art, Design and Future of Fungi” at Somerset House, London,
2020. Courtesy of the artist and L’inconnue Gallery, Montreal.

The Mushroom at
the End of the World
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing