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When Fernand Braudel explained history’s “long durée” or Niels Bohr showed us the quantum atom, these were not projects of scalability, although they each revolutionized thinking about
scale.
Scalability, in contrast, is the ability of a project to change scales smoothly without an...
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Similarly, a scalable research project admits only data that already fit the research frame.
scalability banishes meaningful diversity, that is, diversity that might change things.
is time to turn attention to the nonscalable, not only as objects for description but also as incitements to theory.
A theory of nonscalability might begin in the work it takes to create scalability—and the messes it makes.
In their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sugarcane plantations in Brazil, for example, Portuguese planters stumbled on a formula for smooth expansion. They crafted self-contained, interchangeable project elements, as follows: exterminate local people and plants; prepare now-empty, unclaimed land; and bring in exotic and isolated labor and crops for production. This landscape model of scalability became an inspiration for later industrialization and modernization.
Consider the elements of the Portuguese sugarcane plantation in colonial Brazil.
First, the cane,
Second, cane labor:
The project was, for the first time, scalable—or, more accurately, seemingly scalable.
Their contingent components—cloned planting stock, coerced labor, conquered and thus open land—showed how alienation, interchangeability, and expansion could lead to unprecedented profits. This formula shaped the dreams we have come to call progress and modernity.
factories built plantation-style alienation into their plans.
Contrast the matsutake forest:
Matsutake mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of an underground fungus associated with certain forest trees. The fungus gets its carbohydrates from mutualistic relations with the roots of its host trees, for whom it also forages.
This transformative mutualism has made it impossible for humans to cultivate matsutake.
Matsutake resist the conditions of the plantation. They require the dynamic multispecies diversity of the forest—with its contaminating relationality.
Yet it would be a mistake to see matsutake commerce as a primitive survival; this is the misapprehension of progress blinders.
It is dependent on scalability—in ruins.
Still, here is a place to see forests treated as much like scalable plantations as they might ever
Matsutake had stimulated a nonscalable forest economy in the ruins of scalable industrial forestry.
The challenge for thinking with precarity is to understand the ways projects for making scalability have transformed landscape and society, while also seeing where scalability fails—and where nonscalable ecological and economic relations erupt.
But it would be a huge mistake to assume that scalability is bad and n...
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The main distinguishing feature between scalable and nonscalable projects is not ethical conduct but rather that the latter are more diverse because they are not geared up for expansion.
WHAT IS THE STORY OF A SMELL? NOT AN ETHNOGRAPHY of 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.
And what is smell but a particular form of chemical sensitivity? In this interpretation, trees too are touched by the smell of matsutake, allowing it into their roots. As with truffles, flying insects have been seen circling underground caches. In contrast, slugs, other fungi, and many kinds of soil bacteria are repulsed by the smell, moving out of its range.
American composer John Cage wrote a set of short performance pieces called Indeterminacy, many of which celebrate encounters with mushrooms.
Cage’s attention to listening as things occurred brought him to appreciate indeterminacy.
Barring injury, we’ll never be all that different in shape than we were as adolescents. We can’t grow extra limbs, and we’re stuck with the one brain we’ve each got. In contrast, fungi keep growing and changing form all their lives. Fungi are famous for changing shape in relation to their encounters and environments. Many are “potentially immortal,” meaning they die from disease, injury, or lack of resources, but not from old age.
Rayner challenges us to think with mushrooms, otherwise.
Over the next few weeks, my senses changed.
Like Proust’s madeleines, matsutake are redolent with temps perdu.
For Dr. Ogawa to remind us that Korean aristocrats started Japanese civilization works against the grain of Japanese desire. Besides, civilization, in his tale, is not all for the good.
They had developed in their homeland the human-disturbed open pine forests in which matsutake grow long before such forests emerged in Japan. When Koreans expanded to Japan in the eighth century, they cut down forests.
matsutake grows only in deeply disturbed forests. Matsutake and red pine are partners in central Japan, and both grow only where people have caused significant deforestation.
the past we grasp, as philosopher Walter Benjamin puts it, is a memory “that flashes in a moment of danger.”
is time to tell you that most people of European origin can’t stand the smell.
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).
Loggers, he said, call white fir “piss fir” because of the bad smell the wood emits when you cut
Precarity is that here and now in which pasts may not lead to futures.
IT MAY SEEM ODD TO WANT TO TACKLE CAPITALISM with a theory that stresses ephemeral assemblages and multidirectional histories.
Like a giant bulldozer, capitalism appears to flatten the earth to its specifications. But all this only raises the stakes for asking what else is going on—not in some protected enclave, but rather everywhere, both inside and out.
But the chain illuminates something important about capitalism today: Amassing wealth is possible without rationalizing labor and raw materials. Instead, it requires acts of translation across varied social and political spaces, which, borrowing from ecologists’ usage, I call “patches.”
Translations across sites of difference are capitalism: they make it possible for investors to accumulate wealth.
In our food procurement system, for example, capitalists exploit ecologies not only by reshaping them but also by taking advantage of their capacities. Even in industrial farms, farmers depend on life processes outside their control, such as photosynthesis and animal digestion. In capitalist farms,
living things made within ecological processes are coopted for the concentration of wealth. This is what I call “salvage,” that is, taking advantage of value produced without capitalist control.
Sites for salvage are simultaneously inside and outside capitalism; I call them “pericapitalist.”
Consider the nineteenth-century ivory supply chain connecting central Africa and Europe as told in Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness.
For a brighter view of supply-chain translation, consider Herman Melville’s account of the nineteenth-century procurement of whale oil for Yankee investors.
