The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

First, all that taming and mastering has made such a mess that it is unclear whether life on earth can continue. Second, interspecies entanglements that once seemed the stuff of fables are now materials for serious discussion among biologists and ecologists, who show how life requires the interplay of many kinds of beings. Humans cannot survive by stomping on all the others. Third, women and men from around the world have clamored to be included in the status once given to Man. Our riotous presence undermines the moral intentionality of Man’s Christian masculinity, which separated Man from Nature.

The time has come for new ways of telling true stories beyond civilizational first principles.

Imagine “first nature” to mean ecological relations (including humans) and “second nature” to refer to capitalist transformations of the environment.

My book then offers “third nature,” that is, what manages to live despite capitalism.

Matsutake are wild mushrooms that live in human-disturbed forests. Like rats, raccoons, and cockroaches, they are willing to put up with some of the environmental messes humans have made. Yet they are not pests; they are valuable gourmet treats—at least in Japan, where high prices sometimes make matsutake the most valuable mushroom on earth. Through their ability to nurture trees, matsutake help forests grow in daunting places.

To follow matsutake guides us to possibilities of coexistence within environmental disturbance. This is not an excuse for further damage. Still, matsutake show one kind of collaborative survival.

Alienation obviates living-space entanglement. The dream of alienation inspires landscape modification in which only one stand-alone asset matters; everything else becomes weeds or waste. Here, attending to living-space entanglements seems inefficient, and perhaps archaic. When its singular asset can no longer be produced, a place can be abandoned. The timber has been cut; the oil has run out; the plantation soil no longer supports crops. The search for assets resumes elsewhere. Thus, simplification for alienation produces ruins, spaces of abandonment for asset production.

In a global state of precarity, we don’t have choices other than looking for life in this ruin.

What brings Mien and matsutake together in Oregon? Such seemingly trivial queries might turn everything around to put unpredictable encounters at the center of things.

Gorillas and river porpoises hover at the edge of extinction. Rising seas swamp whole Pacific islands. But most of the time we imagine such precarity to be an exception to how the world works. It’s what “drops out” from the system. 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 precarity, indeterminacy, and what we imagine as trivial are the center of the systematicity we seek?

Assemblages drag political economy inside them, and not just for humans. Plantation crops have lives different from those of their free-living siblings; cart horses and hunter steeds share species but not lifeways. Assemblages cannot hide from capital and the state; they are sites for watching how political economy works. If capitalism has no teleology, we need to see what comes together—not just by prefabrication, but also by juxtaposition.

commercial agriculture has aimed to segregate a single crop and work toward its simultaneous ripening for a coordinated harvest. But other kinds of farming have multiple rhythms. In the shifting cultivation I studied in Indonesian Borneo, many crops grew together in the same field, and they had quite different schedules.

Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination. Without collaborations, we all die.

Self-contained individuals are not transformed by encounter. Maximizing their interests, they use encounters—but remain unchanged in them. Noticing is unnecessary to track these unchanging individuals. A “standard” individual can stand in for all as a unit of analysis.

Thus is born “normal”

Without the possibility of transformative encounters, mathematics can replace natural history and ethnography.

It is hard for me to think of any challenge I might face without soliciting the assistance of others, human and not human. It is unselfconscious privilege that allows us to fantasize—counterfactually—that we each survive alone.

TO LISTEN TO AND TELL A RUSH OF STORIES IS A method. And why not make the strong claim and call it a science, an addition to knowledge? Its research object is contaminated diversity; its unit of analysis is the indeterminate encounter.

To learn anything we must revitalize arts of noticing and include ethnography and natural history.

Yet it is just these interruptions that step out of the bounds of most modern science, which demands the possibility for infinite expansion without changing the research framework. Arts of noticing are considered archaic because they are unable to “scale up” in this way.

The ability to make one’s research framework apply to greater scales, without changing the research questions, has become a hallmark of modern knowledge. To have any hope of thinking with mushrooms, we must get outside this expectation.

mushroom forests as “anti-pl...

The expectation of scaling up is not limited to science. Progress itself has often been defined by its ability to make projects expand without changing their framing assumptions.

Indeed, in this regard, science is synonymous with capitalism

Scalability, in contrast, is the ability of a project to change scales smoothly without any change in project frames. A scalable business, for example, does not change its organization as it expands.

a scalable research project admits only data that already fit the research frame.

Thus, too, scalability banishes meaningful diversity, that is, diversity that might change things.

This is the norm coring power of capitalist exploitation

Scalability is not an ordinary feature of nature. Making projects scalable takes a lot of work.

It is time to turn attention to the nonscalable,

A theory of nonscalability might begin in the work it takes to create scalability—and the messes it makes.

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.

The origins of the agro-industrial complex?

All the plants were clones, and Europeans had no knowledge of how to breed this New Guinea cultigen.

As cane workers in the New World, enslaved Africans had great advantages from growers’ perspectives: they had no local social relations and thus no established routes for escape. Like the cane itself, which had no history of either companion species or disease relations in the New World, they were isolated. They were on their way to becoming self-contained, and thus standardizable as abstract labor.

Plantations were organized to further alienation for better control. Once central milling operations were started, all operations had to run on the time frame of the mill. Workers had to cut cane as fast as they could, and with full attention, just to avoid injury. Under these conditions, workers did, indeed, become self-contained and interchangeable units. Already considered commodities, they were given jobs made interchangeable by the regularity and coordinated timing engineered into the cane.

So Fordism is a refinement, entrenchment, or reification of the exploitation established by the plantationist colonizers

Interchangeability

for both human work and plant ...

Their contingent components—cloned planting stock, coerced labor, conquered and thus open land—showed how alienation, interchangeability, and expansion could lead to unprecedented profits.

As Sidney Mintz has argued, sugarcane plantations were the model for factories during industrialization; factories built plantation-style alienation into their plans.

Japanese research institutions have thrown millions of yen into making matsutake cultivation possible, but so far without success. Matsutake resist the conditions of the plantation. They require the dynamic multispecies diversity of the forest—with its contaminating relationality.

Timber trees were a new kind of sugarcane: managed for uniform growth, without multispecies interference, and thinned and harvested by machines and anonymous workers.

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.

accounting. Wal-Mart has become famous for forcing its suppliers to make products ever more cheaply, thus encouraging savage labor and destructive environmental practices.9 Savage and salvage are often twins: Salvage translates violence and pollution into profit.

Walmart, Amazon, Home Depot supply chain normalization, homogenization, monolingualization

supply chains make value from translating values produced in quite varied circumstances into capitalist inventory.

This is the guiding principal of most academic depts, esp such as AMDT or Chem E etc etc

The legibility of inventory allows scalable retail expansion for Wal-Mart without requiring that production be scalable. Production is left to the riotous diversity of nonscalability,

We know this best in “the race to the bottom”: the role of global supply chains in promoting coerced labor, dangerous sweatshops, poisonous substitute ingredients, and irresponsible environmental gouging and dumping.

As in Heart of Darkness, unregulated production is translated in the commodity chain, and even reimagined as progress.

as J. K. Gibson-Graham

a “postcapitalist politics,” economic diversity...

Most critics of capitalism insist on the unity and homogeneity of the capitalist system; many, like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, argue that there is no longer a space outside of capitalism’s empire.13 Everything is ruled by a singular capitalist logic. As for Gibson-Graham, this claim is an attempt to build a critical political position: the possibility of transcending capitalism.

Is capitalism a single, overarching system that conquers all, or one segregated economic form among many?

Ask any street dealer this and she’ll laugh in your face. Anyone who has ever turned a trick while hitchhiking knows the answer: economics is a wildwood, it’s on,y capitalism that codifies exploitation. Capitalism is not one form, nor is it segregated; the bio metaphor of octopus/mycelium/polyculture is what is yearning here

“noncapitalist” forms can be found everywhere in the midst of capitalist worlds—rather than just in archaic backwaters.

when Jane Collins reports that workers in Mexican garment assembly factories are expected to know how to sew before they begin their jobs, because they are women, we are offered a glimpse of noncapitalist and capitalist economic forms working together.15 Women learn to sew growing up at home; salvage accumulation is the process that brings this skill into the factory to the benefit of owners.