Mushroom at the End of the World

* Book: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. The Mushroom at the End of the World. 2021

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"a study of communities of mushroom pickers in the Pacific Northwest, Yunnan China and Kyoto Prefecture, Japan ; a dizzying account of capitalist modernity. a study of “the possibility of life in capitalist ruins”.

Excerpts

Selected and with commentary by Adam Tooze:

"What follows are a series of quotations and short excepts from the book with brief commentary from me."

Assemblages

"The concept of assemblage is helpful. (22)

It is common to think of capitalism as a machine. A machine has a clearly defined purpose and a number of particular parts.

A factory is a giant machine. A plantation is designed to be a machine. It is tempting to think of all sorts of things as machines that are actually not.

Mushroom picking for Tsing is fascinating precisely because it is, in her words, the “anti-plantation” (37), the anti-factory, the anti-machine, an assemblage.

The mushroom economy, is an economy. It generates considerable value. But it is an assemblage not a machine.

Assemblages for Tsing are comings together of people and animals and things. They do not constitute firm and clear identities. They have no clearly defined boundaries. But they are powerfully productive. They are well-suited to navigating the terrain of ruins.

The time of assemblages

Interestingly, for Tsing this heterogeneous notion of an aggregate, that avoids the notion of a fixed totality, or a closed system, or a thing with clearly defined boundaries, also offers a different way of understanding time and history.

If history without progress is indeterminate and multidirectional, might assemblages show us its possibilities? (23)

So far, I’ve defined assemblages in relation to their negative features: their elements are contaminated and thus unstable; they refuse to scale up smoothly. Yet assemblages are defined by the strength of what they gather as much as their always-possible dissipation. They make history. This combination of ineffability and presence is evident in smell: another gift of the mushroom. 43

Assemblages don’t just gather lifeways; they make them. (24)

Assemblages are open-ended. They show us potential histories in the making. (23)

Thinking through assemblage urges us to ask: How do gatherings sometimes become “happenings,” that is, greater than the sum of their parts? (24)

And before your attention wanders amidst all these abstractions, Tsing brings us back to earth.

Surprisingly, this turns out to be a method that might revitalize political economy as well as environmental studies. Assemblages drag political economy inside them, and not just for humans. … 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. 23-24

This you might say is the metaphysics of “supply-chains”.

The polyphonic assemblage … moves us into the unexplored territory of the modern political economy. The farther we stray into the peripheries of capitalist production, the more coordination between polyphonic assemblages and industrial processes becomes central to making a profit. (24)"

(https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-67-in-the-middle-of-things)

Scale

"Scale

So we are going to set aside the noisy narratives of progress and decline. We are going to cultivate the art of noticing. We are going to listen to the stories that actors tell and we will recognize and valorize that story-telling as a method. Indeed, Tsing insists, why not make the strong claim and call” (37) this gathering of stories, “a science, an addition to knowledge? Its research object is contaminated diversity; its unit of analysis is the indeterminate encounter(s)” (37) Out of all this assemblages emerge.

But this leaves us with a problem. Stories are stories. Just that. The question is what we do with such anecdotage. Can we scale it up? Stories undeniably have the power to convey meaning, but how far do they reach?

Again, Tsing does not simply side with the anecdote, the small or the particular. Instead, she reframes the problem.

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. 37-8

The striking thing here is the parallelism that Tsing establishes between her object and her way of knowing it. The mushroom economy is not a machine. It does not scale. It is radically particular. And yet, it generates value. It has reach. The same is true for the knowledge that she is generating about this far flung global network of mushroom harvesting, valorization and consumption.

In this spirit, I lead a foray into mushroom forests as “anti-plantations.” 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. This quality is “scalability.” The term is a bit confusing, because it could be interpreted to mean “able to be discussed in terms of scale.” Both scalable and nonscalable projects, however, can be discussed in relation to scale. (37-8)

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. This is possible only if business relations are not transformative, changing the business as new relations are added. Similarly, a scalable research project admits only data that already fit the research frame. Scalability requires that project elements be oblivious to the indeterminacies of encounter; that’s how they allow smooth expansion. Thus, too, scalability banishes meaningful diversity, that is, diversity that might change things. Scalability is not an ordinary feature of nature. Making projects scalable takes a lot of work. (38)

Tsing, by contrast, is advancing a nonscalable knowledge of nonscalability. It starts, as she says, by exposing the “work it takes to create scalability—and the messes it makes. One vantage point might be that early and influential icon for this work: the European colonial plantation.” (38)

Hence the interest of economies built on mushrooms that grow amidst the wreckage left amidst the detritus of plantation forestry, an opportunity for far-reaching but nonscaleable knowledge.

Back to the large

Does this focus on mushrooms consign Tsing to the esoteric? Does it provide only, “the view from a frog in a well?” No, she replies, “On the contrary.”

Why? Because modernity’s own account of capitalism, in the grand heroic, progressive mode is self-deluding. In fact, capitalism always operates in multiple modes. Capitalism in its development has of course, seen the gigantic development of machine-like, scalable production, distribution and consumption. But, the totality it pretends to, is never complete. It exists alongside, depends on and helps to create new models of economy that operate in salvage mode, amongst ruins in the manner of assemblages. And successive histories are layered upon each other.

“the modest success of the Oregon-to-Japan matsutake commodity chain is the tip of an iceberg, and following the iceberg to its underwater girth brings up forgotten stories that still grip the planet. … It is the very negligible quality of the matsutake commodity chain that hid it from the view of twenty-first-century reformers, thus preserving a late-twentieth-century history that shook the world. This is the history of encounters between Japan and the United States that shaped the global economy. Shifting relations between U.S. and Japanese capital, I argue, led to global supply chains—and to the end of expectations of progress aimed toward collective advancement.” (109-110)

Tsing’s provocative thesis, is that Matsutake, which hit their prime in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the Japanese boom was at its height, are a relic and evolution of the Japanese mode of merchant capitalism that transformed the world from the late 1960s onwards. They are a memento of the arrival of the “Reverse Black Ships” that “propelled the U.S. economy into the world of Japanese-style supply chains.” (110)

And again Tsing refuses any simple periodization or stage theory.

Yet it would be a mistake to see matsutake commerce as a primitive survival; this is the misapprehension of progress blinders. Matsutake commerce does not occur in some imagined time before scalability. It is dependent on scalability—in ruins. Many pickers in Oregon are displaced from industrial economies, and the forest itself is the remains of scalability work. (40-41)

And likewise it would be a mistake to fall into any easy normative assessment. The aim of her analysis is to register and analyze “scaleability and nonscaleability” free of progress narratives and their obverse. But free also of premature judgement. “it would be a huge mistake to label one good the other bad” (42). The difference is not ethics but greater or lesser diversity enabled by the imperatives of scale and the open-endedness of the assemblage. 42"

(https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-67-in-the-middle-of-things)

Capitalism

"Capitalism

So, we arrive at this fascinating de-reified, non-heroic description of capitalism. Capitalism is a translation machine.

In collecting goods and people from around the world, capitalism itself has the characteristics of an assemblage. However, it seems to me that capitalism also has characteristics of a machine, a contraption limited to the sum of its parts. 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. An army of technicians and managers stand by to remove offending parts—and they have the power of courts and guns. This does not mean that the machine has a static form. As I argued in tracing the history of Japanese-U.S. trade relations, new forms of capitalist translation come into being all the time. Indeterminate encounters matter in shaping capitalism. Yet it is not a wild profusion. Some commitments are sustained, through force. (133)"

(https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-67-in-the-middle-of-things)