The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing — A Reader’s Dialogue
I first came across Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s book, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins through a Below the Radar podcast episode. Joni Low, a Vancouver writer and independent curator, was in conversation with Am Johal, the director of community engagement at SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. There were hints of a new world which I did not recognize. Low talked about living in precarity and assemblages, and quoted Tsing, “If history without progress is indeterminate and multidirectional, might assemblages show us its possibilities? (23)” So off I went to a local bookstore and bought a copy, curious about this new way of looking at the world inspired by mushrooms.
On its surface level, this book is about the supply chain of the matsutake farming; the environmental conditions that lead to its germination, the cultural dynamics of the various groups of harvesters, the capitalist traders, and the Japanese consumers. Digging deeper, every aspect of the supply chain is used to describe a worldview based around assemblages. As the blurb on the back says, “The Mushroom at the End of the World delves into the relationship between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes.”
Tsing introduces the term, ‘Assemblages’, which are described as, “open-ended gatherings. (23)” They are kind of like connections developed between various beings, potentially including both humans and non-humans, creating polyphonic rhythms of living. Or more simply, by putting different perspectives together, new perspectives could be developed that wouldn’t have otherwise come into existence. For example, by looking at the relationships (the assemblages) between foresters, pines, matsutake, harvesters, and consumers, Tsing can find lessons which can be shared with other groups. Each of these units (humans across cultures and classes, plants, and fungi) have very different ways of being, but through interconnection, all operating at different levels, a new type of network can be created.
Tsing, in this example, would be a translator, someone who is able to bridge between assemblies to other groups of people. “Sometimes individuals make a difference in translating across patches. (224)” There is something hopeful here. We all have multiple identities. We can speak to groups that other people cannot, and we can find wonder in certain areas that others could not.
The strength of Tsing’s book is that it discusses matsutake harvesting with genuine love and interest, while also using matsutake as a lesson on how to live in a world of ruins. The mushrooms were both a subject and an example. Personally, I was more interested in the latter, however, everything was so interconnected, that I was mesmerized by the descriptions of mushroom harvesting.
I also found this book strangely healing. Like, I’m someone who worries about climate change and the irreversible damage we are causing to the world. It scares me to think about what the world will look like in the future. But Tsing introduces the idea of precarity, which she calls, “the condition of our time. (20)” Which, for her, is “the condition of being vulnerable to others. (20)” Precarity is a state of the world, one in which we need to understand each other and work with the environment on its own terms. But precarity is not decline. Tsing gives the example of pine in a deforested area. The pine which could not previously live in the shade of already established trees, is only able to grow in open spaces, often from deforestation. Matsutake only grows with certain trees, like pine. Therefore, deforestation, while unfortunate, allows for new relationships between beings. The matsutake doesn’t view its world as in decline, but as one of precarity. It lives through its relationships. In this era, we should be like matsutake.
There are a few interesting themes and concepts at work here. First, I appreciate that Tsing pushes back against teleological historicism, although she never uses the term. Teleological historicism is the idea that history is rushing towards a determinate end. For example, Marx saying that a communist revolution is inevitable due to the dialectical struggles between classes. So, imagine as if human society has a predictable outcome, and we are either in progress or in decline towards that ending. Tsing identifies this perspective of history, one which is either progressing or declining, as a strongly held premise rather than a fact: “The only reason all this sounds odd is that most of us were raised on dreams of modernization and progress.” Tsing also identifies this perspective as one that shuts down alternative ways of living and being in the world. “Instead, agnostic about where we are going, we might look for what has been ignored because it never fit the timeline of progress. (21)” We ignored the matsutake because we had a limited view of what a healthy forest is.
This really got me thinking about how much of my understanding of climate change was premised on this perspective of progress and decline. Maybe that is why I have been filled with dread about the world, because I saw nothing but inevitable decline. Life expectancy has gone down while debt has gone up, and things seem so polarized, I’m not sure whether the current political paradigm can accomplish anything positive anymore. The terrible effects of climate change are no longer regulated to the future, but have become a new normal for the present. It feels like we have failed to achieve the goals we have set up for as a society, namely, to make life better for the next generations.
However, once I tried to look at how I may live in a condition of precarity, instead of decline, it gave me hope. Like, yeah, maybe this is a world of ruin, but I exist in it with many wonderful relationships with other people. And it is through those relationships that we can survive. As Tsing says, “It is in listening to that cacophony of troubled stories that we might encounter our best hopes for precarious survival (34)” and “Luckily there is still company, human and not human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes-the edges of capitalist discipline, scalability, and abandoned resource plantations. We can still catch the scent of the latent commons-and the elusive autumn aroma. (282)” Precarity calls us to work together, and through working together, we can accomplish things we couldn’t before. Decline, on the other hand, is a slow and gradual demise with the hope of returning to where we once were. It is a very different outlook.
For a good portion of the book, despite the hope it gave, it also felt like this book was inherently pessimistic. Most climate related books I read directly tell me to have hope, that it is not too late, that we can still change things, that we can still stop our complete and utter ruin, we can reverse that trend of decline. The Mushroom at the End of the World does none of this. The book starts off from the assumption that the world will be ruined (and to some degree, already is) and that we need to learn how to live within that world. But, after finishing the book, I am not sure that is right. While the book is about how-to live-in ruin — it’s right there in the subtitle — Tsing isn’t foreclosing on the possibility of positive change. Rather, it is more about celebrating resilience, about our ability to find wonder in the small, forgotten things, and about our amazing ability to translate and draw lessons from other beings (both human and non-human). And the book itself is a perfect metaphor for that. I would never have written an anthropological book on mushrooms, but Tsing has, and by reading it, I have gained a new way of looking at the world. This isn’t pessimism at all, but something truly wonderful.
Of course, assemblages can’t be forced, they can’t be artificially created. Matsutakes are notoriously hard to grow in any scalable way. They resist mass production. Human connection is like that too. You can create a public space, but you can’t force people to use it. There are many parks left empty by its neighbours, avoided for whatever reason. Sometimes, all it takes is a friendly shopkeeper or an interesting form of graffiti to make people unexpectedly congregate in a place. Those are things often unaccountable in municipal plans and I would be skeptical of any that tried. Tsing describes how some people would clear an area in a forest to make them conducive to pines and matsutakes, but there is no guarantee that they will flourish there. “They hope their actions might stimulate a latent commons, that is, an eruption of shared assembly, even as they know they can’t actually make a commons. (258)” Even if we can’t create an assemblage, we can still support the conditions that can allow one to develop, whether that be through public space or personal connection. It is something that we can all work towards.
Reading this book, I am in awe about the possibilities of what it suggests. For example, imagine how we would do politics differently, and what new vibrance there will be to life when we explore all the possible modes of human existence. What ways of being exist out there which we have ignored because they didn’t fit our conception of modernization and progress?
Like, rather than view this polarized political era as a lesser version of a previous iteration, what if we use this moment to create new political coalitions and watch political parties imagine new, collective futures. Because it often feels like we, as a society, are struggling to achieve some old political ideals, ones which call themselves the teleological end of society (looking at you, American dream, with your white picket fence), and at this point, those ideas are holding us back rather than letting us dream more vibrantly.
Although this book doesn’t really give recommendations, the lesson that I drew from this book is that we should try to find assemblages around us, or failing that, we should support systems that could allow assemblages to develop. And if they develop and we find one, we should translate it for a wider audience, offering new and better ways in how to support life and the world.
I cannot recommend this book enough, and it was such a pleasure to read. Through this piece, I tried to engage with the book on its own terms. This small dialogue does not give the book justice, and I am sure that you can draw other lessons from the book. In fact, it would be terrible if you didn’t find a different lesson. It is just that rich and varied. After all, this is a book about mushrooms, written by an anthropologist, and later discussed on a podcast between a director of community engagement and an independent curator.
