The Mushroom at the End of the World - Anna Tsing

Review of the new book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Tsing.

Why should a mushroom make it possible to understand capitalism — better than the Internet, for example, or the arms trade, or the sale of grain? The reason defines both the method and the object of this investigation: a problem of scale. It is not possible to cultivate this mushroom because it has a capricious life cycle and depends heavily on other factors; it is not a scalable object.

One of the major contributions of this book is that it redefines capitalism by its capacity to create local conditions that may be scaled up, and plantations are the precursor and the prototype. Gathering matsutake eludes all forms of scalability, as do those gathering it in Oregon or China, whose perilous economy Tsing tracks closely. Criticizing the disputed notion of the Anthropocene, Tsing could in fact put forward a serious candidate, as Donna Haraway suggests: the “Plantationocene.”

But the truly ingenious thing about this book is that resistance to scalability also applies to its method of investigation. Tsing effectively rehabilitates what could be called “pure and simple” description — though there is nothing pure or simple about it. Describing is inventing a science of the concrete, which does not seek to generalize but to penetrate ever more deeply into the specificity of places and history. This specificity is so difficult to describe that “all terrain” sciences, which, like development projects, are obsessed by scalability, systematically fail to understand the ever so particular situation of overlapping species, thus multiplying the fields of ruins.

And becoming accustomed to living in the ruins, and knowing how to do so, is what this book is about. The reason is rooted in its object of investigation: this occluded mushroom that likes ruins, particularly pine forests laid waste by loggers. Its mode of life is devoid of the harmony and equilibrium of nature. Everything about it is artificial; everything in its development is counterintuitive. It resists all stable and lasting definition, all changes of scale. Additionally, like other members of its genus, it refuses to be defined as a species. The matsutake prospers amid disruption, a term to which Tsing imparts a positive meaning, against all hope of return to a “natural” situation.