The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (review)

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins functions as an impressive model of critical inquiry into the dominant figure of the "human" subject and the Nature/Culture divide within capitalist times. Tsing, expanding on her earlier work that includes In the Realm of the Diamond Queen (1993) and Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connections (2005), incorporates a vast body of academic disciplines—anthropology, critical theory, economics, history, biology—and reorients these through the proposition of an entanglement-based ontology that proves to function as much as a transformation of these sciences as it does as a practice of collective (political) resistance. Within this grand project, Tsing narrates in first-person mode a story of the matsutake mushroom that traces the intricate relations between Nature and Culture. The result is an open-ended, contingent, simultaneously hyperlocal and global picture that eschews dichotomous conceptions of Nature/Culture altogether. In telling this story, she offers an experiment in subversive science, and thus a model of (re) thinking and (re) doing politics, that both repositions human and nonhuman subjectivity and poses fundamental questions about how we might do science and politics together. The maze-like complexity of this project is at times overwhelming, but also written with a refreshing accessibility and poetic verve. The Mushroom playfully weaves a tapestry of interconnecting patches of "disturbance-based ecologies" (5) surrounding the matsutake mushroom that manage "to live despite capitalism" (viii). It generates an understanding of becoming with and overturning our shared capitalist world that has ample implications for questions surrounding ethics, knowledge production, subversion, and subjectivity as a whole.

The start of Tsing's intricate project to seek new worlds among capitalist destruction is playful curiosity. Not for nothing does she interject her prologue with the poetic—"Oh matsutake, The excitement before f inding them" (Yamaguchi Sodo in Tsing, 9)—to underline that it is not a drive for "scientific" illumination and discovery that is important here, but rather the experimental process of the "arts of noticing" (24–25): learning to listen to events and entanglements across times that might, or might not, lead to the possibility of other, more liveable worlds. In order to get attuned to the arts of noticing, The Mushroom works through the colonial and Cartesian predicaments inherited by contemporary capitalism. Temporality in general, but more specifically progress, scalability, and accumulation, are turned on their heads in favor of more queer approaches that allow Tsing to notice and retell the world differently. As such, she takes the much debated condition of precarity—the insecurity and vulnerability that define global capitalist economies—and refigures it in order to show how it becomes the condition for radical change. Precarity comes to function as that which also makes us vulnerable and noticeable to one another, whether human or not. In noticing this vulnerability and insecurity that defines contemporary life, Tsing suggests that we become aware of transformative "unpredictable encounters" that throw us into the midst of unstable human and nonhuman assemblages that are constantly in flux and escape the linear temporality of progress (20). Consequently, the questions she raises about precarity as a mode of "freedom" are challenging grounds to be taken up for further exploration. Tsing's analysis of precarity, time, and freedom in the multiethnic and multispecies matstutake-picking communities of Oregon, for example, opens toward discussions about inhabiting multiple temporalities. In this, the book adds richly to decolonial and critical black studies' recent ventures into temporality, agency, confinement, and race. Tsing's development of human and nonhuman assemblages—with the matstutake mushroom as a connecting node—and the visceral-semiotic experience of multi-temporality does much to complicate notions of freedom as connected unquestionably to accumulation, progress, and control.

The book continues into...