I read some selections from The Mushroom at the End of the World last semester, and it struck me as a story about damage, destruction, and human greed. I used it to argue that humans are more alienated from ourselves than ever before and invoked Tsing’s concept of “salvage accumulation” to talk about capitalism and racism. After all, “the concentration of wealth is possible because value produced in unplanned patches is appropriated for capital” (5). These unplanned patches, both human and nonhuman, become commodified, and I found that incredibly interesting but quite pessimistic.
When I read the section this time around, however, I found more nuggets of hope in it than I had before. Several phrases stuck out to me—“promise and ruin,” “precarity,” and “assemblages.” First, “promise and ruin” is interesting because Tsing uses it to remind us that this has happened before (18). Industrial transformation has promised salvation only to result in destruction. Tsing doesn’t try to imply that it will not happen again nor that there’s a silver bullet to save us. But she thinks that mushroom picking will at least “open our imaginations,” and that’s a first step (19). It’s more complicated than just a cyclical promise-ruin relationship, and it’s about more than just humans, she reminds us. Her description of “assemblages” as networks of species interacting in community, “open-ended gatherings” explains just how its complicated (23). I’m thinking about how at the beginning of the book, Tsing mentions that human deforestation is what allowed for the matsutake to flourish in Japan in the first place, making room for the red pines to act as host to the matsutake (6). In this way, humans and the matsutake exist in an assemblage with one another, an open-ended gathering that has produced both promise and ruin and will continue to do so in ways largely out of our control. This lack of control, this vulnerability, is what Tsing calls “precarity” (20). Accepting this precarity, recognizing ourselves as existing in a multiverse of assemblages, and avoiding the empty promise of “progress” because it will surely result in ruin, are three lessons that resonated with me throughout the prologue and first chapter.
I want to know more about how the mushrooms grow in different settings; Tsing mentions different farming styles, from the monocrop commercialized mushroom growers to the wild mushroom forest foragers, and I wonder what kinds of mushrooms each system produces. Do the commercialized mushrooms turn out differently? How have these pockets of foragers continued to exist in a global economic system demanding quantity? I also want to think more about this idea of people and things becoming “mobile assets” that she raises in the prologue on page 5. Is there hope for resisting alienation in a world that is and remains globalized? And, what does it mean that certain people and things are “mobile assets,” able to travel from place to place, while others are rooted in place by borders, poverty, or lack of demand?