There are two ways of painting future in current thinking. The dystopian sees downfall coming everywhere. Bruno Latour readers share progress reports of heating oceans. People who have been politicized on Facebook post texts in which neoliberalism is to blame for everything. Against this planetary pessimism are technophilic Akzelerationisten. Perhaps modern age has really destroyed more than created, y say, but big problems can only be solved technically: with solar plans against climate change, with Kryptowährungen against central bank regime!
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Also Anna Lowenhaupt Tsings essay The Mushroom at end of world takes big picture in eye. Like so many scientists in recent years, anthropologist from Californian University of Santa Cruz is investigating processes that have irreversibly changed global ecosystem over past 200 years: capitalist accumulation, globalization, The disruption of biological and societal systems through colonisation, mechanisation, forced and voluntary migration.
The soothing Tsings book, however, is that it cannot be attributed to dystopian or utopian scheme. Neir does it prophesy that we can be redeemed of modernity and capitalism, nor does it see planet on its way to definite ruin. Tsings premise is simpler, more timeless: We live long ago in ruins. It is a continuous miracle that re is still life. And you can tell strategies of this resilienten, improvised life using a fungus.
Tsings Concrete object is Matsutake, an edible mushroom in Japan, for which supposedly kilogram prices of up to 2000 dollars have been paid. For centuries, taste and grace of Matsutake has been illustrated in Japanese poetry and painting. Unlike most edible mushrooms, fungus grows only in symbiosis with certain trees, preferably with Japanese red pine. He prefers to have barren, mineral soils from which he dissolves nutrients for his host plants.
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Under what circumstances exactly he is training fruit bodies remains puzzling to this day. When milieu is too rich and life-friendly, it does not show itself. All attempts at laboratory breeding failed. One can only do what people in Japan have done for centuries: disturbing balance of a forest by burning a part or removing undergrowth. And n wait a few years if fungus thrives.
This article comes from time No. 16/2018. Here you can read entire output.
Tsing has spent a short decade exploring ecology that has developed around Matsutake deposits in Japan, Scandinavia and North America. In middle of twentieth century, mushroom from Japan had almost disappeared, but Japanese immigrants discovered it in forests on West coast of USA. In state of Oregon, industrial forestry had destroyed ancestral biosphere. The mighty Ponderosa Pines, revered by indigenous peoples, had been cleared, and afforestation with this precious species of failed. Almost only small, economically worthless rotary pines were growing. For reasons that no one can explain exactly, Matsutake liked this environment.
Tsing takes a lot of time to tell stories of various collectors ‘ groups who have been provisionally settled in Oregon’s forests since n. Almost always re are refugees or emigrants from Asian countries, from Laos, Cambodia or Japan, who are looking for ir seasonal happiness in finding mushrooms. Sometimes yield of a fall is enough to live all year round. Sometimes y hardly find anything. The search for unpredictable crop has something anarchic, playful, and yet is capitalist business. An informal network of buyers, intermediaries and exporters brings mushroom to Japanese gourmet markets. The instability of Matsutake prevents this economic cycle from training solid structures.
It sounds a bit kitschy and after too much consistency of content and form, but you can actually run into Tsings essay like a matching mushrooms, can skip chapters, focus on illustrations and captions, or in methodical Excursions is amazed at how biologists, economists and ethnographers work toger in Matsutake research. Autobiographical anecdotes mingle with nature descriptions, ories protokapitalistischer socialization with narratives of post-industrial, migrant precarity. This is never boring or pedantic, but always exactly what author has done to write: A reading book for a world that has to get along without a managerial narrative of progress.
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing: The mushroom at end of world. About life in ruins of capitalism; A. D. Engl. v. Dirk HöferVerlag MacDonald Seitz, Berlin 2018; 447 p., 28, – €, as e-book €23.99
