Mushrooms, fungi, mycelium - breaking news, gossip, slander, lies etc.

[version]

My dad's been banging on for ages about wanting to read this book, The Mushroom at the End of the World, so I picked it up for him for Father's Day.

Reading it myself at the moment as FD's about a week away and it's not what I expected. A lot of talk of assemblages and references to Marx and Donna Haraway and Japanese poetry. Not sure how much he's going to like it.

The Mushroom at the End of the World

"A poetic and remarkably fertile exploration of the relationship between human beings and the natural environment."—Pankaj Mishra, The Guardian"I'm very grateful to have this book."—Ursula K. Le GuinThe acclaimed and award-winning book about what a rare mushroom can teach us about sustaining...

press.princeton.edu

Underwhelming, thus far.

It's supposed to be structured in line with her themes, i.e. it's a fragmented, rhizomatic sort of thing, but in practice what you're presented with reads like a loose series of flimsy New Yorker articles. It's also quite clunky and repetitive. She'll use a phrase or term several times on a single page and it takes me right out of it.

Another issue's I just don't get a sense she really knows what she's talking about or what the thrust of her arguments are. She jumps from tidbit to tidbit with the odd sprinkle of theory where she'll make some vague attempt at updating Marx and it just isn't convincing.

 

[sus]

I don't love the worldview but it's soooo emblematic of a kind of worldview that I feel like I'm reading psychology or sociology at points. I didn't make it far past the first few chapters though, like you said, it starts getting redundant. It's a good text to flip around, read a little, understand the zeitgeist. But not an especially impressive text.

 

[sus]

I'll see if I have any notes written down in the margins worth posting

 

[Mr. Tea]

Underwhelming, thus far.

It's supposed to be structured in line with her themes, i.e. it's a fragmented, rhizomatic sort of thing, but in practice what you're presented with reads like a loose series of flimsy New Yorker articles. It's also quite clunky and repetitive. She'll use a phrase or term several times on a single page and it takes me right out of it.

Another issue's I just don't have a sense she really knows what she's talking about or what the thrust of her arguments are. She jumps from tidbit to tidbit with the odd sprinkle of theory where she'll make some vague attempt at updating Marx and it just isn't convincing.

That sounds pretty insufferable.

If you want a good book about fungi, you're much better off with this:

 

[sus]

The fungi are just a metaphor for rhizomatic communism

 

[version]

It's an interesting premise, tracing these various overlapping systems via a species of mushroom, but she hasn't written a particularly interesting book.

 

[sus]

"all that taming and mastering [ie the Western approach to land management and governance more generally] has made such a mess that it is unclear whether life on earth can continue. Second, interspecies entanglements that once seemed the stuff of fables are now materials for serious discussion among biologists and ecologists who show how life requires the interplay of many kinds of beings. Humans cannot survive by stomping on all the others."

"Without Man and Nature, all creatures can come back to life, and men and women can express themselves without the strictures of a parochially imagined rationality"

 

[sus]

I don't know why people concerned about climate change can't say things like "has made such a mess that many species will go extinct, at a magnitude that has seen only a handful of times in Earth's history." Like, that's a pretty plausible outcome, and a pretty dang bad outcome! Instead they say things like "it is unclear whether life on earth can continue." Which is just patently false and ridiculous and not what a real natural philosopher would say. Of course life on earth will continue and adapt. It has for billions of years through cataclysms far more abrupt. Human beings couldn't eradicate life on earth if we set all the resources at our disposal solely to that project. It's impossible.

 

[sus]

Anna Tsing is a classic woman (sorry, I don't mean to go gender essentialist, we can say that it's a result of socialization and not biology). She's all about interpenetration. Everything has holes and things need to slip into those holes and get under your skin. That's her worldview.

 

[sus]

OK yes this is true we need to let things in past our boundaries, cells need to respire, we need to eat, fertilization is important, but also we have a massive immune system, we have all this tough skin, because also sometimes it's bad to be penetrated? Sometimes you don't want to get "entangled" with other living things.

So her antithetical position is as absurd as the thesis, which is that you should Never Be Penetrated, and you should Stomp Out All Resistance.

And if you draw the synthesis, well, the real concept here is semi-permeable boundaries. You want to let some things in and not others. And it uh, depends a lot on context when you want to do one vs the other. This is a sort of boring tautological claim, which nonetheless I treated at length for the Cleveland Review, because you know I rep Midwestern cultural institutions, but no, it's not a very good treatment.

 

[sus]

I just find her work so symptomatic, like I said.

For instance, being penetrated = being female = being ecological = cooperative = bottom-up
And then penetrating = being male / patriarchy = structuring and systematizing and "rational"

And this cluster of syllogisms continues endlessly, it's like she's setting up a sports team

So e.g. the nose = associated with nonverbal intuition, a holistic/deep "gut feel"—contrasted with vision, which is superficial, deceptive, patriarchal

 

[version]

I was reading Archaeology of Knowledge before picking this one up and it's such a contrast in terms of prose. The Foucault, even when it was going over my head, felt precise, crisp, diamond hard.

 

[sus]

There are mushroom forests (all about delicate ecological balance, a complexity of interdependence so great that we still don't understand it)

and then there are Plantations

Plantations are "architected" "rationally" by White Men who engage colonial projects

Mushroom forests are "stewarded" and "tended" by POC migrant laborers who have suffered at the hand of western patriarchal colonialism

 

[sus]

The Foucault, even when it was going over my head, felt precise, crisp, diamond hard.

Yes that's Michel's phallic top-down patriarchal approach

 

[sus]

"Such interwoven rhythms perform a still lively temporal alternative to the unified progress-time we still long to obey"

straight lines = straight men = economic cult of progress

circular time & interwoven polyrhythms = feminist ways of knowing = maternal storytelling

 

[sus]

good: flux, formlessness, mess, tangle, contamination

bad: order, logic, form, hygiene, borders

 

[Mr. Tea]

I don't know why people concerned about climate change can't say things like "has made such a mess that many species will go extinct, at a magnitude that has seen only a handful of times in Earth's history." Like, that's a pretty plausible outcome, and a pretty dang bad outcome! Instead they say things like "it is unclear whether life on earth can continue." Which is just patently false and ridiculous and not what a real natural philosopher would say. Of course life on earth will continue and adapt. It has for billions of years through cataclysms far more abrupt. Human beings couldn't eradicate life on earth if we set all the resources at our disposal solely to that project. It's impossible.

I know we've disagreed about environmental stuff before, and I still think you were striking a bit of a pose with the "What use are polar bears, really?" attitude, but I completely agree with you here. The hyperbole is ridiculous and actively undermines the point being made.

 

[version]

It's interesting to read something where the fragmented structure fails like this. When it's done well, e.g. Naked Lunch, there's an electricity. The components fizzing with life and plugging themselves into one another. When it's done poorly it's a disintensifier, like a runner persistently dropping to tie their shoelace.

I'll try to finish it and see where it goes, maybe I'll find something more in it by the end, but at present it's dull and irritating.

 

[Mr. Tea]

The fungi are just a metaphor for rhizomatic communism

Counterpoint: a huge number of fungi are wholly or mainly parasitic in their ecology - take the infamous honey fungus, one known colony of which is well over 2,000 years old and covers over 1,000 hectares of forest - which, if you're the kind of person who loves to see everything as a metaphor for politics, is surely a much better match for colonialism, or the most brutally extractive kinds of capitalism.

 

[version]

She's focusing on a particular species she claims only grows in forests disturbed by humans. Apparently it was the first thing to grow after Hiroshima too.

Matsutake - Wikipedia

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