The Mushroom at the End of the World

Tsing frequently discusses assemblages in terms of what they are not: they are not tidy, linear, or predictable. The term originates in ecology, as an alternative to predetermining how ecosystems and biological communities work. Assemblages are “open ended gatherings. They allow us to ask about communal effects without assuming them” (22). Tsing argues that her work is a quest to examine assemblages both among humans and in “non-human ways of being” which reveal how organisms interact with each other, sometimes producing significant change. In her analysis, the encounter between pines and mushrooms, which happens only because of human involvement in forests, is an example of an assemblage (22-23). Assemblages may include ways of being that are not concerned with resource extraction for economic gain, but they cannot be treated as somehow free or liberated from these processes. Instead, Tsing describes how assemblages, too, are exploited for capitalist economies (24).

An economic system that relies on workers selling their labor to those above them in a class hierarchy, and the goods they produce being sold to consumers so that companies and their owners earn profits (Marx, 204). Tsing, like Marx, is interested in the social and environmental consequences of this system. While Marx called for a revolution in which workers would abolish capitalism (500), Tsing is less certain that such progress is possible, questioning whether a “single solidarity” of workers is sufficient for social transformation (65). Tsing’s innovation on Marx’s theory is to argue repeatedly that there are “noncapitalist elements on which capitalism depends” (66). Spaces like Open Ticket in Oregon do not involve traditional capitalist structures, as they rely on constantly raising prices as a social ritual all its own, rather than mushroom buyers trying to drive prices down to their own advantage. But, eventually, in transit to Japan, mushrooms re-enter capitalist logic before they become gifts in Japan. For Tsing capitalism is largely inescapable as human societies are currently configured.

Commodities are units sold under capitalism. In Marxist formulations, commodities are assigned an “exchange value” often a unit of currency for which they are sold. Commodities are created when humans sell their labor for profit, and the person who buys their labor receives not merely subsistence, but more capital for themself. Commodities are “products of labor” and contain it, but this is usually hidden from most people’s analysis of economics. Marx argues that a focus on money and prices obscures the “social character of labor” (Marx 324). Tsing argues that tis same act of deliberate obscuring happens when matsutake mushrooms are sold without regard to the social dynamics of the people who picked them—they are “objects torn from their life-worlds to become objects of exchange” (121).

In Tsing’s work, commodities are also part of global supply chains. Increasingly, commodities are produced transnationally: that is, parts of the raw materials for an industry are produced in a different country than the parent company. American companies learned from this experience—Nike, for example, where Tsing asserts that it “never occurred to them to manufacture shoes (118). Commodities and global supply chains are what help produce the forests Tsing finds in her travels—both the depleted aspects and the flourishing ones. Matsutake mushrooms themselves become commodities part of a supply chain, though not for their entire lifespan.

Tsing thinks of shared, communal spaces as a possible respite from capitalism. She declares, “I search for fugitive moments of entanglement amid institutionalized alienation” (254). She defines them primarily by what they are not: humanity does not have exclusive domain or control over them, they are “not good for everyone” and they “don’t institutionalize well” (256). That is, they are not a universal solution to all the problems of the world, and they cannot readily be formalized or translated from context to context in predictable ways. Latent commons contrast with the progress narratives Tsing writes against, as they are similarly resistant to the replication and scalability she associates with “plantation models” (23). Most importantly, she declares, “latent commons cannot redeem us” (256). There is no single cure, no utopia, there is no mold available to make salvation uniform. Latent commons may be a mode of resistance and a source of encouragement, but Tsing resists using them as the “happy ending” to her tale of ruin and loss.

This concept is key to Tsing’s argument about capitalism’s current stage: “value produced in unplanned patches is appropriated for capital” so that the former linear narrative of constant progress in a single place is no longer necessary (5). Tsing uses an ecological term to describe a socioeconomic reality—commodities can now move across varied cultural and political contexts, rather than being controlled in a more central way or produced and then sold in a single nation (62). For Tsing, patchiness is a way of describing how commodities move in capitalism, but also how spaces outside capitalism operate. Open Ticket, Oregon, is also a “patch” where conceptions of freedom are contested and argued. Helpfully, mushrooms themselves grow in patches, so Tsing can use the term to emphasize how nature and human constructed economies are constantly interacting and overlapping.

At its base, polyphony is music where “autonomous melodies intertwine” (23). Tsing uses the term as a metaphor to describe the function of the modern economy. Global supply chains are polyphonic as the corporation is not concerned with how raw materials or goods are produced. Factories can follow their own timetables and particular rhythms—Tsing underlines that Chinese garment factories are “constantly switching among orders for local boutique brands, knock off international brands, and generic to-be-branded later production” (24). Tsing sees similar polyphony in forests via the relationship between trees, mushrooms, and pine wilt nematode worms, which exist as assemblages containing “separate ways of being” (158).