Delving into the Patchiness of the World
Mycelial Orientations Towards Practices of Sensing, Sharing, and Caring
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7146/nja.v34i69.160659Keywords:
Fungal turn, Mycelial Entanglements, Relational Knowledge, Sensing, Sharing, CaringAbstract
In an era of increasing precarity and ecological disruption, Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) offers a compelling perspective on navigating life amid capitalist ruins. Challenging dominant narratives that relegate nature to a passive backdrop for human agency, Tsing follows fungal pathways to explore relational models of egalitarian, multispecies coexistence. Building on Tsing’s transdisciplinary approach, this paper advocates for a shift beyond entrenched categorizations and extrapolations grounded in well-established conceptual frameworks of flora and fauna, proposing instead that fungi—with their intricate subterranean networks, subtle perceptual capacities, and remarkable symbiotic strategies—can serve as generative figures for imagining and co-creating alternative futures. Departing from the hierarchical logic of family trees and individualist competition—tied to an endless trajectory of progress, differentiation, and fragmentation—fungi offer a transformative paradigm for cultivating situated practices of sensing, sharing, and caring.
References
1 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016), 1. As Jane Bennet points out, we can also make kin with inert matter: “I equate affect with materiality, rather than posit a separate force that can enter and animate a physical body. My aim, again, is to theorize a vitality intrinsic to materiality as such, and to detach materiality from the figures of passive, mechanistic, or divinely infused substance.” Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010), xiii.
2 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015).
3 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, vii.
4 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, vii.
5 See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things. An Archeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (Vintage Books, 1994).
6 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 27.
7 Researchers found that land plants evolved 700 million years ago, while land fungi evolved 1.300 million years ago. See Daniel S. Heckman, David M. Geiser, Brooke R. Eidell, Rebecca L. Stauffer, Natalie L. Kardos, S. Blair Hedges, “Molecular Evidence for the Early Colonization of Land by Fungi and Plants,” Science 293/5532 (August 10, 2001): 1129–1133. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1061457. Given the fact that fungi colonized the Earth long before plants and animals, the notion of funga is surprisingly young. After it had been used in the life sciences since the 2000s, it was first officially proposed in 2018 to support the implementation of education and conservation goals. See Francisco Kuhar, Giuliana Furci, Elisandro Ricardo Drechsler-Santos, Donald H. Pfister, “Delimitation of Funga as a valid term for the diversity of fungal communities: the Fauna, Flora & Funga proposal,” IMA Fungus 9/2 (December 1, 2018), Springer Science & Business Media: A71–A74. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf03449441.
8 Tim Ingold in conversation with Una Meistere, “Anthropology, art and the mycelial person” (July 15, 2020), https://spiriterritory.com/conversations/interviews/24992-anthropology_art_and_the_mycelial_person/.
9 Ingold, “Anthropology, art and the mycelial person.”
10 Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez, Let’s Become Fungal! Mycelium Teachings and the Arts. Based on Conversations with Indigenous Wisdom Keepers, Artists, Curators, Feminists, and Mycologists, with illustrations by Rommy González (Valiz, 2023), 6.
11 The notion of “wood wide webs” was coined by Canadian forest ecologist Suzanne Simard in the late 1990s. See Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree. Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (Knopf Doubleday Publishing, 2021).
12 Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and legendary Psychasthenia,” in The Edge of Surrealism. A Roger Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank, trans. Camille Naish (Duke University Press, 2003), 91–103, 100. As for a historical analysis of invisible and dark spaces, see Robert MacFarlane, Underland. A Deep Time Journey (Penguin Books, 2019).
13 See above, note 1.
14 Some major exceptions include, only to mention two examples, yeast cultivation and the discovery of penicillin. Note that the official 1928 discovery of the antibiotic effect of penicillin by the British physician and bacteriologist Alexander Fleming was in fact a rediscovery, as the Italian physician and microbiologist Bartolomeo Gosio had already isolated mycophenolic acid from a mold of the genus Penicillium as early as 1893 and observed that it could inhibit the growth of the anthrax pathogen. Moreover, there is also evidence of the use of antibiotic substances in earlier cultures and even in the animal kingdom.
15 See Michael Pollan, How to Change your Mind. What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (Penguin Press, 2018), chapter III.
16 According to estimates, it is only around 6% of up to 3.8 million suspected species of fungi that are known to date. See Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life. How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures (Random House, 2021), 11.
17 See Simard, Finding the Mother Tree; Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running. How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World (Ten Speed Press, 2005); Peter McCoy, Radical Mycology. A Treatise on Seeing and Working with Fungi (Chtaeus Press, 2016); Pollan, How to Change your Mind; Sheldrake, Entangled Life.
18 Allison Mackey and Elif Sendur, “What is Fungal Turn? Explorations and Interview with Sherryl Vint and Alison Sperling,” Interconnections: Journal of Posthumanism 3/2: Fungal Turn (2024): 4–17, 5. https://doi.org/10.26522/posthumanismjournal.v3i2.4864.
19 Murray Bookchin, “Introduction to the 1991 edition” in The Ecology of Freedom. The emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, revised edition of the 1982 original publication (Black Rose Books, 1995), xii–lxi, xvii and xxiii. As for Bookchin’s concept of “social ecology,” see Bookchin, “Introduction to the 1991 edition,” xiv: “In contrast to pragmatic environmentalism, I advanced a comprehensive body of ideas that I call social ecology. For social ecologists, our environmental dislocations are deeply rooted in an irrational, anti-ecological society, a society whose basic problems are irremediable by piecemeal, single-issue reforms. I tried to point out that these problems originate in a hierarchical, class, and today, competitive capitalist system that nourishes a view of the natural world as a mere agglomeration of ‘resources’ for human production and consumption.”
20 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia II, trans. Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 4. As for the concept of the “rhizome,” see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, “Introduction: Rhizome,” 3–25.
21 Consider mycorrhiza (from the ancient Greek mýkēs ‘fungus’ and rhiza ‘root’), a form of symbiosis in which a fungus collaborates with the fine root system of a plant. The fact that fungi and mycelial networks are indeed only mentioned sporadically in A Thousand Plateaus is arguably less due to a lack of interest on the part of the authors than to the fact that fungi were still scarcely represented in interdisciplinary discourse when the book was written.
22 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 3–4.
23 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 10.
24 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 2–3.
25 As for the special attraction of “true ruins,” also see Roger Caillois, Le Fleuve Alphée (Gallimard, 1978),
31–34 (quote: 34). German edition: Der Fluss Alpheios, trans. Rainer G. Schmidt, eds. Anne von der Heiden and Sarah Kolb (Brinkmann & Bose, 2016), 20–22 (quote: 22).
26 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 1.
27 “Nothing more than mushroom identification develops the powers of observation,” John Cage stated in 1959 by citing the words of his colleague Prof. MacIvor from The New School of Social Research in New York. Cited in John Cage, A Mycological Foray, ed. Ananda Pellerin (Atelier Éditions, 2020), 32.
28 Cage, A Mycological Foray, 55. It is important to note that this form of transience does not affect the fungus as a whole, as mycelia can survive for enormous periods of time and even divide into several independent ‘individuals.’ In fact, this radical transience only affects the ephemeral fruiting bodies, the sexual organs of the fungus.
29 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 471.
30 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 238. Deleuze and Guattari speak of various “blocks of becoming” (like the one of “a tree, a fly, and a pig,” which is incited by a truffle mushroom), highlighting that each of these blocks “involves terms that are entirely heterogeneous” in that it builds on “combinations [that] are neither genetic nor structural.” See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 242.
31 Volker Grassmuck, “The Sharing Turn: Why we are generally nice and have a good chance to cooperate our way out of the mess we have gotten ourselves into,” in Cultures and Ethics of Sharing / Kulturen und Ethiken des Teilens, eds. Wolfgang Sützl, Felix Stalder, Ronald Meier, and Theo Hug (Innsbruck University Press, 2012), 17–34, 18.
32 Wolfgang Sützl, Felix Stalder, Ronald Meier, and Theo Hug, “Introduction,” in Cultures and Ethics of Sharing, 7–10, 7.
33 Roger Caillois, “A New Plea for Diagonal Science,” in The Edge of Surrealism. A Roger Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank, trans. Camille Naish (Duke University Press, 2003), 343–347, 347. The original French text titled “Nouveau plaidoyer pour les sciences diagonales” was first published in Roger Caillois, Cases d’un échiquier (Gallimard, 1970), 53–59.
34 Tim Ingold, Lines. A Brief History (Routledge, 2007), 4. Given that Ingold’s father was a mycologist, it is no coincidence that his history of lines is closely related to the phenomenology of fungi. See Ingold, Lines, 41.
35 Ingold, Lines, 4.
36 Tim Ingold, Being Alive. Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (Routledge 2011), 63. Note that the notion “web of life” reappears in Merlin Sheldrake’s 2023 film Fungi: Web of Life, which was filmed in Tasmania’s Tarkine rainforest and narrated by Björk.
37 Ingold, Being Alive, 14. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 202.
38 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 90.
39 Ingold, “Anthropology, art and the mycelial person,” n. pag.
40 This passage refers to one of the workshops within the project The Lure of Mycelial Space. Sharing Knowledge with/through Mushrooms, organized by Ilka Becker, Sarah Kolb, and Jutta Strohmaier within the artisticscientific conference Traversing Topologies: Imagining Worlds and Knowledge with/through Artistic Research, Entlebuch Biosphere and Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, September 2021. Many thanks to the participants: Maia Gusberti, Marion Neumann, Alison Pouliot, Olivier Rossel, Berit Singer, and Dila Suay. More information: www.mycelial-space.net/blog/the-lure-ofmycelial- space. The workshop series laid the foundation for the ongoing transdisciplinary project and the collaborative platform www.mycelial-space.net, which went online in April 2022.
41 This passage refers to the collaborative workshop Parliament of Lines by Sarah Kolb and Jutta Strohmaier on occasion of the ELIA Biennial “Arts Plural,” Nuova Academia di Belli Arti, Milan, November 2024. The workshop’s title is inspired by Tim Ingold’s Lines.
42 Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (Oxford University Press, 2006), 3.
43 Held, The Ethics of Care, 3–4.
44 Held, The Ethics of Care, 13.
45 Held, The Ethics of Care, 14. The image of the mushroom is drawn from Hobbes’s Elementorum philosophiae sectio tertia de cive (1642), see Thomas Hobbes, The Citizen: Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society (Doubleday, 1972), 205.
46 Hobbes, The Citizen, 205. Hobbes’s original text reads
“homines tanquam si essent iamiam subito e terra fungorum more (like mushrooms) exorti et adulti, sine omni unius ad alterum obligatione” (my translation).
47 Federico Zappino and Brunella Casalini. “Fungorum More: The Concept of Interdependence from Hobbes to Butler,” Diacritics 51/4 (2023), 8–34, 24–25. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/dia.2023.a948428.
48 See Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (Boston Review, 2009), 3–13.
49 Ostendorf-Rodríguez, Let’s Become Fungal!, 8–9.
50 See Paolo Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans.
Myra Bergman Ramos (Continuum International Publishing, 2005), 141: “It is in the interest of the oppressor to weaken the oppressed still farther, to isolate them, to create and deepen rifts among them. This is done by varied means, from the repressive methods of the government bureaucracy to the forms of cultural action with which they manipulate the people by giving them the impression that they are being helped.
51 Ostendorf-Rodríguez, Let’s Become Fungal!, 82.
52 Carolina Caycedo as cited in Ostendorf-Rodríguez, Let’s Become Fungal!, 82 and 85.
53 Lucia Monge as cited in Ostendorf-Rodríguez, Let’s Become Fungal!, 30.
54 As for the fundamental ethical standards, it is important to prioritize engagement with fungal strains sourced from nature, ensuring respect for biodiversity and minimal environmental impact. At the same time, any form of research should be committed to preventing the introduction of non-native strains into natural habitats to guarantee the protection of ecological balance.
55 See Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford University Press, 2007).
56 The international grassroots movement owes much to the ongoing project Radical Mycology, initiated by Peter McCoy in 2006. See McCoy, Radical Mycology.
57 Internationally, a large number of scientific and artistic projects investigate new sustainable technologies based on mycelium. Examples include www.spun.earth, www.openfung.org, www.eurofung.org, www.mycoworks.com, and many others.
58 The verb to curate is derived from Latin curare, which means “taking care of” or “looking after.” Among other recent events and publications, see the workshop series at the University of Arts Linz TAKE CARE! Sorge tragen im Kunstsystem, curated by Anne von der Heiden and Anna-Viktoria Eschbach, since 2024.
59 This passage refers to the exhibition Try, Feel, Fail. Learn. Think. Play. Observe, curated by Sarah Kolb and Jutta Strohmaier on occasion of the Wiener Pilzfestspiele (Vienna Fungi Festival), Viktoria – Space for Artistic Research and Social Design, September 2023. Many thanks to the artists: Paula Flores, Taro Knopp, Mouldelling Design aka Theresa Hajek, Samire Gurgurovci, and Salma Shaka, Jonas Studer, and Kristin Weissenberger. More information: www.mycelial-space.net/blog/try-feel-fail-learn-think-play-observe.
60 The initial spark for the project was our proposal for the workshop series The Lure of Mycelial Space within the Traversing Topologies conference in 2021, see above, note 40. As for the ongoing activities within the project, see www.mycelial-space.net.
61 See above, note 52.
62 In his “synthesis of relational, ecological and developmental approaches,” Tim Ingold similarly distinguishes between the three categories of “livelihood” (as related to sensing in terms of “comprehending how human beings relate to their environments”), “dwelling” (as related to sharing, since “awareness and activity are rooted in the engagement between persons and environment”) and “skill” (as related to caring “conceived as the embodiment of capacities of awareness and response by environmentally situated agents”). Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill (Routledge, 2002), 5.
63 See Andreas Reckwitz, Verlust. Ein Grundproblem der Moderne (Suhrkamp, 2024).
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