10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17352
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Laura Centemeri
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton University Press, 2015
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Book Reviews
2017-07-20
2023-06-22
2017-07-20
2023-08-21
159-162
TS
Laura Centemeri
2017/07/20
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17352
159
Centre d'Etude des Mouvements Sociaux (EHESSCNRS/ PSL)
2038-3460
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en
162
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton University Press, 2015
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17352/16201
8
Book Review                                                             159
     Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Cap-
italist Ruins, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2015, pp. 331

Laura Centemeri Centre d'Etude des Mouvements Sociaux (EHESS-
CNRS/PSL)

    Can a mushroom become our guide to explore the “dark wood” of
the current global capitalism, the “savage, dense and harsh” wood in
which, paraphrasing Dante, we seem to have lost “the straightway”? This
is the journey that anthropologist Anna Tsing invites us to engage in: the
journey of the matsutake mushroom (Tricholoma matsutake), from gift to
commodity and back. This journey brings us from “disturbed” forestry
landscapes that, in such disparate places as the US state of Oregon, the
Chinese province of Yunnan, Finland and Japan, result from “the over-
lapping world-making activities of many agents, human and not human”
to the realm of disembedded market commodities in which the mush-
room shortly, but decisively, dwells before its transformation into what is
considered in Japan as a highly appreciated gift.
    With this book Tsing pursues the programme of ethnography of
“global connections” she began in the 1990s, with her work on predatory
business and local struggles around Indonesian tropical rainforests. That
work already focused on the study of “frictions”, meaning the potentially
empowering but also compromising effects of “encounters across differ-
ences”. Now Tsing observes these frictions in the encounters of value re-
gimes across the Matsutake mushroom global supply chain. Along the
way, Tsing develops an original analysis of the value regime of our current
capitalist economy that rests on three key-concepts: scalability (and its
contrary, nonscalability), salvage accumulation and global supply chain.
According to the author, scalability means “the ability of a project to
change scales smoothly without any change in project frames. A scalable
business, for example, does not change its organization as it expands.
This is possible only if business relations are not transformative, changing
the business as new relations are added” (38). Modernity and capitalism,
according to Tsing, are filled up with dreams (and nightmares) of scala-
bility that shape progress in the form of expansion. Scalable projects (be
them social, economic or political) are oblivious to the diversity of con-
texts and the indeterminacies that originate from the encounter with this
diversity. Nonscalability, on the contrary, refers to everything that is
without that feature, “whether good or bad”. In fact “nonscalability is by
no means better than scalability (…). Feudal service was a nonscalable
form of labor but not commendable because of it. (…) At the same time,
ecological complexity is nonscalable, and so is love; and we value these
things”. According to Tsing we need a theory of the nonscalable, intend-
160                                                             Tecnoscienza – 8 (1)

ed as an analytical frame designed so to notice nonscalable phenomena,
because only through noticing the nonscalable it is possible to recognize
“salvage accumulation”. Salvage accumulation is the feature of capitalism
consisting in “taking advantage of value produced without capitalist con-
trol” (63) or, more precisely, the ability to create capitalist value from
nonscalable value regimes. Salvage accumulation operates through global
supply chains that have become the dominant form of organization of
commodity production in today world capitalism: “Supply chains are
commodity chains that translate value to the benefit of dominant firms;
translation between noncapitalist and capitalist value systems is what they
do” (63). Wal-Mart is a good example of how a supply chain works. Re-
tail expansion does not require that production be scalable: “Production
is left to the riotous diversity of nonscalability, with its relationally partic-
ular dreams and schemes. We know this best in ‘the race to the bottom’:
the role of global supply chains in promoting coerced labour, dangerous
sweatshops, poisonous substitute ingredients, and irresponsible environ-
mental gouging and dumping” (64). As explained by Tsing: “in this ‘sal-
vage’ capitalism, supply chains organize the translation process in which
wildly diverse forms of work and nature are made commensurate –for
capital” (43).
     In this respect, Tsing’s analysis should be of interest to the community
of sociologists and other social scientists working on issues of value and
valuation. Shifting the analytical focus from the variety of technical devic-
es of “qualculation” to the irreducibly contextual value regimes that
emerge in livelihood processes, Tsing stresses the importance of paying
attention to the nonscalable modes of valuation that innervate livelihood
practices.
     “Noncapitalist value systems” are defined by Tsing as “gift econo-
mies”: not much more is said in the book about the specific modes of
valuation that organize these evaluative spaces, beyond the fact that they
are nonscalable, i.e. they cannot be scaled without changing the frame-
work of knowledge or action. Still, Tsing’s contribution to the debate on
valuation and evaluation is important in that it points to the relevance,
both in research and in politics, of noticing the nonscalable value regimes
embedded in life processes.
     Somehow, Tsing’s idea of “salvage accumulation” echoes the analysis
of the feminist thinker Silvia Federici (2012) and her denunciation of the
systematic devaluation of “reproductive work”, the largely unnoticed
work that is needed for the maintaining of life processes. For Federici
too, the sphere of reproduction (extended to include the reproduction of
life in the environment) is a sphere of nonscalable modes of valuation that
can be shared through practices of “commoning”. Tsing, for her part, in-
troduces the idea of “latent commons” to point to “entanglements” of
human and non-human beings “that might be mobilized in common
cause” (135). They are not “exclusive human enclaves” and the opening
Book Review                                                             161
of the commons to other beings shifts everything: “Once we include pests
and diseases, we can’t hope for harmony” (255).
     Tsing’s tone is in fact much less optimistic than Federici’s call for a
revolutionary resistance against capitalism, led by women and built on the
“commoning” of reproductive work. In line with recent developments in
feminist new materialism, Tsing embraces the perspective of a fluid state
of reality, of an “earthwide condition of precarity” seen as an opportunity
for new possibilities of multispecies coexistence, shaping a “third nature”,
that is, “what manages to live despite capitalism” (viii). Her enthusiasm
for the perspective of the adventurous “life without the promise of stabil-
ity”, however, is quite moderate. In fact, “a precarious world is a world
without teleology” (20), which means that “progress stopped making
sense”, for better or worse. The “end of the world” evoked in the book's
title is the end of the modern world, with its progressive destinies and its
oppression, both related to projects of scalability. On the one hand, the
author argues, “dreams of progress” have blinded us to the diversity of
the many world-making projects, human and non-human, that surround
us. Without progress, capitalism has no teleology either, which means
that “we need to see what comes together – not just by prefabrication,
but also by juxtaposition” (23). According to Tsing, descriptions of capi-
talism as an all-encompassing global political economy (as, for example,
in David Harvey’s or Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s analysis) may
be accurate when pointing to the capitalist ambition of generalizable
commensuration of all forms of value, but they can also underestimate the
interweaving of historical contingencies and the fact that unexpected so-
cial forms can still emerge within capitalism.
     On the other hand, Tsing acknowledges that “progress gave us the
‘progressive’ political causes with which I grew up. I hardly know how to
think about justice without progress” (24). Scalability is a two-faced Janus
and Tsing’s book does not provide a solution to its enigma.
     The author points to the possibility of “collaborative survival” within
environmental disturbance; here it should be stressed that “survival” is
not the same as flourishing. There is no optimism in Tsing’s account of
the adventures of the matsutake mushroom. But neither is there total
despair. Even if she believes speaking of “postcapitalist politics” and
economies is premature, she argues that out there are “pericapitalist eco-
nomic forms” that “can be sites for rethinking the unquestioned authority
of capitalism in our lives. At the very least, diversity offers a chance for
multiple ways forward – not just one” (65). Still “since no patch is ‘repre-
sentative’, no group’s struggle taken alone will overturn capitalism. Yet
this is not the end of politics” (134). However, the question of how to
build equivalence between nonscalable “social demands”, in Ernesto
Laclau’s sense (Lacau 2005), remains open.
     Should we then really give up on all ideas of progress? As Peter Wag-
ner (2015) suggested, we should at least not renounce the idea of progress
162                                                           Tecnoscienza – 8 (1)

towards “a more adequate interpretation of the world we live in”, by
identifying new forms of domination while combatting “the hubristic in-
clination of considering human beings as actually capable of mastering all
aspects of their existence on this earth” (Wagner 2015). In this respect,
there is something that, according to Tsing, we, as social scientists, can do
for a start: practice the art of noticing in our research. This means “to
look around rather than ahead”, to cultivate the vulnerability to unex-
pected encounters (with entities, objects, disciplines); to pay attention to
the margins, with no rush to adhere to a pre-formatted narrative.

References
Federici S. (2012) Revolution at Point Zero. Housework, Reproduction, and Fem-
       inist Struggle, Oakland, PM Press.
Laclau E. (2005) On Populist Reason, London and New York, Verso.
Tsing, A. (2012) On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Preci-
       sion-Nested Scales, in “Common Knowledge”, 18 (3), pp. 505-524.
Wagner P. (2015) Progress: A Reconstruction, Cambridge, Polity Press.



                                      ***


   Luigi Pellizzoni
Ontological Politics in a Disposable World: The New Mastery of Nature,
Farnham, Ashgate, 2015, pp. 259

Roberta Raffaetà Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

    Since roughly the 1990s, the “ontological turn” has been one of the
most thrilling “turns” within social sciences. It has been a breath of fresh
air beyond the limits and impasses of either constructionism and positiv-
ism. However, its thrill stems also from the controversies it raised, as STS
scholars know (see, for instance, the debate in a recent issue of Social
Studies of Science, 3/45 of 2015, spurred by a previous issue of SSS, 3/43
of 2013, dedicated to the issue).
    Luigi Pellizzoni, in his book, brings such turn under deep scrutiny. Is
it really the case, he asks, that the ontological turn has emancipatory im-
plications? Can the conflation of the epistemological under the ontologi-
cal liberate humans and non-humans from a dominative, hierarchical and
exploitative logic which is based on dichotomies (of nature/culture,
thing/thought etc.)? His answer is substantially negative. Pellizzoni, in-
deed, argues that the ontological turn is paradoxically nourishing neolib-
