From Anna Tsing’s “Mushroom at the End of the World”.
“Lead firms amass capital without controlling the conditions under which commodities are produced.”
In exploring the matsutake mushroom, Tsing shows the conditions under which the mushrooms are harvested and traded are often personal and organic. Commodification can be understood as a part of a chain of events from the organic material to the profit. Other parts of this chain include personal relationships, longing for freedom, love!
There are many other forces and narratives to hold to understand the dynamics of capital. Capitalism is not a totality. It is a temporal translation of material into alienated product. This alienation is temporary in the way that there are other emotional affects happening in the lives of these materials and beings. For example when we give a gift, we often participate into a destructive global supply chain by purchasing an object. However the act of giving this to another person can cut a hole in the seemingly immortal alienation of the object, giving it meaning and a potential to carry emotion. Darkness prevades but is not the whole.
A new perspective! Tsing wants us to hold the realities while not succumbing to totalities. She preaches holding wide perspectives. To allow the personal and the organic to emerge in our experience of our worlds. We deserve to feel excited and entranced in the beauties that pervade our worlds. Destruction existing in the chain of an activity, such as typing on this laptop, does not define the whole process as destructive. This is not a call for total passivity. But it is recognising where we are at: a call for change can not be to end capitalism as we are in the trenches of such; we are dependent on these chains of production to survive. It recognises that between these translations of life to alienated product, there are many other narratives occuring. To see these narratives feels to me as to hold an active and enduring intention. In a way it is to overcome traditional ways of seeing, to stretch a hole between reason and logic, not to delete the past but allow a truth to come to our perspective. Not Truth, but that that reveals love. Love is present.
My current music is to show this intention, this pushing and holding open, the failing and the imperfections of that process, the love peaking through, the intentions, the longing of the spirit, the joy of being, of being within chaos.