Further notes on “The Mushroom at the End of the World” by Anna Tsing.
“Landscapes more generally are products of unintentional design… overlapig world making activities of many agents, human and non-human.” How exciting! Tsing points out the dramas and adventures of a landscape being an unintentional collaboration across species, lifeworlds and non-living forces.
Unintentionality is an exciting concept to apply to human and non-human activity. It seems that our shaping of the planet most certaintly reflects a human will but it is also in reaction to adverse circumstances. Our will to surive is totally influenced by that which is around us: the weather makes us build houses, the gut makes us search for certain foods, trees shelter us, materials offer possibilities for design and technology. We are totally entangled with other beings.
The confusing point of the anthropocene or capitalocene is that none of this “human domination” would be possible without the other materials and beings we are in action with outside and within our own bodies. It seems also that we live in a constant precarity that we try to overcome with further development. This precarity is beyond our own control. In a way the “anthropocene” could be seen as a natural disaster. There is another force however, that is to dominate, to colonise, to ascend precarity, that feels like it surpasses a will to live but it is a will to be superior. It seems like to attribute this mode to every human would be a terrible mistake since some humans colonise more than others.
Unintentionality could relate to the accelerationist theory of capital/machine being it’s own force with it’s own will. The will of the machine also participates in the construction of a landscape. In the accelerationst’s vision of the future, this will becomes a totality: everything becomes captial. Tsing relates to this when she describes capitalism as a machine, a “contraption limited to the sum of it’s parts.” But she makes clear that this is only a part of the economic situation: “This machine is not a total institution which we spend our lives inside; instead it translates across living arrangements, turning worlds into assets.” To understand capitalism as a force of translation reveals it’s part and dependency on other forces, meaning it is not a total force. This contrasts to the doom and gloom of accelerationist theories because it means for capital to exist it requires organic life worlds and desires to motivate and push into the machine.
A major point of Tsings is that capitalism has characteristics of an assemblage in the way it gathers and depends on goods and people from around the world. These “diverse patches of livelihoods help constitute capitalism.” Tsing asks that we “notice this precarious living that both uses and refuses capitalist governance… They tell us what is left, despite capitalist damage.” pg 134.
A music that represents this noticing would be polyphonic, a spectrum of voices both human and non-human. Tsing directly relates to music when she says let us “listen to seperate melody lines and their coming together in unexpected moments of harmony and dissonance.” A polyphony that changes and is unpredictable: alive, impermanent, emergent. I am imagining certain tools like randomisation, panning, spatialisation and layering as potential tools to show this moving assemblage of things. Would a new music form change the way we think and relate to this cloud of forces?
I want to add my personal and dangerously essentialist belief in the heart to this cloud of forces. I imagine the tension and drawing of energy from capital towards different bodies requires a desire and ambition from those bodies. Desires for freedom and intimacy are translated into assets by the complex technologies of power. The longing of the heart to live and live outwards is the current moving through our machines. Love is here!
The heart is accelerated by the drawing out of desires and longing through instant communication. The longing for community and intimacy keeps us searching within our possible means, therefore accelerating our communication even more. The heart is there running inside the machins. Hyper heart!