Abstract
Introduction: Triangular Junction Park
During the weeks of reading Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World I was regularly crossing Berlin’s Gleisdreieck Park (triangular junction). It is a new park, successively opened to the public between 2011 and 2014. Situated at the very centre of Berlin, it connects the districts of Kreuzberg and Schöneberg to each other. I’m starting my review with this park because it is a case in point of ‘Life in Capitalist Ruins’ just as it offers an entry to the perspective of ‘Unsettled Humanities’. The park stretches across the vast area of a former shunting yard and depot, a transport hub from the time of industrial advent. The tracks have been removed almost entirely, yet some are still there, overgrown by birch groves or embedded in the lawn. One active railway line crosses the park with regional and intercity trains running at frequent intervals. There are also two above-ground subways cutting through the park at 10 m height. Travelling in one of those subways offers a tempting sight. The park’s outline seems to follow some inscrutable remains of railway architecture such as oversized steps, slanted terraces, or massive iron blocks. Laid out between and among these residues are large patches of grass, pathways for walkers and cyclists as well as groves of trees and bushes. There are basketball courts, a skatepark, playgrounds, ping-pong tables, trampolines, training and seating areas, and kiosks. At any point of the day, the park is busy with different ‘user groups’: daycare groups, school sport groups, tai chi/capoeira/salsa groups, commuters, runners, sun bathers, dogs and their owners, boule players, musicians, teenagers sitting in circles, rabbits, foxes and rats.
When I googled the history of the park, I came across a documentary on the area’s development since the 1930s – Zwischen den Zeiten: Berlin Gleisdreieck (1985) by Andreas Oberbach and Hubertus Siegert – astonishingly in tune with Anna Tsing’s approach. It shows the shunting yard and depot being in heavy use for the transport of goods and people in and out of Berlin. After World War II and the city’s separation the facilities were closed down. The GDR administration, to which they had been assigned, left them unused. The gravel and rocks on top of soil soaked with herbicides became the starting point for moss, field bindweeds, clematis and eventually birch trees to sprawl. Out of their residues organic soil began to develop. As the documentary’s voice-over says, ‘the shunting area was turning into sparse scrubland, a society of a few plant pioneers.’ The wind blew birch and poplar seeds in any direction and trees grew wherever they found soil and water. Dry grassland evolved featuring different weeds and herbs, like dwarf everlast, compact dock, melilot, chicory, soapwort, and mugwort. The degradation of organic material made the soil more nutritious. Higher trees began to shade out lower trees. A forest of robinia emerged. Thus, in the course of three decades, the industrial ruin had turned into a species-rich wood and grass landscape. But in the 1980s, its undisturbed deep sleep came to an end. Transferred to West Berlin’s administration, part of it became exhibition space for the newly built Museum of Traffic and Technology. According to the documentary’s melancholic voice-over, the remaining green areas were ‘subjected to horticultural measures of design and maintenance.’ In fact, in 1994 a citizen’s initiative prevented a new highway to cut through. In 1997, the then united city of Berlin decided on building a park. In 2008, construction works began following the design of landscape architecture firm Atelier Loidl that had won the competition.
This short glimpse of Gleisdreieck Park testifies to one of Tsing’s crucial points: That disturbance can be a source of flourishing. But disturbance and flourishing are relative. Who disturbs whom for what reason and to what effect – this depends on one’s place in within shifting multispecies entanglements. ‘Deciding what counts as disturbance is always a matter of point of view.’ (p. 161)
Overview of the book
The book is divided into four parts: 1. What’s Left, 2. After Progress, 3. Disturbed Beginnings, and 4. In the Middle of Things. Each part consists of three to seven chapters of about ten pages interrupted by even shorter interludes. Tsing calls it ‘a riot of short chapters’ building ‘an open-ended assemblage, not a logical machine’ (p. viii). Within the chapters, sections are marked by delicate drawings of mushrooms and spores. Throughout, the book features black-and-white photographs stemming from fieldwork, the book’s central source. Between 2011 and 2014, Tsing and her research group spent time in Oregon (USA), Finland, Japan, and China, engaging with mushroom pickers, buyers, traders, scientists, foresters, activists, and consumers. A large part of the book consists of virtuously crafted stories of those places and people. Here is a quote to get an impression of the captivating tone:
‘In the gathering dark, we scrambled up a rocky hillside not far from his camp. I saw nothing but dirt and some scrawny pine trees. But here was Kao with his bucket and stick, poking deep into clearly empty ground and pulling up a fat button. How could this be possible? There had been nothing there – and then there it was. Kao handed me the mushroom. That’s when I first experienced the smell.’ (p. 14)
Next to fieldwork, the book draws on research from history, economics, and ecology. Some chapters are relying exclusively on such sources, for instance ‘Between the Dollar and the Yen’ reporting on Japanese-American trade relations from the 19th century until the present. Lastly, the book inserts itself into contemporary debates in social and cultural theory. Tsing stresses her indebtment to critical feminist studies of capitalism (Gibson-Graham, 2006) and Donna Haraway’s multispecies storytelling (Haraway, 2007). At a later point of the book, she attributes herself to ‘the North American anthropologists, with our metacommentary on science and society’ (p. 224). The Mushroom builds on relationalism, assemblage theory, postcolonial theory and posthumanism. Tsing summarises these efforts as ‘theories of heterogeneity’ being ‘still in their infancy’ (pp. 4–5). Her study contributes to them, I think, firstly by skilfully consolidating what has been done so far and secondly by practicing ‘theories of heterogeneity.’ The book shows how research works when it adopts them.
The book starts with a basic assumption: ‘What if, as I’m suggesting, precarity is the condition of our time’ (p. 20, italics in the original)? Tsing posits that living ‘without the promise of stability’ (p. 2) is not ‘an exception to how the world works’ (p. 20). ‘Irregular livelihoods’ are what is actually regular. This goes for the western world, too. As regular jobs with stable wages and welfare benefits are on the retreat, post-war ‘promises of modernisation’ have lost their grip (p. 3). The direction of the future is less clear than ever. Tsing stresses that she is ‘not against (. . .) railing at those who put us here,’ however more is needed (p. 3): ‘If we end the story with decay, we abandon all hope’ (p. 18, italics in the original). Tsing advocates to ‘look around to notice this strange world’ (p. 3). She suggests to become curious for the ruins surrounding us, exploring and understanding them. This is what the book sets out to do by focussing on the mushroom Matsutake. It is a mushroom that grows in disturbed landscapes. It is also a highly valued delicacy in Japan. Tsing uses the ecology of the mushroom as well as the commerce unfolding around it as a space to generate knowledge about ‘precarious livelihoods and precarious environments’ (p. 4). Can the mushroom help us to better understand ‘livability—the possibility of common life on a human-disturbed earth’ (p. 163)? Tracking matsutake and its entangled ways of being is the book’s method. Matsutake is a case and a teacher. ‘To learn about an assemblage, one unravels its knots,’ Tsing writes (p. 83) which in turn leads to a ‘cacophony of troubled stories’ (p. 34): ‘To listen to and tell a rush of stories is a method’ (p. 37).
Key ideas
This rush of stories left me, first of all, as a happy reader. Secondly, the stories peeled out a couple of ideas and approaches that I want to take away from the book. In the following, I will outline two of these ideas before turning to Tsing’s contribution to this special issue’s topic: the humanities being unsettled and unsettling at the same time.
A first idea I want to take away and find out how it helps in describing other (un)sett(l)ings is economic diversity. It approaches capitalist practices by asking ‘what else is going on’ (p. 61). It directs us away from the foundational places of capitalism, the factory and the plantation, and towards the ‘radically different scenes’ where much of the economy happens, today just like in the past and ‘not in some protected enclave, but rather everywhere’ (p. 61). Tsing introduces the terms salvage accumulation and pericapitalist activities. They describe how values are produced beyond archetypal capitalist settings and how they are then salvaged, thus integrated into the capitalist system. Tsing suggests a constitutive relationship between noncapitalist and capitalist forms. They depend on and create each other (p. 66). It is supply chains rather than factories that ‘characterize world capitalism’ (p. 63) as they offer the ‘pericapitalist spaces’ where ‘capitalist and noncapitalist forms interact’ (p. 66). The Oregon-to-Japan matsutake commodity chain that she describes in chapters 4 to 10 is a case in point. Its ‘rifts and bridges (…) show capitalism achieved through economic diversity’ (p. 66).
Secondly and relatedly, Tsing advocates the arts of noticing (p. 37). ‘(W)e need an ethnographic eye to see the economic diversity through which accumulation is possible’ (p. 66). Strong ‘commitments to observation and fieldwork’ are necessary in order to move beyond the ‘modelling-science’ (my wording) and instead to perceive what is actually going on in the world. According to Tsing, ‘modern knowledge’ is too focused on what she calls scalability (p. 38). It is concerned with structures that allow switching between smaller and greater scales without changing basic parameters. ‘It is time to turn attention to the nonscalable,’ she writes, ‘not only as objects of description but also as incitement to theory’ (p. 38). Indeterminate encounters are what she views as the basic units of analysis (p. 37). Every situation and every way of being are singular effects of a contingent encounter between different species, actors and temporalities. It is our task to notice and describe these encounters. Further, they might incite us to consider the lack of repeatability, manageability and scalability and instead to acknowledge the ‘singularity of interspecies gatherings’ (p. 213). Pointing to the work of Isabelle Stengers and Ilya Prigogine, Tsing argues that we need to appreciate indeterminacy, difference and irreversible time. She makes the ‘strong claim’ that reporting on indeterminate and unscalable encounters should be considered ‘a science, an addition to knowledge’ (p. 37).
The Mushroom and the unsettled humanities
The CfP of the present special issue raises a number of questions related to the changing set-up of the humanities and their possible roles within management and organisation studies. I think The Mushroom helps in tackling these questions as it showcases the humanities’ new humanism while also offering inspiration of how this new humanism might feed into MOS.
Right in the beginning of the book, Tsing is very clear about its focus: ‘this book sketches open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life’ (viii). It is one great exercise in multispecies storytelling. Thus, Tsing inscribes herself into the movement of unsettling the humanities by decentring human agency as it has been done in science studies, new materialism and media theory (i.e. Barad 2003; Pickering, 1995; Serres 2007; Siegert 2015). She implements this kind of decentring by concentrating on a mushroom. Making matsutake the book’s main character helps to put human actors on the side-line of events. In her book, humans are not the main sources of action, agency, movement, and development. Rather, we see how plants and animals as well as matter keep acting. These nonhuman players continuously intervene into human plans and ambitions. Tsing suggests the figure of the peasant as a substitute for ‘modern Man’ who we imagine ‘in contrast to peasants’ as being ‘in control of all his work’ (p. 180). The peasant form of living ‘channels and taps’ the resources and circumstances it is surrounded by, but it ‘cannot fully control’ them (p. 181). The peasant’s agency is knowingly entangled with other kinds of agencies. Thus, peasants do not understand themselves as self-contained and stable entities, but rather as ‘contaminated’ by encounters ‘both within and across species’ (p. 28) and ‘changing with circumstances’ (p. 27). Tsing posits ‘contamination, that is, transformation through encounter’ (p. 28) as a fundamental human condition repealing any pure, original, uncontaminated human-ness: ‘The evolution of our “selves” is already polluted by histories of encounter; we are mixed up with others before we even begin any new collaboration.’ (p. 29)
What are the implications of this basic assumption on human-ness for the study of management and organisation? I think there are two directions to consider. Firstly, Tsing’s take on unsettling the humanities suggests a new understanding of our objects of research. If we start from multi-species and multi-entities entanglements in constant movement, then these encounters are the baseline of what our research is dealing with. Importantly, they are singular, they do not scale. Here lies a point where the humanities’ skillset proves its relevance. The humanities are proficient in dealing with ‘the contingencies of circumstance and history’ (p. 157). In contrast to the natural sciences (and the positivist social sciences) the humanities do not promise scalable knowledge. Instead they centre around understanding singular phenomena (e.g. Dilthey, 1989). Following Tsing, we are fundamentally dealing with ‘shifting cascades of collaboration and complexity’ that neither repeat, nor follow an easily graspable pattern. Acknowledging and integrating singular encounters into the realm of MOS could be one of the tasks ahead. Actually, this task has less to do with adding something to our research, but rather with leaving something aside – that is, the search for generalisable principles: ‘Assemblages coalesce, change, and dissolve: this is the story.’ (p. 157, italics in the original)
Secondly, if there is no pattern or law to grasp, we have more time and space to perceive and describe what is going on in particular places. This goes for research as well as for teaching about management and organisation. In the classroom, more time and space could be devoted to describing concrete encounters between organisations, environments, people, policies and cultural imaginaries foregrounding unintended consequences, smart reactions, instances of juggling, of muddling through, of failing and making do. Such stories could be framed as humbling and empowering at the same time. Humbling because they tell of the lack of control by human actors. Empowering because they give legitimacy to the way people and organisations are constantly juggling different approaches and their unforeseeable results. Integrating multi-entities entanglements into academic teaching on management and organisation offers the opportunity to show that the difficulties of dealing with them is not the result of lacking a clear understanding of some core principles. Instead it suggests that sometimes (or maybe even quite often) juggling is all we have at our disposition. This idea could be a powerful addition to conventional management education, not in the sense of superimposing itself or substituting what has been well established and tested. Rather, it could intervene at different moments of the curriculum or into formats of exploration, such as the case study. Could we take Tsing’s ‘troubled stories’ (p. 34) – that she suggests as ‘an addition to knowledge’ (p. 37) – to reformulate what it means to conduct a case study?
