Fungi are everywhere. I’m not the first to say it, but I want to be the last. In February, Triple Canopy published a series of essays surveying the ongoing proliferation of fungi-inspired culture. Mushrooms, with their pleasing color palettes and subtly salacious shapes, have been made into plushie toys, decorative patterns for dish towels and puzzles, and vibey graphic tees. Mushrooms, specifically the reproductive fruiting bodies of fungi that we can see protruding from soil or downed trees, are predictably easy to aestheticize. There are other parts such as mycelium that are aestheticized too but in different ways. These fine fungal threads are similar to roots forming networks underground that are largely out of sight. Unlike their squidgy counterparts, mycelial networks can’t be rendered into cutesy anthropomorphic characters. Instead, they’re more susceptible to conceptual aestheticization through language, social sciences, philosophy, and critical theory. Rather than make fungi appear more human as representations of mushrooms are prone to, mycelial aesthetics achieve the opposite.

This type of aestheticization urges humans to embrace a mycelial nature. As a metaphor, mycelium inspires effortless and instantaneous distribution of resources like water, nutrients, and even information across great expanses, much like mutual aid networks. With its rhizomatic structure, mycelium fits neatly into a post-structuralist framework in the lineage of thinkers like Deleuze and Guattari, and more recently Karen Barad. The rhizome metaphor puts pressure on categorical differentiations between race, gender, and species to theorize social models in which individuals are made through their relationships (to other individuals, their physical environment, and interstices with governing bodies). They have been a great help in imagining non-hierarchical societies. But today, as we witness the genocide of Palestinians, rising geopolitical tensions, heightened anxiety over climate collapse, and global health crises, our world is eerily primed for pushing the rhizome metaphor further. Thinking and acting rhizomatically—mycelially, even—has become an urgent task. Mycelial metaphors project possibilities of new life springing from so much death and destruction. Mycelial aesthetics attempt to metabolize this decay into a future free of the same outcomes. It’s a big task. One I’m not sure we can collectively see through to completion. Despite the popularity of fungal aesthetics—both mushroom and mycelium—we have yet to collectively digest what it means to be rhizomatic interconnected beings or the responsibility that takes. Instead, through aesthetic oversaturation and cooptation, culture has successfully rebranded societal collapse.

It’s not only that fungi are too popular to produce radical transformation. The failure of fungal aesthetics seems to come from two directions. For one, it seems that given the increasing invasiveness of capitalism, underground mycelial networks and soil breaching mushrooms are a better metaphor for describing the problem than potential solutions. As is the difference between mushroom and mycelium, there are parts of capitalism that most people can recognize and there are parts that operate without being noticed. It’s possible to see the whole structure but only if you have tools and know where to look. Lastly, fungal aesthetics fail because they never quite permeate past the looks-of-things. Adopting a fungal aesthetic hasn’t transferred over to mycelial modes of thinking or being, at least not in the ways we hope. In this essay I locate the downsides of fungal aesthetics and mycelial thinking by looking at two writers, Anna Tsing and Jenny Hval. As artistic muse and post-capitalist social model, their narratives venerate fungal ways of being. But at the edges of their work a dark fuzzy halo takes shape. From an ethnography about global supply chains to a novel exploring the productivity of queer desire, their specific implementations of fungal metaphors reveal a world that doesn’t look like the utopia that was promised. 

MUSHROOM AT THE END OF THE WORLD

If someone rendered a map of every global supply chain for every product on the market, it would look like mycelia. A ‘global supply chain’ refers to the assemblage of agents, actors, and corporations responsible for sourcing raw materials, producing, and transporting a commodity.¹ The goal of global supply chains is to outsource labor and extract resources to bring the cost of production down and maximize profit. They are key to how capitalism functions today. iPhones, pharmaceuticals, and all kinds of more unsuspecting products are produced this way. 

Anna Tsing’s book, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, investigates one global supply chain in particular: the matsutake mushroom. At a foraging camp in Oregon she calls “Open Ticket,” Tsing observes groups of Mien, Hmong, Lao, and Khmer from South East Asia, as well as white pickers from rural parts of the state. While each group in the camp mostly sticks to themselves they make their living the same way by foraging matsutake in downed forests. Pickers sell matsutake for the highest price the pickers can manage to agents who work for big firms in Japan. This camp is a site of “salvage accumulation” where a raw material that is produced without capitalist control is then extracted with labor and enters a supply chain.² Tsing distinguishes this camp and other sites of salvage accumulation as pericapitalist, meaning, they exist both inside and outside of capitalism. Tsing makes a prescient observation that there is a tendency shared between supporters and critics to think of capitalism as totalizing. The intervening implication that Tsing’s matsutake camp poses is that capitalism is not universal. It depends on places like Open Ticket where pickers have more command over their time, what conditions they will or won’t labor in, and notably, what price they’ll sell their mushrooms for. But this freedom comes at the cost of precarity. While living in the camp, pickers are inaccessible to immediate medical assistance and are subject to the unpredictable profitability of each harvesting season. While the matsutake pickers are outside of complete capitalist control, they’re unlikely to find permanent refuge from it or alter its course. These conditional freedoms in sites of salvage accumulation are ultimately necessary for supply chains–and capitalism–to function.³

Mushrooms then, on a literal level, are an example of a global supply chain in which the site of salvage accumulation offers a view of lifeways outside of capitalism though entangled in it. Figuratively though, mycelium works as an analogy for the expansively interwoven global supply chains that capitalism depends on today. Tucked underneath these observations is a critique of the way people think about capitalism as totalizing and unescapable. Maybe it’s true: not everything is capitalism.⁴ But one thing is sure: since The Mushroom at the End of the World was published, capitalism has reached unprecedented heights of production by extending its networks underground, extracting information while out of sight, and parasitically seeping into people’s private lives—or, one could argue, by behaving more like mycelium. 

PARADISE ROT

The idea that capitalism encroaches on people’s private lives isn’t exactly a new one. Queer and feminist theorists have argued that the family unit is a capitalist invention made to enclose the individual, exploiting their ability to reproduce the world’s workforce and consumers.⁵ Elvia Wilk, in her essay, “This Compost: The Erotics of Rot,” reads literary examples of queer desire that use fungal imagery and mycelial metaphors to explore themes of reproduction and toxicity, including Jenny Jenny Hval’s novel Paradise Rot. Wilk argues that desire is both destructive and reproductive, but unique to queer desire, especially outside the enclosed family unit, it can be productive in a way that enables people to not only survive but revel in toxic times. However, reading to the end of Paradise Rot suggests that when intimate relationships take on mycelial properties, self-destruction is more likely than survival. 

Hval’s Paradise Rot depicts what relationships might feel like if lovers could become one entity as lovers frequently want to. The novel follows Johanna, a Norwegian student on exchange in Australia who moves into an apartment with a pale blonde woman named Carral. The apartment, which was once a brewery, has paper-thin walls that don’t reach the ceiling. As the weather grows wetter the apartment disintegrates. Dampness breeds in the apartment. Mould grows. A honey mushroom springs from the bathtub. One day, Carral brings home a bag of discarded apples that take on the presence of roommates as they continue to decompose. Rot in the apartment is rendered full of sensual vitality and Johanna can sense the microscopic activity of it all. Between the human roommates, boundaries disintegrate too. Carral sleepwalks into Johanna’s bed. Carral gets sick, needing Johanna’s constant caresses. After some scheming on Carral’s part, Johanna has sex for the first time with their neighbor Pym and Pym sleeps with Carral soon after, barely concealing his intentions to have a threesome. After they’ve both slept with him, the bond between Johanna and Carral grows until it’s clear that Pym is not either of their love interest but the substrate for them both to subsist on. They begin to share physical sensations. Their dreams and memories intertwine until it seems like their forms might actually dissolve into the same body.  This productive capacity of desire is terrifying—and it has nothing to do with procreation. Intoxicating as it is to become undone by her lover and remade again into a unified beast, it’s a risk Johanna and lovers like her can’t take. Giving herself over to incursion by another would mean total annihilation. 

Taken up to the point of complete intrusive enmeshment, Johanna leaves her living arrangement, proving that the reality of this boundless and boundaryless productivity is disastrous for the individual. The fungal aesthetics of the apartment attribute a toxic sensuousness that seems to come from every which direction, weaving an ominous mycelial web of interconnection where the space between individuals, species, and architectural structures collapses. There is no separateness. No refuge. No protection. Instead of a euphoric free-loving atmosphere, this unboundedness makes even trusted relationships feel foreboding. It turns out that boundaries are a good thing. Fungal aesthetics are undoubtedly sensual and reflect an undying desire of individuals to merge with another as mycelium does. But the reality of a relationship that is truly free of distinction, of one desiring fungal body, is far from a utopia. It’s a nightmare.

WHERE TO GO FROM FOSSORA?

Hval and Tsing’s mycelial aestheticizations can be interpreted to soften the appearance of societal collapse while masquerading as a solution. It’s easy enough to say we’re all connected like mycelium but it’s another thing entirely to act like it. Without having to do strenuous work or uphold responsibility, unmediated fungal aesthetics offer a short-cut through the difficulty of living in relation to other beings, especially other humans. The aesthetics of fungi perhaps epitomize post-modernism’s failed promise of diversity and inclusivity, amounting instead to sameness and exhaustion. Even Björk, one of my favorite artists of all time, isn’t immune. Her latest and fungi-inspired album Fossora is full of empty mycelial promises.

On the level of instrumentation, Fossora is arranged with discordant bass clarinets, murky low-end drums, and polyharmonic choral singers, composing an aesthetic of complex relationality. These components work alongside each other much like the different Southeast Asian groups of matsutake pickers in Open Ticket. However, this musical gesture towards interconnectedness dies at the surface.  Are these not just excuses to not connect? Our differences are irrelevant… This is the opening line of the album, serving as a thesis to a disturbingly dimensionless fungal worldview. Björk compels the listener to find our resonance where we do connect. Resonance here seems to stand in for sameness and history has shown that sameness is achieved through violent biopolitical measures. Later, Björk sings, To insist on absolute justice at all times, it blocks connection. In a global atmosphere of ongoing genocide this sounds abhorrently shallow. The song ends with this message: Hope is a muscle that allows us to connect. In Björk’s articulation, hope is exercised by overlooking individual differences for the sake of collective sameness. Here is the troubling logic of mycelial aesthetics splayed open: if this is hope then the cultural aestheticization of fungi parasitically disintegrates our differences to produce streamlined capital. It attempts to satiate and sedate us with an anemic version of universal connectivity. 

Inside the failed album there is a kernel of what continues to draw me to her old music, a proclivity for the specific, an antithesis to anemic mycelial connectivity. “Ancestress” marks a lyrical shift. She begins a meditation on the crises of relationality with lyrical precision. My ancestress’ clock is ticking… Her pulsating skin, rebelling. The doctors she despised placed a pacemaker inside her. Having written this soon after her mother’s death, there is a sense of urgency to distill her mother. She had idiosyncratic sense of rhythm, dyslexia the ultimate freeform… She invents words and adds syllables, hand-writing language all her own. Instead of diffusing the grief like mycelium in soil, the lyrics pull the listener close to the sharp pin-point reality of saying goodbye. When Björk sings about the specificity of her mother and the crisis of this loss, she captures the intricate beauty and immense difficulty of living among separate individuals. Björk got it wrong in the lyrics, but maybe she knows this. Our differences are not excuses, but the reasons to connect. 

Difference, complexity, specificity, and materiality. This is what is lost to aesthetic short-cuts through relationality. The cultural obsession with fungi is too diffusive. Past the surface, these aesthetics smooth over necessary social differences, oversimplifying the commitment it takes to be in close relationship with human beings let alone other species. From the flatness of a mycelial worldview we need to collectively contend with how to care for the living, dying, and dead, even as those conditions change moment by moment. It will require being able to think, feel, and act between agents separated by permeable membranes made through their intra-action. Karen Barad, a post-structuralist quantum physicist of new materialism, calls this agential realisim. I can’t possibly explain it here. I can’t explain it here because I know, despite myself, that I would fall into a tongue-tied trap and invoke the mycelial without meaning to. Without a steadfast understanding of the complexity in Barad’s argument I might reach for the facile relational metaphors of mycelium because it’s completely possible that the way forward is only a slight rearticulation and respecification on what mycelial thinking attempted to achieve from the start. What would be lost is a small but meaningful sum. It’s enough to make all the difference.