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‘Noticing is my way of opposing’

Anna Tsing in conversation with Justin McGuirk

The anthropologist turned the matsutake mushroom into a hero of theory, and her work has become a touchstone for designers looking to find new life in the ruins of modernity. Here Tsing discusses the radical arts of noticing, and her excitement about design that engages with the more-than-human world – as long as it anticipates its feral effects

Fig. 01. Fig 1: All photos by Drew Kelly for Future Observatory Journal
JM

Anna, your work in anthropology has been highly influential to an emerging generation of designers. And the more-than-human turn in anthropology is slowly beginning to take root in design. Indeed, you’ve started collaborating with designers as part of the Feral Atlas group, and so today I’d like to talk about the intersection of your work with design. I’d like to begin by talking about some of your methods and terminology, which are now bleeding into design discourse. In your 2015 book The Mushroom at the End of the World, you elaborate a practice that you call the ‘arts of noticing’. Noticing seems particularly relevant to contemporary design practice with an ecological focus, so perhaps we can start there.

AT

Noticing is my way of opposing a particular modernist practice of looking towards an imagined future. Certain things get coded as possible futures and then we develop blinders so that all we can see is our trajectory towards one kind of imagined future, which isn’t actually the future but is a stereotyped dream future. And so, we stopped seeing. Noticing is trying to take those blinders off to look at the world around us, with special attention to the more-than-human world, by which I mean the human plus non-human world. There we start to recognize that soils are alive and if you ship them around the world, you will spread all the living things in them, much to the detriment of the places you ship them to. And if you kill them off with fungicides and other things, they probably won’t work so well for growing plants. These are little things that I think are coming back into people’s observations.

Over the last few years, it’s been really interesting to see the revival of natural history, where you can open the newspaper and find an article about a specific kind of sea worm and its reproductive habits, which was not the case before. I feel very positive about that as an attempt to open popular culture to what I’m calling noticing, or to the existence of a world around us. Despite all our attempts to squash biodiversity and landscape diversity, there are still refugia, places where all sorts of organisms still live. And I think it’s important that we notice them, and maybe keep our hands off them if we want to have the kind of biodiverse earth that we take too much for granted.

JM

Noticing involves a kind of zeroing in on the particularities of a place. In your new book, Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene, you call these places ‘patches’ and you focus on the feral effects taking place within them, which are almost always the result of imperial or industrial infrastructure. That word ‘feral’ has been taken up by a number of designers. Can you speak a little bit about ferality and its relevance to design?

AT

Feral has a lot of different meanings but the core meaning in English, as I understand it, describes a domestic animal that escapes the farm and lives in the forest by itself. A pig that runs away and is perfectly capable of supporting itself in the forest, that’s a feral pig. So my group stretched that meaning to look at things that come out of human plans and histories, but that escape human command and control. Just like that pig that runs away from the farm, we could look at the effects of human infrastructures and describe them as feral effects. That is, infrastructure changes its environment, and organisms change to negotiate this new world in which this infrastructure is a part.

Anna Tsing

I would very much like it if designers would think about the feral effects of their projects.

One of the examples that I find most compelling is the water hyacinth, a water plant that was introduced to botanical gardens around the world, but escaped those gardens. This wouldn’t have mattered, except that engineers were building all of these perfect places for water hyacinths to proliferate, places where the water is slow or still, like reservoirs or canals. In its original homeland in the Amazon, water hyacinth existed in fast-water streams and so it was never a problem, but if you put it in these slow-water places it starts cloning like crazy. And before you know it, it’s filled the entire surface and sucked out all the oxygen. But it couldn’t do it without the reservoir. So that’s an example of a feral effect of infrastructure, and that’s how I’ve been using the term.

I think it would be great if the design community was willing to use it. Because of course designers are very involved in building all kinds of things. So if we could think more about the effects of what we’re building, effects that are not part of the intention, or the design, that might help.

JM

The implication is that designers – masterplanners, in particular, but probably designers of all stripes – need to get better at anticipating the effects of their plans. And only by studying feral effects can they become anticipatory designers.

AT

I truly believe that. I would very much like it if designers would think about the feral effects of their projects.

JM

You’ve been collaborating with designers on recent projects. How do you view that relationship?

AT

Perhaps you know that Feifei Zhou and I are developing an idea for an exhibition. It’s currently called Fungi: Anarchist Designers. So it’s a show with a bit of an attitude. Collaborating with designers and thinking about design seems great to me. But we’re also slightly worried about the way fungal mycelia has been incorporated into the design world as yet another material, just as if it were plastic or concrete. And in that sense, it’s become a kind of dead object, even as people make things out of it. I hadn’t thought about where design begins and ends, and so this has been a concrete opportunity to think about design as a field and what kinds of dialogue I might want to have. Our show attempts to bring fungi back to life, in part by showing their ability to destroy design as we know it, to attack some of the materials that we’re most dedicated to building with, especially when industrial capitalism spreads them around the world causing extinctions and all sorts of terrible things. So it’s anarchism, both in the sense of attacking familiar institutions and of self-organization and building communal worlds on their own terms, rather than on our terms.

JM

It’s funny because in popular culture fungi also have quite a different manifestation. There was a video game, that became a TV series, called The Last of Us, in which fungi more or less wipe us out by taking over our brains, the way Cordyceps takes over the brains of ants. So there’s a flipside to the fungal turn, in which they are as destructive as they are magical.

AT

Yes, that’s right. Fungi can destroy the world, they’re powerful. In the Anthropocene it is precisely those areas where humans have enormous power in shaping the earth, like the global shipping industry, that fungi can be at their most destructive. Carry them in live soils in container ships and they cause mass destruction. These plant diseases that we’re spreading around the world are moving much faster than climate change in killing forests.

JM

You sounded sceptical about using these living things as material.

AT

No, I think there’s promise to it, but I think one of the scary things about our times is the continued naturalisation of a kind of ‘business-as-usual’ in which an industrial civilization that has wreaked havoc on the natural world is just allowed to continue doing exactly what it has been doing, but each time substituting a new product that is supposed to be the miracle product.

To get back to more-than-human worlds, let me compare that to how crops in industrial agriculture are treated, which is with real dedication to monoculture, which has to do with the need for standardisation, the control of big companies and the use of particular kinds of machines. Monoculture fields are highly susceptible to fungal attack. We know perfectly well that there are polycultural alternatives that wouldn’t be nearly as vulnerable. But what we see the business world doing is substituting a new variant that’s not so vulnerable to that one attack, but which of course opens it up to future attacks. So that’s a comparison relevant to what I worry about in using mycelial blocks as a design element. It could be great, but as long as it supports a business-as-usual understanding of what our role in the world is, it just opens itself to future problems, a lot of which are from the misconception that when we build things to make our human lives more comfortable it has no impact on anything except us. But in fact, that’s where the more-than-human approach comes in, and that’s at the heart of the kind of dialogue that I would like to be having with designers.

JM

I’m interested in your analysis of monocultures or plantations as forms. In Field Guide, you and your co-authors dwell on the pernicious effects of these imperial and industrial forms. In fact, you explore the feral effects of modernist forms more generally, often concrete infrastructures like dams and sea walls. I wonder to what degree the problem is the form itself, or the way these forms are replicated around the world in standardised ways that don’t respond to their places. I mean the modernist need for a universal solution.

AT

What’s been exciting to me over the last few years is thinking about form, in its most material meaning, as the physical manifestation of whatever it is we’re talking about. A ‘form’ gets used to mean a style, something rather abstract. But the physical aspect of form proves to be really useful to think with. Let’s go to infrastructure for a moment. The common-sense use of the term infrastructure today is often ‘a way to make human life better’. What’s a road? Well, it’s a way to get to the store more easily. What’s a wall? Well, it’s a way to keep the cold out. So we think of infrastructure in terms of meeting our human social needs. But if we start thinking about the physical manifestation of the form, then we can see all these other effects that occur every time we build a road or a wall. I think the problem with these imperial and industrial infrastructures is that they’ve been devoted to creating a world for certain kinds of powers and influences, without regard to what they’re giving up.

In my current research, I’m looking at a place where swamps are being converted to dry land. If you want to have a plantation or a city, it’s convenient to drain the land. What they’re not thinking about is the kind of havoc that creates for all the other creatures, as well as the Indigenous people who were using the swamp as the swamp. And now that we know how important swamps are to the resilience of the land during climate change, it has made it possible for us to reach out to those other long-term ways that people and swamps have interacted with each other.

So it’s an opportunity, an opening, to think about how we’ve ignored the physical manifestation of infrastructures, that is, that feature of their form as it affects the world. So back to what you asked about uniformity versus diversity, it’s not just that we spread these forms around the world, it’s that we are disregarding local environments. ‘We’ meaning imperial interests. And if you look at the maps of wetland loss around the world, you can see that wherever developers have gone since the European Imperial age, the first thing they want to do is drain swamps. It’s only very recently that elites have started thinking, ‘Wait a minute, what does it mean that we just think that all local environments can get wiped out and be replaced by a particular standard environment that was thought to push forward particular kinds of interest without regard to what was being destroyed in the process?’

So it’s not uniformity in itself, but perhaps the disregard of that physical manifestation of our infrastructure that allows us to think it’s perfectly fine to spread it without regard to local conditions.

JM

We talked about the practice of noticing, which you brought to life through your observations about the matsutake mushroom. And it sounds like you’re now applying that to swamps. Are swamps the unloved research project of the landscape world? And are you trying to bring them from the margins to the centre, as it were?

AT

That’s what I’m trying to do in my current work. I mean, I didn’t set out to chase swamps, but I started working in this area and I feel lucky to have found a place in Indonesian Papua where people’s engagement with swamps is still alive. It’s also a place where swamps are being drained and eradicated. So I’m able to look at this contrast between the living world of swamps and what happens when you get rid of them. The downsides of that infrastructural change are very evident in things like chronic flooding, impoverishment of the biotic world and other effects.

JM

Wasn’t Jakarta built on a wetland area, which is why it is now sinking?

AT

Absolutely. It’s a great example and I feel lucky enough to have a student who’s been doing some research on that history because you probably know that the Netherlands has been a leader in the conversion of swamps to dry land. In fact, even in the UK, the experts who were brought in for the draining of the Fens were people from the Netherlands. The Dutch were the colonial conquerors of Java, where Jakarta is, which has now become the capital of Indonesia. The first thing they did was to build a capital city based on canals and on draining swamps. And very quickly those canals were dysfunctional, in part because this was a tropical environment that the Dutch were not as used to. And the canals became conduits for diseases and trash and so on. They also segregated the city ethnically, with certain citizens being more exposed to diseases and garbage depending on their status. Today, it’s still very much a part of the problem of the city. And it’s made worse by the fact that in order to get fresh water, the people who have the means have been draining the aquifer, so the whole city is now sinking into the swamps. The student that I’m working with, Kirsten Keller, has been studying fishing communities that are right near the water and how they struggle, not only to not get evicted every time a government urban renewal plan comes along, but also to stay above the water.

JM

So Jakarta is an object lesson in the idea that what works for a small northern European country doesn’t work for a megalopolis in the Global South. If I can change tack for a moment, you suggested in an e-mail to me that the commons and commoning are becoming relevant to your thinking again. It would be interesting to discuss how they can help foment more-than-human relations.

AT

I can think of many reasons why the commons are a good idea. And a number of scholars and activists are trying to create a more open notion of what could count as the commons. Even in The Mushroom at the End of the World I was already trying to figure out what could enter this more open commons, with a notion that I was calling ‘latent commons’ – commons that aren’t codified but have the potential as we find non-human allies in our struggles to have a liveable world. There are organisms that we want to live with, and fungi are a great example. Again, since the 1990s fungicides have been used as preventative treatment in agricultural business, so fungicide use has rocketed. This has meant removing beneficial fungi that are absolutely necessary for the soil to be good for plants at all, but also coming up with fungicide resistant strains of fungi that will attack humans too. So we are getting rid of our fungal allies through this excessive use of fungicides. To reopen an approach towards the commons would be to allow ourselves to make friends with fungi.

JM

In a way, more-than-human thinking has to have the commons at its heart.

AT

That’s right. At least, it involves living together with creatures that are different from you and imagining kinds of relationships. I mean, when I was writing The Mushroom at the End of the World, I had the advantage of a mutualist relationship between a mushroom and trees. But there’s a variety of kinds of relations through which we can imagine our common lives. In the swamp work I’m doing I’m thinking about commensalism, which is a relationship in which there’s eating together but, unlike mutualism, one doesn’t feed the other. One may not benefit when the other does. But it seems to me that the more we open the notion of the commons to multiple kinds of human and non-human relationships, the better chance we have of holding on to sites of liveability, which are very much threatened by the business-as-usual forms of ecocide.

JM

I’m interested in this because there’s a form of the commons that is quite passive, which is about resources and their protection. And then there’s commoning, which is a form of responsibility and endless negotiation, and which involves people being very active in their relationship with a place. Do you have a view on that more active role for us in those more-than-human relations?

AT

Absolutely. I don’t think we can do without it. I mean, back to the fungicide example, in a parallel case, over the last 30 or 40 years the use of antibiotics has been curtailed somewhat, for exactly the same reasons as the fungicide that I was talking about – the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria, which is going to kill us all. An example of that more active relationship is the idea that we can live with a lot of bacteria and that we don’t have to be purifying every surface. I am delighted every time I hear that there’s some new policy or standard through which we can reduce our reliance on antibiotics. Especially in livestock rearing and other places where it creates a vast atmosphere of opportunities for bacteria to develop the ability to withstand all treatments. So this is just one tiny place where we need some movement towards living together, with bacteria.

The swamp work would be another example where negotiations are necessary about how people could live with the swamp. In the place where I’m working, the former dwellings were often on stilts but because of standards of civilization, and also property law, people feel they have to fill in the swamp and drain it and put a concrete slab on top of it in order to count as a proper dwelling. So renegotiating other ways that you could live with the swamp seem to me really in order. And that’s a form of commoning. With potential commons, we have to keep reimagining what’s possible.

JM

There’s a term that you introduce at the end of the mushroom book that I found very useful: ‘autumn thinking’. It’s connected to the art of noticing, because the metaphor you elaborate is that, in autumn, we train our gaze on the forest floor looking for mushrooms, which can be difficult to spot. The implication is that we live in a time when things aren’t so abundant and we have to be more resourceful. We’ve just had a 20th and early 21st century of immense abundance, with cheap materials and cheap energy and so on. And now, in a position of relative scarcity, we’re trying to find new forms of abundance. Elsewhere you call this ‘the arts of living on a damaged planet’. But I think ‘autumn thinking’ is a very useful framework for design. We have to not just reduce what we use, in terms of materials, but reduce what we build, reduce what we make. It’s a constraint that encourages resourcefulness and ingenuity. And designers love a constraint, in theory, but this one really is a paradigm shift.

AT

Yes, I think for a lot of the 20th century, which is still very much with us, the idea that growth solves all problems cut across the work of economists, developers, designers and many other fields. And the kinds of problems growth was expected to solve included racial conflict, scarcities and all sorts of other things, at the same time transforming the world into platforms for corporate interests. That’s not working out very well, shall we say. I feel quite inspired by the movements of degrowth, on the one hand, and unbuilding on the other. And I feel excited that some designers will find great opportunities in thinking with questions about how to work in a world that’s not about the stable truisms of the 20th century. This could be a great time for design.

But, as I said earlier, this must be coupled with a real engagement with the material world. If design gets abstracted from the world, without paying attention to the world, then it’s going to be part of the problem. But a design in which engagement with the world is part of what designers do, then it’s a really exciting place to think about both the problems and the possibilities of what’s ahead.

Anna Tsing, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of The Mushroom at the End of the World and the co-athour of Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene. She is also a Professor at Aarhus University.

Justin McGuirk, director of Future Observatory and editor of Future Observatory Journal.