Smelling Life in Capitalist Ruins

Anna Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins reads like a science fiction novel. Perhaps that's partly the reason why books that engage seriously with the divides between humans and nonhumans (e.g. the growing scholarship on aspects of post humanism) draw heavily from literary sources like Tsing's reviewer Ursula K. Le Guin or others like Octavia Butler who have fundamentally challenged these boundaries to speculatively imagine futures, pasts, and presents when one critically interrogates these reified boundaries of Man and Nature that have been so emblematic of liberal modernity and its insidious development in Western capitalist/socialist fervor.

As she fundamentally uses theory to reframe her multisited ethnographies, political economic tracing, concepts of ecology, and even presentation of literary texts, Tsing provides us with a story of the matsutake mushroom and its proliferation of life even within, despite of, and totally un-synced from this notion of capitalist time, space, and exploitation. Drawing her framework from assemblage theory, Tsing then attempts to make us really think about the connections, happenings, that occur within a specific time and place--those pathways that have developed separately and converge and diverge based on its own happenstance and planned historical trajectories. In doing so, she fundamentally attempts to link and trouble these reified, inherited boundaries that we have between Man and Nature through a critical examination of the matsutake mushroom.

For this week's media précis, I return to a novel that I had read in the past that might be of interest to you all. It's Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl, published in 2002. Attached here is the preview that Amazon provides for its readers:

Salt Fish Girl is the mesmerizing tale of an ageless female character who shifts shape and form through time and place. Told in the beguiling voice of a narrator who is fish, snake, girl, and woman - all of whom must struggle against adversity for survival - the novel is set alternately in nineteenth-century China and in a futuristic Pacific Northwest.

At turns whimsical and wry, Salt Fish Girl intertwines the story of Nu Wa, the shape-shifter, and that of Miranda, a troubled young girl living in the walled city of Serendipity circa 2044. Miranda is haunted by traces of her mother’s glamourous cabaret career, the strange smell of durian fruit that lingers about her, and odd tokens reminiscient of Nu Wa. Could Miranda be infected by the Dreaming Disease that makes the past leak into the present?

Framed by a playful sense of magical realism, Salt Fish Girl reveals a futuristic Pacific Northwest where corporations govern cities, factory workers are cybernetically engineered, middle-class labour is a video game, and those who haven’t sold out to commerce and other ills must fight the evil powers intent on controlling everything. Rich with ancient Chinese mythology and cultural lore, this remarkable novel is about gender, love, honour, intrigue, and fighting against oppression.

As literary texts are often interpreted and reinterpreted, I am interested to see how literary scholars might actually think about Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl in relation to Anna Tsing's theoretical framework for reading this book. The commonalities that I find here are actually ones that interrogate the role of olfaction, of smelling natural things in the face of capitalist ruins. As the matsutake mushroom exudes an aroma that is emblematic of autumn--built within different historical legacies of what matsutake mushroom mean for different groups of people globally, and historically based nonetheless--Larissa Lai's story also uses smell as a means of interweaving the possibility of life even in capitalist ruins. As the text itself oscillates between past and future present (e.g. 2044), the future based on Lai's narrative is fraught with overdeveloped areas of citizen life and severely underdeveloped, left-to-ruination, places outside of these cities where oddly enough durian fruit is grown, matures, and ripens. The smell of durian and salt-fish become particular ways that the antagonists and protagonists in the story find a sense of history and life lessons as the plot develops. 

There is something here that I think the class would really enjoy if we were to take this kind of twinge to our studies of infrastructure. We've touched on the aspects of smell and our senses in how infrastructure is understood. For example, Fennell's book definitely shows us the role that affect around built environments become politically, culturally, and even economically salient as the residents' sense of heat become emblematic of their quotidian lives and what marks normalized life for them within the privatized housing projects. What I find particularly interesting and evocative about both Lai and Tsing's use of smell in their texts is the ways that natural life--albeit Tsing would probably shudder at this distinction between natural and unnatural life that I'm making here--can in fact breathe life and trouble the overdetermination on socio-technological development. The existence of the matsutake mushroom's smell, although used as means of contributing to capitalist relations, are also evocative of another life-world that has radical undertones for our study of infrastructure and capitalist relations: how does the extractive processes for capitalist profit still rely on these 'natural infrastructures' of smell and sense? There's a certain way then that we can reiterate the point that Tsing makes about the possibility of life in ruination--that indeed life reliant on the polyvocal, poly-rhythmic, multi-valenced, and collaborated happenings of the world can have emerging insurgencies that supersede and undermine the meta narratives capitalist relations evoke to justify their privatized extractive purposes. 

Although I didn't provide a summary of her book here, I hope that you all would find some time to read Larissa Lai's novel. I find it phenomenal and actually compliments Tsing's text well.

Works Cited

Lai, Larissa. Salt Fish Girl: A Novel. Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2002. Print.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. New York: NYU, 2015. Print.