Counterpointing Care: Performing with fungi in three (in)different acts

Abstract

An intricate lace-like net of chitin, acids and enzymes dwell in the interstices of life and nonlife, between plants, animals, biomass and the atmosphere, working in and through others; always dismantling, repairing and remaking matter. These are the ecologies of mycelial networks and fungal bodies that have given rise to biospherical life as we know it. Now, on the eve of planetary environmental collapse, calls to care for these vital fungal relationships are growing louder.

What does it mean to care for something so obfuscated yet ubiquitous, something often regarded as abject yet gastronomic in some cultures, something that moulds human life but is yet abstract and unsympathetic to it? We argue that care in all its complexity and generality is in crisis because it is based on certain anthropocentric assumptions that do not account for the difference and indifference of fungi. Drawing on three discrete performative acts, we explore the possibilities of an abstract care when fungi is engaged as an ‘actor’ or agent, in which normative performances of ecological care are troubled.

Through Wendy Wheeler’s biosemiotics, Jakob von Uexkull’s Umwelt and Merlin Sheldrake’s vital mycology, we ruminate on how these nets, cast wide into human and nonhuman guts, genes, brains and affects, themselves perform abstractions that are not mechanical but rather driven by semaphore and semiosis. We focus on the biosemiotics of eating (with) fungi as a performative act for care for more-than-human and human entanglements. As Jane Bennett suggests, a partial material overlap occurs through eating that is ontologically constitutive, moulding a kind of radical care through the communicative exchange of bodies and matter. Taking seriously these interdependent abstractions by mycelium’s sympoetic and holobiontic entanglements defines intuition as non-cognitive but sympathetic (after Bergson), enacting unequal and perhaps ‘care-less’ collaborations.