Fungal Rhizomes: Mycorrhizae and Posthumanism

ABSTRACT

As the material conditions of the Anthropocene continue to destabilise, urgent and heightened attention to diverse, more-than-human agents is imperative. One ecologically critical domain of life is that of fungi. Fungi, although important trophic links in their ecosystems, are often given short shrift as ecological agents when it comes to discourses around sustainability, whilst conventionally viewed (in Western thought) as either harbingers of disease and degradation, or primarily instrumental or aesthetic objects-in-the-world, reinforcing binary notions of anthropic exceptionalism. Drawing together the concept of fecundity, indebted to the non-fiction narratives of Annie Dillard, and the rhizomic model explicated by Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, this paper will argue that an effective means of undermining this ontological stratification between domains of life is realised through rhizoanalytic approaches to fecund contexts in fungal worlds, as they allow for the employment of methodologies which endeavour to articulate the multi-agential, embodied processes of worldmaking which occur ceaselessly within and around human bodies.

KEYWORDS:

• Fungi
• posthumanism
• rhizomes
• Anthropocene
• mycorrhizae

Introduction

The existential need for heightened systems of consideration regarding the wide array of organisms outside the anthropic stratum grows ever larger as the true consequences of the Anthropocene reveal themselves. We are not bodies within a vacuum but agents co-constituting a wide network of diverse relationships and interfaces: as Donna Haraway writes, ‘No species, not even our own arrogant one pretending to be good individuals in so-called modern Western scripts, acts alone; assemblages of organic species and of abiotic actors make history, the evolutionary kind and the other kinds too’ (2015, 159). The failure to recognise this interdependency is one of the main factors contributing to the cataclysms which threaten to destabilise and reshape the climate and the concomitant effects on biodiversity. The spectre of irreversible ecocatastrophe looms over contemporary ecologies and their resultant knowledges and artworks. Given anthropogenic culpability in the present ecocide, it can be argued that humans bear a moral responsibility not to let considerations of the Anthropocene devolve into ‘idle chatter’ (Rigby 2009, 174). This responsibility, if we are to heed its call, necessitates more lucid comprehension of, and attendance towards, our environments and the myriad agencies that constitute them.

Posthumanism is one movement intimately involved with the idea of moral culpability and heightened awareness of anthropic influence on, and embeddedness within, the more-than-human world. Posthumanist works seek to destabilise anthropocentric notions of experience and presence. Rejecting the tenet of anthropic exceptionalism, they employ devices which ‘reject any sense of separateness of the human from the forces – physical, climatological, technological – that have shaped our history’ (Caracciolo 2018, 304), instead attempting to decentre the anthropic figure in the ongoing histories of community, generating instead patterns of thought and ontological models which emphasise ‘Nonhuman animals and other forms of life […] as a consequence of the removal of the human ontological pedestal’ (Umbrello 2018, 29). The delineations created by human subjects in their attempts to order and categorise the world must be ceaselessly interrogated, analysed, negated, recombined, resituated and contextualised across numerous dimensions in order that we may develop more complex and comprehensive engagements with the more-than-human lifeworlds which intersect with, and exist alongside, our own.

By refusing the false dichotomy between human and non-human, posthumanism establishes ‘an idea of human identity that embraces alterity and continuous hybridisation with non-human elements (such as animals, machines, and other technological devices)’ (Fusillo and Colombi 2013, 2). Posthuman thought, and subsequent praxis, represents the antithesis of the anthropocentric vision in its avowal of bodies ‘no longer based on autarchy and isolation, but on multiplicity’ (2), refusing to adhere to static conceptions of being, identity, community, and attending instead to a sympoietic aggregation of entities engaging in reciprocal acts of environing, cohabitation, hybridisation and interdependence.

From a purely physicalist perspective, the human being is at its most basic level a composite object, a matrix of microscopic bionts of such radical genetic makeup that the proposition of a singular agent may already seem suspect: one estimate puts the ratio of human cells to bacterial cells in an average human body at 1:1 (Sender, Fuchs, and Milo 2016), and fungal and archaeal populations in the human microbiome are constituted according, in part, to long-term dietary patterns (Hoffman et al. 2013), while further gut flora plays a role in mediating mood and cognition (Mohajeri et al. 2018), demonstrating a powerful and defined link between human wellbeing and the human microbiome. Posthuman thought seeks to ‘relativize the human by coupling it to some other order of being’ (Clarke 2008, 3), negating the anthropic superstructure in recognition of the wider realms of biotic entanglements which provide such intensities and dynamisms to material embodiment.

Posthumanist thought ergo actively participates in. and attempts to comprehend and translate, the more-than-human lifeworlds and projects into praxis that facilitates engagement with the wide array of possible and realised worlds that overlap and share features but not organisations. To decentre the human is to participate in the dismantling not only of the anthropocentric ontologies which form the basis of our mainstream literatures, but also of the semiotic relationships which arise as a consequence of engagement with the narrative medium under a particular cultural system of associations and meanings.

One particular area I believe requires further integration into posthumanist thought is mycology, the study of fungal organisms. If we are to truly embrace a posthumanist system of attendance to the more-than-human, we must devote ourselves not merely to the abundance of conspicuously charismatic organisms such as animals and plants, but also to the diverse array of micro-organic lifeforms whose manifold contributions to our ecologies present in astonishing ways. Fungi form an immensely diverse kingdom of organisms and are ‘the foundation of a variety of ecosystem services’ (Heilmann-Clausen et al. 2015, 62), and their influence is not limited to their local ecologies but ramifies outwards in potent lines of association and entanglement. Nevertheless, ecological thought has historically given limited attention to the mycological field: as an example, conservation considerations tend to overlook the role of fungi in establishing and maintaining healthy, biodiverse environments (Heilmann-Clausen et al. 2015; Mariyana et al. 2022), with the first fungal organism only being added to the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species in 2003, almost 40 years after the project’s formation, with additional fungi being added only in 2014 (Mueller et al. 2022, 3). If we are to truly break away from humanist-exceptionalist ideologies and recognise our embeddedness within the sympoietic structures of our local systems, the hope thereby being a more profound generation of sustainable patterns of living, it will be only beneficial to expand the scope of our investigations into the expansive and often inconspicuous realm of mycology, and from these investigations generate more comprehensive knowledges which encompass and apply the dynamics of fungal ontologies.

In this article, I first provide an overview of fungal ecologies to highlight the dynamic and interrelated engagements of these agentic bodies within their environments. I then discuss cultural attitudes towards fungal organisms and the concept of the mycophobia-mycophilia axis in tandem with an elaboration of Annie Dillard’s discussion of fecundity, which I use to anchor the view that fungal organisms possess legitimate onto-ecological status across a range of spaces and contexts. I then discuss how Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concepts are of value to the theoretical appreciation of fungal ontologies, and towards refocusing attention on the situated networks established by fungal organisms. I conclude by highlighting the relationship between fungal ecologies and the Deleuzo-Guattarian rhizome, in particular the structural embodiment of the fungal mycelium and the fungal-plant mycorrhizome. My ultimate contention is to promote a view of the fungus as a creatively and conceptually rich opportunity by which to conceive of structural relationships within the more-than-human world, and to deny the absolute autonomy of anthropocentrism, in an effort to go ‘fungal’ (Whiteman 2021, 226) and participate in ‘raising our voices from the level of “idle chatter” to that of biting and stinging ecoprophetic witness’ (Rigby 2009, 184) as the true consequences of the Anthropocene unfold.

A brief overview of fungal ecologies

Fungi form one of the main domains of life alongside bacteria, animals, and plants. Their principal role in ecological systems is as decomposers: degrading dead matter and recycling nutrients back through the environment for other organisms to use (Fox and Boddy 2013, 16). In this manner, fungi form an essential link between the higher and lower bounds of trophic hierarchies, joining ‘decaying leaves with fallen twigs, large rotting stumps with decomposing roots’ (Sheldrake 2020, 178), and forming lines of convergence between different spheres of articulation and agency. Doug Bierend writes that fungi: ‘form close relationships with the vast majority of leafy plants, often bonding with and weaving within them at the root level to create living networks’ (2021, 7). Fungi are critical organisms in every environment in which they are found, from the human microbiome to the soil to marine ecosystems, and their interactions within the wider ecological framework shape environments on impressive scales. In fact, they are so critical to the evolution of life that some research suggests it was fungi, and by extension the mutual relationships they enact with diverse organisms, that allowed plants to colonise land (Bouwmeester 2021, 789). This faculty is seen in many higher plants but not algae, ‘suggesting that this process evolved 450 million years ago, allowing plants to colonize land, and is conserved across the plant kingdom’ (789).

Further, experiments on climate modelling have found that adjusting a factor called symbiotic efficiency between plants and fungi can affect the entire global climate: ‘The amount of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the atmosphere, and global temperatures – all varied according to the efficiency of mycorrhizal exchange’ (Sheldrake 2020, 147). The embeddedness of fungi within the spheres of interspecific organisms demonstrates not only their resilience and flexibility, but the complexity of the diverse lifecycles fungi can embody. Bierend notes: ‘Soils are the most biologically diverse places on earth, and within them, the realm of the rhizosphere is among the most complex and dynamic […] It’s a dizzying commotion of life that’s bound up in the hyphae of mycorrhizal fungi’ (2021, 33). Fungi bind and link the world together as parasites, mutualists, and symbionts: almost every form of plant life has been discovered to exist in mycorrhizal relationships, in which the rooting structures of both the plant and the fungus grow together and exchange nutrients to provide growth for both organisms (Gaude et al. 2012, 510). Many plants and fungi cannot survive without mycorrhizal relationships. For example, plants provide fungal partners with carbon, whilst fungal hyphae increase root surface area allowing for improved water and nutrient uptake. The dynamic and organised lifeworlds which constitute the rhizosphere are of such an intensity that these exchanges and planes of convergence include not only the immediate organisms constituting the rhizosphere but also ‘bees, cicadas, termites, and beetles. The mycorrhizal relationship is essential to the overall health of the forests’ (Whiteman 2021, 231).

Approximately 230 species of ants have diversified to cultivate fungal gardens for the extraction of resources, to the extent that many of these ‘farmed’ species of fungi are genetically distinct from their closest relatives and lack free-living populations (Shik et al. 2014, 364). Certain termite subfamilies also farm fungal organisms like those in the genus Termitomyces, which grow as obligate symbionts exclusively within termite nests, unable to survive without the active cultivation conducted by the termite population: ‘Termites regulate the nest temperature, humidity, and gas exchange by building elegant ventilation structures, so that the growth conditions for fungi remain favorable throughout the year’ (Vesala et al. 2017, 402). Further studies have shown that fungal symbionts reside within a wide range of varied creatures, such as soft-scale insects, encouraging ‘tolerance to pathogens and natural enemies, enhancing fecundity, causing reproductive manipulations and more’ (Gomez-Polo et al. 2017, 5855), whilst also providing primary sources of nutrition for organisms too immature to acquire these resources through their own capacities.

Moreover, fungi have a close relationship with human civilisation, being involved in many different domains of technological advancement. They play obvious gastronomic roles across a range of human cultures, and do important work as fermenters in baking, brewing, distillation and viniculture (Duan et al. 2018). As Merlin Sheldrake writes, ‘Human societies have always pivoted around prodigious fungal metabolisms’ (2020, 11). Many new applications for fungi are being investigated, including for the treatment of mental illnesses such as anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and substance addiction (Meade et al. 2022; Williams and Warner 2019). Since only around 5% of fungal species have been catalogued (Sheldrake 2020, 9) there are a wealth of possibilities for further shifts towards mycologic industrial-technological social organisations.

Several disciplines have sought to incorporate fungi into their operation: one fascinating field is that of forensic mycology. Mycological applications in crime investigations include ‘providing trace evidence; estimating time since death (post-mortem interval); ascertaining time of deposition; investigating cause of death, hallucinations, or poisonings; locating buried corpses; and biological warfare’ (Hawksworth and Wiltshire 2010, 1–2). Further areas of study which are seeing heightened interest in mycological applications include archaeobotanical investigations into historical methods of pastoral management (Cugny, Mazier, and Galop 2010), nanoparticle biosynthesis and steroid bioconversion (Litwin, Nowak, and Różalska 2020), renaturation and afforestation of degraded land (Chen et al. 2018; Rhodes 2014), biological treatment processes for odorous compounds (Luo et al. 2013), while ethnological investigations can make use of cultural attitudes towards fungi to map a schematic of communal realities (Zent, Zent, and Itturiaga 2004). Together, these fields demonstrate the multifarious capacities of fungal organisms to promote more sustainable, ecologically mindful modes of attending to the world through a more lucid comprehension of mycological ontology.

Posthuman mycologies

Mainstream interest in the potential uses and developments of fungi is steadily increasing, as evidenced by a wealth of recent publications, including Nicholas P. Money’s Mushrooms: A Natural and Cultural History (2017), Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (2017), Alison Pouliot and Tom May’s Wild Mushrooming: A Guide for Foragers (2021), Alison Pouliot’s Underground Lovers: Encounters with Fungi (2023), Aliya Whiteley’s The Secret Life of Fungi: Discoveries from a hidden world (2020), Michael J Hathaway’s What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make (2022), a sequel to Anna Tsing’s work on matsutake; Michael Lim and Yun Shu’s The Future is Fungi (2022), and Keith Seifert’s The Hidden Kingdom of Fungi (2022), to name only a few.

It is frequently claimed that Western culture(s) view fungi as grim, odious, poisonous, symptomatic of degradation and decay, as disease-vectors and agents of pestilence, etc; while Eastern culture(s) are said to take an opposing viewpoint, viewing fungal organisms as nutritious dietary staples as well as potent medicinal ingredients. This viewpoint is, of course, reductive, and does not account for population centres outside these already extraordinarily broad and diverse areas. Nevertheless, much work has gone into cataloguing various cultural attitudes towards fungal organisms in a discipline known as ethnomycology, which ‘emerged with the analysis of this dichotomy’ (Ruan-Soto et al. 2013, 3) and seeks to determine where on the mycophilia-mycophobia axis particular people-groups fall.

Although cultural conceptions of fungal organisms are much more dynamic and fine-grained than this common maxim contends, there is still much work to be done, at least in a Western context, to promote fungal organisms as a creatively and analytically legitimate framework through which to view, interrogate and interpret the ontic structures which constitute the material presence of some artefact. Bierend writes of (general) human attitudes towards fungi: ‘The average person can be forgiven for a lack of fungal literacy. After centuries preoccupied with plants and animals, the institutions of natural science have been slow to prioritize fungi’ (Bierend 2021, 16), at least to the extent of developing a comprehensive and ecologically sound understanding of fungal entanglements, beyond being mere

foodstuffs or assigned to the rank band of weeds, pests and other horticultural undesirables.

One particular vision of a posthumanist mycology, and certainly one that is prominent in mycological defences, is an unduly instrumental fungal ontology: that is to say, the very concept of the mycophobia-mycophilia axis perpetuates value-judgements of fungal organisms according to their instrumental applications, offering a strict binary framework for the comprehension of these entities. One danger of relying too significantly on this axis is the inevitable tension between instrumentalism and value: fungal organisms positively correlated with domains such as medicine, gastronomy, and psychonautics (the exploration of the subjective effects of altered states of consciousness), are generally perceived as good and useful, or more ontologically legitimate, insofar as these organisms are utilised for purposes deemed beneficial or enriching to human agents. Thus, much of the recent fascination and attention afforded to the fungal domain is the result of instrumental applications of fungi to new disciplines and labour-processes, such as providing thermal insulation (Tong et al. 2023). While these are certainly exciting discoveries with fascinating potential, the way these technologies are framed in discourse arises from an anthropocentric notion of the value of life and of external organisms, insofar as they are only worthy of attention and respect according to their suitability for biotechnological applications. The same argument extends to medical and spiritual applications of fungal organisms, and the peculiar appropriation of certain fungal types (particularly Amanita muscaria, the fly agaric) as objects of aesthetic value. The fly agaric is the red, white-speckled, ‘famous fairytale mushroom’ (Pouliot 2023, 28) depicted in many forms of media, arguably the most famous mushroom in the world, given this cross-cultural prominence: ‘The emoji symbol for mushrooms is modeled on the muscaria’ (Bierend 2021, 23), and the recent aesthetic trend of cottagecore, which incorporates mushrooms as part of its bucolic ideology (Heathcote 2021), is one display of mushrooms being appropriated along aesthetic lines, divorced from their ecological or cultural contexts, and commodified in a space of symbolic dispossession.

The task is to strip the human–fungal relationship of this reliance on instrumentalisation and aestheticism, to divorce their rich material lifeworlds from concepts of benefit to anthropic realms, and instead promote a general appreciation of fungal organisms for their basic ontological being-in-the-world, thus allowing us to discern their wider fields of relation and then incorporate the knowledge produced from these fields into further engagement with fungal and non-fungal organisms. This same argument applies to expressions of mycophobia, which take the opposite extreme in the consideration of fungal materiality, classifying these organisms according to certain negative attributes possessed or affected by the fungal subject. That is not to say that these views are in essence wrong, or that subjective encounters with fungal organisms do not involve some degree of mycophilia or -phobia; however, they are situated experiences, isolated and contextual exchanges of particular embodied histories which cannot substitute for the cooperative, interactive, transcorporeal assemblages which constitute the conventional relations of the more-than-human world, within which all fungal organisms constitute critical agents.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, in a chapter entitled ‘Mushrooms in Culture: Apropos of a Book by R. G. Wasson’, attributes various mycophobic attitudes to certain North American people-groups. He writes that ‘the Ojibwa […] saw mushrooms as the food of the dead, and a negative attitude appears among the Tête-de-Boule and the Micmac of the Atlantic coast who […] classified mushrooms among famine foods’ (Lévi-Strauss and Layton 1978, 234–235). Lévi-Strauss also describes the Germanic and Celtic peoples as displaying ‘real revulsion’ (224) towards mushrooms, Hindus as ‘having become mycophobes’ (228), and St. Augustine as having ‘accused [the Manicheans] of being fond of mushrooms’ (228). Nicholas P. Money alleges that ancient Greeks were ‘unenthusiastic about mushrooms’ (Money 2022, 12), although one can certainly find opposing views on classical views regarding the propriety of mushrooms. Regardless, the fact that there can be widespread cultural acrimony towards fungi demonstrates that there is power in their negative aspects. These aspects include: the difficulty of ascertaining the toxicity of mushroom species, even among established mycologists; the prominence of fungal blights and rots in the agricultural industry and the widespread ramifications of crop losses; and, closer to home, food spoilage and accidental consumption by domestic animals or young children. A striking example of this last danger is found in an article in Canadian Children:

In 2011, one of the side effects of the earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand, was liquefaction, which, long after the cleanup, facilitated the growth of many varieties of mushrooms not previously seen in the city. This natural phenomenon, for some early childhood services, was a cause for concern, and great lengths were gone to so that the mushrooms were eliminated from the outdoor play areas before children went into the area in case they were harmed’. (Penman and Maiden 2017, 36, emphasis added)

The italicised phrase contains echoes of a powerful cultural mycophobia. It is not uncommon to hear mycophobes express the view that mushrooms are to be destroyed wherever found: Bierend, for example, notes an occasion when he was on an evening stroll with his girlfriend and chanced upon a spread of mushrooms:

Without warning, my companion revealed her long-standing habit of reflexively kicking mushrooms into oblivion wherever she met them. There wasn’t any apparent malice behind the act, but rather total acceptance that this is simply what one does when encountering a mushroom. (2021, 26)

Similarly, Greg A. Marley reminisces: ‘When I ask participants in talks I give on wild mushrooms what their parents told them about mushrooms as they were growing up, they say: ‘Don’t touch that. It’s a toadstool. It could kill you! Quick, go wash your hands!’ (Marley 2010, xii)

The Emily Dickinson poem ‘The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants’ has at least two versions available; one seems to be an earlier draft of the work (Dickinson and Franklin 1998, 1166–1170), though it can be found in certain collected editions of Dickinson’s works (2015). For our purposes, what is most relevant between the versions is Dickinson’s commentary upon the mushroom, in particular as being either nature’s ‘Iscariot’ (Dickinson, Todd, and Higginson 2015, 136) or its ‘Apostate’ (Dickinson and Franklin 1998, 1170). Both are rather excoriating comments upon the ontology of the mushroom, and this view is supported by Patricia Kaishian and Hasmik Djoulakian who argue that Dickinson portrays mushrooms as ‘an aberration of nature’ and ‘an active, malicious threat to a holy place’ (Kaishian and Djoulakian 2020, 10). They also quote an excerpt from the Arthur Conan Doyle work Sir Nigel (1906):

A sickly autumn shone upon the land. Wet and rotten leaves reeked and festered under a foul haze. The fields were spotted with monstrous fungi of a size and colour never matched before—scarlet and mauve and liver and black—it was as though the sick earth had burst into foul pustules. Mildew and lichen mottled the walls and with that filthy crop, death sprang also from watersoaked earth. (Doyle 1906 cited in Kaishian and Djoulakian 2020, 10)

It is clear, then, that emotional reactions to mushrooms can be visceral and deep-rooted. What is needed is to overcome or at least synthesise these emotional resonances with scientific and philosophical knowledges, thus producing a more complex, multidimensional network of attendances to fungal ontology in domains as varied as creative arts, gastronomy, conservation ecology, etc.

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Dillard 1998), Annie Dillard endeavours to promote an idea of the more-than-human world as ‘the perfect picture of utter spirituality and utter degradation’ (161), and states further that it is rife with ‘the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful’ (162). Dillard discusses scenes of birth and renewal in macabre, unsettling terms:

‘Creatures extrude or vent eggs; larvae fatten, split their shells, and eat them; spores dissolve or explode; root hairs multiply, corn puffs on the stalk, grass yields seed, shoots erupt from the earth turgid and sheathed; wet muskrats, rabbits, and squirrels slide into the sunlight, mewling and blind; and everywhere watery cells divide and swell, swell and divide’. (163)

This explosive force of replication is termed by Dillard ‘a terrible pressure […] of birth and growth’ (163), an unyielding drive towards proliferation ‘that hungers and lusts and drives the creature relentlessly towards its own death’ (163). These are the natural pressures of existence, the necessary conditions of corporeality: ‘The faster death goes, the faster evolution goes’ (177). There is something fundamentally morbid about the bundled process of living and dying, and ultimately what is required is a reorganisation of priorities and affective attitudes; as Dillard writes, we must consider that ‘creation itself is blamelessly, benevolently askew by its very free nature, and that it is only human feeling that is freakishly amiss’ (180).

Yet there is a curious tension in Dillard’s discussion of fecundity, as she notes having ‘never met a man who was shaken by a field of identical blades of grass’ (Dillard 1998, 164). In simple terms, the abundance and proliferation of the plant kingdom is (generally) looked upon with mild indifference: ‘Plants are not our competitors; they are our prey and our nesting materials’ (164). While invasive or pest species do certainly receive a more critical regard, the growth pressure on plants does not inspire the revulsion that typically accompanies animal (and fungal) fecundity. Dillard notes, ‘in the animal world things are different, and human feelings are different’ (167). A hillside replete with dandelions conjures a much more inviting image than does one adorned with the odorous and phallic stinkhorns, or the desiccated husks of parasitised arthropods.

Fungal fecundity, in my opinion, tends to produce similar reactions to animal fecundity. Whether in the morphological form of a puffball, or a parasitoid like many Cordyceps species, or merely as a mould-forming fungus growing in the grouting or the drywall, there is a proximal abhorrence to these organisms originating from their basic ontology, their mode of being-in-the-world and their processes of affecting the world about them, environing and generating spheres of influence. Greg Marley discusses in the introduction to his wonderful Chanterelle Dreams, Amanita Nightmares (2010) this concept of the mycophobia-mycophilia axis: ‘questions about the mushrooms growing on our lawns are not about beauty, but about ugliness; not about potential edibility, but about the risk of toxicity and how to make them go away’ (xii). I find these feelings thematically linked to the perversity of fecundity, the sense of ‘a terrible innocence in the benumbed world of the lower animals, reducing life there to a universal chomp’ (Dillard 1998, 170).

In a discussion of the Dillard chapter on fecundity, Justine Parkin writes: ‘Fecundity as a performance of living and dying in concert with other beings is perhaps best exemplified by the flourishing of fungi’ (2017, 462). Fungal organisms point us towards the junctures of interspecific entanglement, with their myriad and dynamic forms and methods of establishing and maintaining biodiverse relations, providing ample material for critical interrogation of their personal lifeworlds and the worlds of their interspecific partners; inviting us to explore ‘open avenues and transformative encounters’ (de Vries 2018, 11) in conventionally sublime scenarios (for example, stumbling upon a girthy fly agaric in a dewy pine forest) and in those repugnant, pestilential circumstances humans often disdain (for example, food spoilage by moulds). In this latter scenario, picturing a loaf of bread erupting with pustules of white mycelium, we must not be deluded by our phobic prejudice against what we consider the most egregious displays of fecundity, but recognise that such processes are merely explosions of lines of flight, the establishment of new spheres of worldmaking and presence, new modes of attendance to engage with and learn from, new encounters to enrich the mind, a kind of diversity which is thoroughly unrecognised and unappreciated. Justine Parkin sums this thought up well, writing: ‘As a characteristic shared by all life, fecundity is one point from which to incite conversations between human, animal, vegetal, fungal, and microbial matter, celebrating the complexity of kinships that compose the present and evoke the past’ (2017, 461). It is through the recognition of relationships founded upon rank materiality, the vulnerability and fragility of the flesh and the endo- or exoskeleton, the often grotesque forms of reproduction and birthing in environmental niches of all magnitudes and types, that we can generate ‘multivalent, experimental practices’ (461) regarding our deeply rooted interminglings with more-than-human entities. As Parkin writes in summary, ‘Fecundity as a performance of living and dying in concert with other beings is perhaps best exemplified by the flourishing of fungi’ (462), whose saprobic and parasitic lifecycles enable forest regeneration through nutrient recycling and complex mycorrhizal associations, while simultaneously being the same mechanisms by which buildings are degraded and crops are blighted.

There is evidence, however, that mycophobia can be overcome. A team of researchers looking into reducing the qualitative aspect of germaphobia found a positive correlation between nature engagement and attitudes towards microbes (Robinson, Cameron, and Jorgensen 2021). Narrowing the field down to fungal organisms, the same research team found that individuals who were already likely to know that fungal organisms were (generally) microbic displayed heightened positivity scores towards microbes, theorising thus that ‘basic microbial literacy may be an important factor in the formation of a person’s attitudes towards microbes’ (7). This and other similar research suggests the potential for a wide transformation in cultural attitudes towards fungi, from a binary phobic-philic axis into a more complex and dynamic framework which embraces the capacity of fungal organisms to elicit feelings of revulsion on a viscerally sensorial scale, while also playing critical roles in ecological systems.

Fungal organisms, with their capacity to arouse mixed sentiments of mycophobia and mycophilia, provide important conceptual tools for posthuman endeavours, influencing posthumanist lexicon and behaviours towards more mycologically oriented modes of expression. This has the potential to engender more careful attitudes of attention towards our fungal kin, leading to more active means of existing with fungi and their material relations, ultimately contributing to a reframing of the false dichotomy of human-nonhuman.

Rhizoanalysis and (mycor)Rhizomes

Valuable alternatives to this binary axis can be established through the employment of conceptual models such as rhizoanalysis, a conceptual model derived from the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Rhizoanalysis is so named because it is drawn from the concept of the rhizome, a non-hierarchical matrix of interconnections without a centralised locus of intentionality and control, itself modelled on the subterranean stems developed by certain plants. The rhizome has ‘no essential essence; it changes as the relations that comprise it change’ (Khasnabish 2008, 29), its determinations and intensities evolving across various power relations and exchanges. Rhizomes possess no internal unifying pivot by which to trace out a deep structure, and so employing rhizoanalysis in our fictions discloses myriad and boundless opportunities for approaching and interpreting the diverse ontologies of nonhuman organisms, especially as regards the dismantling of anthropocentric cultural formulations which delineate patterns of thought and attendance. Because the rhizome is non-hierarchical and non-totalising, ‘each point of a rhizome can be connected with any other point in the rhizome (the principle of connection), and at whatever point a rhizome is ruptured or destroyed, it will always grow further according to different lines or connections ’ (Sermijn, Devlieger, and Loots 2008, 638). As Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order’ (2018, 7). Rhizomic relationships are engagements of reciprocity, correspondences between spheres of influence without stringent directional parameters by which to be dominated and fixed. Rhizomic thought entails multiplicities which reveal contradictory and oppositional truths and fictions in their relative discourses. There is no real objectivity, merely the present formulation of the rhizomic network at any one temporal instance, successive iterations of a rhizomic body which embody the proximal engagements of its present determinations. ‘A rhizome is the only structure that can effectively sustain connections between different media without giving hegemony to language’ (Burnett and Dresang Kathleen and Dresang 1999, 427), precisely because any attempt to stratify and essentialise the rhizome must necessarily lead to a resituation of the rhizomic body within a mapping of the various power relations which constitute the frame of reference by which the features of the rhizome are disclosed. Where language attempts a power takeover of the rhizome, the rhizome retaliates by exploding in various lines of flights, segments, magnitudes and dimensions.

Thus rhizomes avoid reductive movements towards a whole, for a whole presumes a subject bound by a unifying essence. As Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘The notion of unity (unité) appears only when there is a power takeover in the multiplicity by the signifier or a corresponding subjectification proceeding’ (2018, 8). Decentralised systems of operation territorialise spaces of opportunity, establishing zones of heterogeneity ceaselessly fluctuating in the intensities and dimensions of their differential power relations; these spaces are differently constituted as the rhizome is resituated and its dimensions altered. Unlike arborescent thought, rhizomic networks promote non-hierarchical, non-linear and multimodal methods of attending towards the objects of knowledge which can thereby disclose ‘a supplementary dimension’ (Deleuze, Guattari, and Massumi 2018, 6) within the item, dimensions which fold upon one another in myriad ways and disclose profoundly informative aspects of the natural environment through the existing relationships between bodies, modalities, and processes of connection. Kevin Leander and Deborah Rowe write that ‘rhizoanalysis recasts the problems of multimodality and the body as elements of a more general problem of connectivity, including the stabilising and destabilising effects that particular connections have’ (Leander and Wells Rowe 2006, 432). Rhizoanalytic praxis composes ‘detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable’ (Deleuze, Guattari, and Massumi 2018, 21) maps which can ultimately come to generate new knowledges and applications.

One modality of knowledge-production I believe aligns well with these concepts can be found in Su Hu’s ‘Boundary-Crossing Species: Making the Realities of the Caterpillar Fungus’ (Hu 2019), which presents an analysis of knowledge-production through Chinese and European empiricist attitudes towards the Ophiocordyceps parasite. Ophiocordyceps is a genus of fungal parasite notable for the particularly disturbing nature of its lifecycle: upon infecting a host, the fungus ramifies throughout the body, hijacking command of the animal whilst consuming its internal components; eventually the host is commanded to climb to a high spot where the fungus punctures the skull, projecting out a large stalk to sporulate and start the cycle anew.

Emerging from a postcolonial tradition critical of the ‘scientific gaze’, Hu’s article highlights how modern science, as an apparatus of Western hegemony, has posited an ontological realism which stratifies modes of knowledge into binary oppositions. As an alternative to Eurocentric models of knowledge, Hu discusses Chinese epistemology and the constitution of the caterpillar fungus, highlighting the magical and medicinal conceptions of the mushroom: ‘Simultaneously a grass at the top and a worm at the root’, the fungus starts as ‘a worm in the winter, transforms to a grass in summer, and shifts to a worm again when winter comes’ (471). This contrasts with the Western mycological model, in which the fungus is an obligate parasite which ramifies through the body of the caterpillar and finally produces a fruitbody which emerges violently from within the insect to spread it spores. Under a postcolonial lens, these conflicting conceptions of the fungus’ ontic structures disclose ‘a knowledge space in which a univocal voice is rejected’ (471), engendering a heterogenous ‘coming-into-being of caterpillar fungus realities’ (471). These realities are ‘performative’ (473) insofar as they are constituted by the practical activities of involved subjects, emerging from a mixed field of belief and action. In opposition to the Western model of static universe governed by predictable laws of cause and effect, in the Chinese ontological world ‘concrete materials and fixity were devalued, everything was viewed as in constant change and metamorphosis’ (474), allowing for material fluidity and alternative processes of knowledge-production. Ultimately, Hu argues that both conceptions of the caterpillar fungus are sound when viewed in the context of the ontological world governing scholarly praxis.

I believe the parallels between the mycophobia-mycophilia axis and science as an apparatus of Western hegemony are self-evident, and the inherently contradictory yet simultaneously rationally cogent status of the caterpillar fungus showcases that the world as a systematised empirical construct exists as ‘merely one among many realities’ (Hu 2019, 471). Despite its claims to objectivity and universalism, it would be erroneous to consider that modern European science, in its capacity as an apparatus of Western powers, is trans- or a-cultural: ‘what we have before us is the most classical and well reflected, oldest, and weariest kind of thought’ (Deleuze, Guattari, and Massumi 2018, 5), a thought-model which invokes and perpetuates the arborescence of relationships and the formation of specific processes, sites, contexts, and manifestations. In non-Western traditions of knowledge-production, a ‘physically single body […] frequently serves as an open space for multiple ontologies’ (Hu 2019, 474); we can imagine that the caterpillar fungus, the originary root-tip, embodies a space of unfolding forces and mutations, ‘an immediate, indefinite multiplicity of secondary roots’ (Deleuze, Guattari, and Massumi 2018, 5) radiating out in lines of flight which are incorporated into models of knowledge-production as the varying magnitudes and dimensions of the caterpillar fungus.

In considering the fungus, we consider not just the literal body of the organism and the intensities of affect it presents in relation to its environment, but also the matrix of connections and interrelationships, the projects and environings of external organisms, the ongoing deterritorialisations and reterritorialisations of competing agencies in flux. Kevin Leander and Deborah Rowe write that the purpose of rhizoanalysis is to move from ‘identifying what is present or contained within an interaction to analysing the interaction as a process of producing difference’. (2006, 434). Precisely what acts and processes are set in motion by participation in any individual action, and what histories are generated, erased or linked by the numerous associations between units of assemblage is of principal importance in attending to the multimodal and multispatial networks of communication and difference which constitute semiotic world(s). In particular, mycorrhizae constitute a critical embodiment of rhizomic principles, generating reciprocal networks as endomycorrhizal hyphae squeeze themselves between root-cells and endomycorrhizal hyphae sheathe root-tips to facilitate nutrient exchange. Mycorrhizal linkages constitute explosions of lines of flight towards becoming-other, becoming-different as the thresholds between domains of experience and embodiment are ruptured. The complex interdependencies of the mycorrhizal relationship, the hyperdense agglomeration of hyphal strands on and within roots, casts doubt on ‘the boundaries between fungi, trees, roots, soil, nutrients, and everything in between’ (de Vries 2018, 6). The fungus is reconstituted: echoing Hu’s analysis of the Ophiocordyceps fungus, the hyphal apparatus severs the unity of the mycelium and invokes the plant-sphere, hybridising itself as part of the process of becoming-other, generating bodies without organs, heterogeneous arrays of difference, decentralised networks of reciprocity and opportunity, new power relations.

Whether parasitic, mutualistic, opportunistic, or symbiotic, and often in flux and inhabiting simultaneous, oppositional roles, fungal organisms are intimately involved in projects of displacement, degradation, nourishment, renewal and remediation, establishing local fields of connection which transcend their immediate environment, dispersed through rhizomic networks that dismantle binary logics of the one-multiple, inside-outside, subject-object. As such, mycorrhizal linkages, and the larger bodies of which they are a facet, constitute ‘a rhizomatic network, a multidimensional multiplicity’ (de Vries 2018, 7). In these myriad planes of multiplicity, fungal organisms embody the Deleuzo-Guattarian rhizome in their dynamisms, their associations, and their capacities and propensity for forming assemblages.

Conclusion

At a time of overwhelming ecological devastation, the requirement for a heightened engagement with our environments and their constitutive features is ever more present. It is crucial that we learn to attend to these environments as assemblages of subjecthood and reciprocity, rather than static fields occupied by isolated, non-cooperative objects. Posthumanist thought is in the vanguard of such change, as it actively seeks to destabilise notions of anthropic supremacy and exceptionalism and redirect sociocultural energies towards a more harmonious, sustainable, and conscientious engagement with the more-than-human. Fungal organisms, being one of the most critical ecological agents in all environments within which they are embedded, offer a fantastically diverse array of ways to inhabit and conceive of being. Existing at the periphery of life, welding without joint processes of renewal and degradation, fungi constitute, in some measure, all the peaks and valleys of presence and embodiment. They commonly erupt in areas of natural devastation, such as after volcanic eruptions or forest fires. So if we examine the Anthropocene in its most apocalyptic context, how will we envision the vast landscape? We must imagine fungal organisms, micro- and macroscopic, ceaselessly interacting in aggregations of lifeforms as distinct and matchless as can be fathomed. Even if we lack immediate access to these worlds, these interminglings of perceptual fields and physical impulses, or if our access must be mediated through technological apparatus, the initial step in developing more mycologically-oriented patterns of thought is to apply a rhizoanalytic model to fungal worlds, to map out the differential relationships, the various magnitudes and dimensions of the fungus and its ecological partners. Perhaps, then, we may generate methods of knowledge-production and practical application which will dismantle anthropic hegemonies and binary approaches to the more-than-human world.

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Joshua Finzi

Joshua Finzi is a poet and a doctoral student at the University of Canberra.