Thinking Fungi, or Random Considerations

Abstract

Thinking fungi as a way of considering randomness gives rise, in particular, to thinking about categorization, comparison, as well as creating (more-than-human) communities through strange and unexpected commonalities. These ideas inform comparative literature more broadly, along with the desire to identify and understand culturally codified motifs – that is, meanings as they gather around particular images and generate certain ideas of being in the world. By bringing fungi to the table, this contribution considers agency and ruin with contemporary narrativized deliberations on all kinds of fungi matter(s). Textually, it examines memoirs, (new) nature writing, as well as cultural studies work on fungi; theoretically, it draws on etymology and systems of classification more broadly, impulses from new materialism, as well as STS-informed deliberations on knowledge generation, classification, and circulation.