Oblivious to
Encounter

Sugarcane is a New Guinea cultigen. When Europeans got hold of it they had no idea how to breed it — and they did not need to. You plant cane by cutting a piece of cane and pushing it into the ground.

Every plant that comes up is the previous plant again. Not a descendant: a continuation. There is no cross, no pollen, no other parent, nothing that has to go right between two organisms for the next one to exist. The crop could be multiplied indefinitely without anything ever meeting anything.

Carried across the Atlantic, it arrived somewhere it had no history — no companion species, no established diseases, nothing it had ever had to negotiate with. Anna Tsing gives this property its name:

Hold onto how ordinary that sounds. It is a remark about a grass. Nothing in it is sinister, and nothing in it is about anybody. It is a description of a plant that can be moved without being negotiated with.

That property is the specification the rest of this chain is built out of. Everything that follows is what happened when people went looking for the same property in other things — in land, in work, in time, and then in each other.

The date is the standard account: cane carried from the Canaries on Columbus's second voyage and planted in Hispaniola before the end of 1493. Mintz notes independently that the technical skills for the early Spanish plantations of Santo Domingo were imported "principally from the Canaries."

In their sugarcane plantations in colonial Brazil, Portuguese planters assembled a formula out of three components. Tsing lists them plainly: exterminate local people and plants; prepare now-empty, unclaimed land; bring in exotic and isolated labour and crops.

The cane, we have met. It had no relations here.

The land had been emptied — the emptiness was manufactured, and calling it "unclaimed" was part of the manufacture.

And the third component was people. Portuguese cane-growing came together with the newly gained power to take enslaved people from Africa. Tsing is exact about what made that, from the growers' point of view, an advantage: they had "no local social relations and thus no established routes for escape." They had been carried somewhere they had no history — which is the same sentence we just wrote about the grass, and it is not a coincidence, and it is not a metaphor.

What the plantation then did was make the interchangeability real. Once the central mill was running, every operation had to keep the mill's time. Workers cut cane as fast as they could, with full attention, just to avoid injury. Tsing: "Under these conditions, workers did, indeed, become self-contained and interchangeable units."

Read that sentence twice. Interchangeability was not a property anyone discovered in human beings. It was produced in them, by force, at enormous cost, because the system required it as an input. The sameness came first as a demand and only afterwards looked like a fact.

Tsing's word for what the arrangement was engineered to achieve is alienation: "Plantations were organized to further alienation for better control."

Cane must be cut when it is ripe and ground as soon as it is cut. Those two facts are agronomy. What was built on top of them is not.

Sidney Mintz describes what English planters on Barbados did about it. They divided their land into equal portions of about ten acres each, so that the portions could be planted and harvested seriatim — one after another, on a stagger —

The fields were subdivided so that the machine would never be idle. Not the harvest scheduled around the land: the land re-cut around the schedule. During the harvest the mills "operated unceasingly." Time, Mintz writes, "was of the essence throughout, from the moment when the cane was perfect for cutting until the semicrystalline product was poured into molds to drain and be dried." The only break in the work week ran from Saturday night to Monday morning.

This is the mill's clock, and it reached everything. Cutting crews, mill crews and boiling crews all had to be coordinated to it; field labour was divided "not only seasonally but also between the cane and the subsistence crops." Mintz's list of what results — specialization by skill and job, division of labour into "crews, shifts, and 'gangs,'" and "the stress upon punctuality and discipline" — is a description of a factory floor written about the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

And one detail that should not be lost, because it tells you what kind of thing the discipline was. Some of the pressure, Mintz says, came from

Part of the killing pace was not required by the chemistry at all. The demand had already outrun the thing it claimed to serve. People were worked past exhaustion partly on the strength of a belief about sugar that was not quite right — and nobody was going to find out, because the schedule was no longer answerable to the process. It was answerable to itself.

The usual story runs: Europe invented the factory, and then exported it. Mintz, on the two pages this link is built from, argues the traffic went the other way.

The specialization, the crews and shifts and "gangs," the punctuality, the coordinated tempo — these, he writes, "are features associated more with industry than with agriculture — at least in the sixteenth century." The plantation was not a farm that later got industrialised. It was already the thing, and it was the thing first.

Mintz knows exactly how that lands: "It may seem a topsy-turvy view of the West to find its factories elsewhere at so early a period." He is careful about why the idea sounds strange, and his reasons are worth having in full. The plantation was read as agricultural because it was colonial and worked by coerced rather than free labour; because it made a food rather than textiles or tools; and — the one that should stop us —

The factory was looked for where the scholars already were. Its absence from the record was a fact about the searchlight, not about the world — which is the same failure A Conquering Gaze from Nowhere (41) tracks in another discipline entirely.

Now the part we are obliged to print as he printed it. Mintz's strongest claim is marked, by him, as a belief, about a view then only "gradually winning recognition":

The plantation formula worked. That is the uncomfortable part, and it has to be said before anything else: great profits were made in Europe, and most Europeans were far enough away not to see how.

Tsing's argument is that the formula then stopped being a way to grow sugar and became a way to think about everything. She gives the quality a name:

A scalable business does not reorganise as it grows. A scalable research project "admits only data that already fit the research frame." And the requirement underneath both, in her words, is that project elements be "oblivious to the indeterminacies of encounter" — the cane's property, promoted to a design principle.

She is precise about what the word does not mean, and the precision matters. Scalable is not the same as discussable in terms of scale. Braudel's longue durée and Bohr's quantum atom both revolutionised thinking about scale and neither is a project of scalability. The distinction is between changing your sense of scale and refusing to let scale change you.

What the frame buys is a question you can ask of any institution: what did this have to become blind to in order to get this big?

Having named it, Tsing writes down what it costs. This is the sentence the whole chain is walking toward, and it is one sentence:

Note what she does not say. Not diversity is inefficient. Not diversity is risky. Not even diversity is unwelcome. The clause after the comma is doing all the work: the diversity that gets banished is specifically the kind that would alter the frame if you let it in.

Difference that changes nothing is fine. Six colours of the same interchangeable unit, fine. What cannot be admitted is a difference that would make you re-plan — because re-planning is precisely the thing the system was built not to have to do. The exclusion is not an attitude. It is in the specification.

And this is where Tsing says something that ought to be printed larger than it usually is:

Sameness is not the resting state of the world that difference departs from. Sameness is the expensive, engineered, maintained thing — and link 2 is who paid the bill the first time. Uniformity has to be manufactured continuously or it decays back into variety, which is what everything does when you stop holding it still.

Companion argument, from the other side: The Universe Runs on Difference (8) shows monoculture is brittle. This link is the harder half of the same coin — brittle or not, it worked, and it was chosen.

This link is short on purpose. Another chain in this collection already runs it end to end, and re-arguing it here would be a worse version of a thing we have already done properly.

Frederick Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management appeared in 1911. One month after his magazine series ended, a school board member told the National Education Association that scientific management held a message for every teacher — and that if teachers did not raise their efficiency voluntarily, the business world would force them to. By 1916 Ellwood Cubberley's standard school-administration textbook was listing what schools must adopt from the factory: continuous measurement of production, and the elimination of waste in manufacture.

What is worth adding is only this. The thing that travelled from the cane field to the classroom was never a technology. No machine made the trip. What made the trip was a specification — that a project should be able to get bigger without having to reconsider itself, and that it may therefore admit only what already fits its frame.

A mill can hold that specification. So can a syllabus, a job description, an intake form, a diagnostic threshold, a service that has to be delivered the same way in every borough. None of them need to have heard of Barbados. A specification does not require a lineage to be reinvented. It only requires the same pressure — get bigger, and do not change while you do it.

Matsutake is, in a good year, the most valuable mushroom on earth. There is enormous demand, a wealthy market, decades of well-funded institutional science, and every commercial reason imaginable to grow it on purpose.

Nobody can.

Tsing, writing in 2015: "Japanese research institutions have thrown millions of yen into making matsutake cultivation possible, but so far without success."

That was eleven years ago, and a claim of the form nobody has managed it yet is exactly the kind that quietly stops being true while everyone keeps repeating it. So we checked. The most recent review of the field opens with the same verdict:

Commercial demand is still met the way it has always been met — by people walking into forests and finding them.

But the near-misses are more interesting than the failure, and they sharpen the fact rather than softening it. There have been field successes: fruiting achieved in 2010, reproduction in 2017. Both were done using pine trees that the fungus had already colonised. Not soil, not spores, not a substrate — a tree with the relationship already in it, and then years of waiting.

So the honest version of the fact is not matsutake refuses cultivation. It is stranger and more exact:

The mushroom is not the organism. It is the fruiting body of a fungus that lives underground, wrapped around the roots of particular trees, and that fungus cannot feed itself.

It gets its carbohydrates from the tree. In exchange it forages — reaching into ground the roots cannot work, and bringing back what the tree cannot otherwise get. Tsing: matsutake "make it possible for host trees to live in poor soils, without fertile humus. In turn, they are nourished by the trees."

Neither party is a product. There is no matsutake that is not currently being a relationship with a pine. And this, she says flatly, is the reason for link 8:

Set it against the cane, which is the whole reason this chain has two rails. Cane could be moved because it had no relations. Matsutake cannot be moved because it is nothing but relations. The property that made one of them the engine of a world-system is the exact property the other one lacks.

Tsing's phrase for what the forest therefore is: an anti-plantation. Matsutake "resist the conditions of the plantation. They require the dynamic multispecies diversity of the forest — with its contaminating relationality."

And the general form of the fact, which is the thing worth carrying out of this spread: some yields cannot be separated from the relation that produces them. Not because the separation is difficult, or expensive, or not yet solved by better engineering. Because there is nothing left to take once you have taken it apart.

Here is the part that catches people out. Matsutake is not a wilderness organism hanging on despite us. In Japan its great abundance was something people made — not on purpose, and not by protecting anything.

Peasant woodlands were worked: cut for firewood and charcoal, raked, kept open. That work stressed the soil and let pine hold ground it could not otherwise have held, and matsutake came up in it. By the early twentieth century matsutake were so common around Kyoto that matsutake served as a generic word for "mushroom."

Then, from the mid-1950s, the woodlands stopped being used. Tsing's account is a list of ordinary improvements: peasant woodlands cut down for timber plantations, paved for suburban development, or simply abandoned as people moved to the city. Fossil fuel replaced firewood and charcoal. Farmers no longer had a reason to go in.

What followed was not neglect producing wilderness. It was succession. The unworked woodlands "grew up in dense thickets of broadleaf trees"; hillsides that had been covered in matsutake became too shady for pine ecologies; the shade-stressed pines were then killed by an invasive nematode.

No one cut down the matsutake. No one meant it any harm at all. A support it depended on was incidental to how people happened to live, nobody had ever named it as a support, and then the way people lived improved and the support went with it. The loss was a side effect of a fuel switch.

Nothing about a grass, a mill, or a fungus tells you how a person should be treated. Ten links of documented history do not add up to an ought. Tagging this leap is not modesty; it is the accurate label. The step is ours, and here it is.

Link 6 gave us a specification: a scalable system admits only what fits its existing frame, and therefore banishes diversity that might change things.

Now put an accommodation next to that sentence. An accommodation is not a preference or a comfort. An accommodation is, precisely and by definition, a difference that requires the frame to change in order to admit it. A different pace. A different sensory environment. A different way of showing what you know. If it fitted the existing frame it would need no name, and nobody would have to ask.

Which explains something that otherwise looks like malice and mostly is not. An institution built to scale will experience every accommodation as a defect — not because the people in it are cruel, but because a request to re-plan is the one input the design was built to refuse. The refusal arrives already dressed as objectivity: we can't make exceptions, it wouldn't be fair to the others, it doesn't scale. That last one is not an excuse. It is an accurate technical description, and it is the confession.

And link 10 says what happens next, without anyone deciding it: the support that was never named gets removed by an improvement aimed at something else, and what depended on it goes quiet, and the record shows only that things got better.

Now the argument against this spread

There is a seductive version of everything above, and it is wrong. It goes: the forest is good and the plantation is bad, therefore be like the mushroom.

That is the naturalistic fallacy with better scenery. The matsutake is not a moral example; it is a fungus that happens to have a metabolism we cannot fake. Nothing about how nature works is why anyone deserves care. If cane had turned out to be the fussier organism the argument for welcoming difference would be exactly as strong, because that argument was never resting on biology.

Tsing puts her own brake on harder than we would dare to, and she is right to:

No redemption. No arc. Just the observation that sameness had to be built, someone was made to pay for building it, and it is still being maintained — and that a thing which has to be maintained can be maintained differently.

We love you down to your star stuff. Not because the universe runs on mutualism. Down to is not because of.