On nonscalability: The living world is not amenable to precision-nested scales

Common Knowledge

Volumn 18, Issue 3, 2012, Pages 505-524

  Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84866640267     PISSN: 0961754X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/0961754X-1630424     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the "Conceptualizing the World" conference at the University of Oslo (September 2011).
2. Conversations with colleagues there, as well as at the University of California, Santa Cruz; Aarhus University; Leiden University; and the University of Wisconsin "Globalization and the Humanities" conference (February 2010) have been most instructive.
3. www.paris-26-gigapixels.com/index-en.html.
4. Clifford Geertz, Peddlers and Princes: Social Development and Economic Change in Two Indonesian Towns (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19 68).
5. For additional discussion of supply-chain capitalism, see Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, "Supply Chains and the Human Condition", Rethinking Marxism 21. 2(2009):148-76.
6. In contrast, scalability theory asks how to make systems more scalable and takes the desirability of doing so for granted. Scalability theory is like nonscalability theory in tracking design problems that arise in making things scalable. (See, e.g., Martin Abbott and Michael Fisher, The Art of Scalability [Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison-Wesley, 2010].) However, the point of scalability theory is not only to improve but also to naturalize scalability. In this framework, a system that works ought to be scalable, and nonscalable systems are understood to be flawed. The first step in building nonscalability theory is to denaturalize scalability, revealing its historicity and specifying alternatives.
7. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
8. A rich interdisciplinary literature - comprising anthropology, geography, art history, and historical agronomy, among other fields - has gathered around the history of the sugarcane plantation. See especially Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1986)
9. and Worker in the Cane (New Haven, C T: Yale University Press, 1960);
10. J. H. Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991);
11. Jill Casid, Sowing Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005);
12. and Jonathan Sauer, A Historical Geography of Crop Plants (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 1993).
13. Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
14. Many domestic sugarcane clones cannot reproduce sexually; breeders cannot develop new varieties with them. In the homeland of sugarcane in New Guinea and Southeast Asia, however, people have long produced new varieties through choosing useful hybrids of Saccharum robustum and S. spontaneum. Europeans came into this knowledge very late, only after they had finished conquering the world for sugar. Before the twentieth century, Europeans obtained new varieties only by getting samples from people who grew them. See Sauer, Historical Geography of Crop Plants, 236-50.
15. War captives were hung over cliffs to carve channels into the rock; many lost their lives in the process. Madeira's cane-preparation experiments thus also prefgured the use of unfree labor for scalable agribusiness. See Sidney Greenfield, "Madeira and the Beginnings of New World Sugar Cane Cultivation and Plantation Slavery: A Study in Institution Building", Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 292(1977):536-52. Christopher Columbus went to check out Madeiran sugar and took Madeiran cane with him on his travels to the New World, where landscape reengineering for cane soon became the norm.
16. Galloway, Sugar Cane Industry, 72.
17. Mintz described cane labor in the 1950s in Puerto Rico. Synchronized planting and harvesting of a single variety made attention to the growth of the plants unnecessary. Instead, discipline of humans and nonhumans was key. When harvest time was announced, the cane had to be cut and transferred to the factory in twenty-four hours, before any sugar was lost to fermentation. The coordination of time was of the essence. Workers were forced to use their full energy and attention to cut in synchrony and avoid injury. As Mintz's key informant put it, "I am really afraid of it. Especially when they are cutting cane heavy with trash [cane leaves], a machete can easily get entangled in the straw and incapacitate a man, what with so many people cutting at the same time." Mintz, Worker in the Cane, 202.
18. Casid, Sowing Empire, 44.
19. For a related analysis, see Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
20. For discussion of sugar cane plantations as a model for factory discipline, see Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 47;
21. also, Wolf, Europe and the People without History.
22. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (1976; Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1992).
23. For a related analysis, see James Scott, Seeing like a State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).
24. For matsutake biology, see Ogawa Makoto, Matsutake no seibutsugaku (Biology of matsutake mushrooms) (Tokyo: Tsukiji Shokan, 1991);
25. David Hosford, David Pilz, Randy Molina, and Michael Amaranthus, "Ecology and Management of the Commercially Harvested American Matsutake Mushroom", USDA Forest Service General Technical Report PNW-412 (1997). For matsutake social worlds
26. see Matsutake Worlds Research Group, "A New Form of Collaboration in Cultural Anthropology: Matsutake Worlds", American Ethnologist 36. 2(2009):380-403;
27. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, "Beyond Economic and Ecological Standardization", Australian Journal of Anthropology 20. 3(2009):347-68.
28. My discussion of Pacific Northwest forestry draws particularly on William Robbins, Landscapes of Conflict (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004);
29. Paul Hirt, A Conspiracy of Optimism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994);
30. Richard Rajala, Clearcutting the Pacific Rain Forest: Production, Science, and Regulation (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998).
31. For what went wrong, see Nancy Langston, Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996). For the eastern Cascades
32. see Mike Znerold, "A New Integrated Forest Resource Plan for Ponderosa Pine Forests on the Deschutes National Forest" (paper presented at the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources workshop, "Tools for Site Specific Silviculture in Northwestern Ontario", Thunder Bay, Ontario, April 19-20, 1989).
33. See Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, "Free in the Forest: Popular Neoliberalism and the Aftermath of War in the US Pacific Northwest", in States of (In) security, ed. Zeynep Gambetti and Marcial Godoy-Anatiria, forthcoming.
34. This concept of "freedom" touches neoliberal economic ideologies but is too much shaped by cultures of war survival to be synonymous. Matsutake pickers do not beleve that they must become autonomous units of choice to be "free." Instead, "freedom" furthers communal cultural agendas of war survival. See Tsing, "Free in the Forest"
35. See Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, "Sorting Out Commodities", in The Paradox of Value, ed. Ton Otto and Rane Willerslev, forthcoming.
36. See, e.g., S. F. Jamal, Patrice Cadet, R. S. Rutherford, and C. J. Straker, "Effect of Mycorrhiza on the Nutrient Uptake of Sugarcane", Proceedings of the South African Sugar Technology Association 78(2004):343-47, www.sasta.co.za/wp-content/uploads/Proceedings/2000s/2004-jamal- EFFECT%20OF%20MYCORRHIZA%20ON%20THE.pdf.
37. See Tsing, "Supply Chains and the Human Condition. " Making use of links between scalable projects and unscalable relations is not limited to supply-chain capitalism, though the process is especially clear in that context.
38. See Alexander Young, The Sogo Shosha: Japan's Multinational Trading Companies (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1979);
39. Michael Yoshino and Thomas Lifson, The Invisible Link: Japan's Sogo Shosha and the Organization of Trade (Cambridge: MA: MIT Press, 1986).
40. See Peter Dauvergne, Shadows in the Forest: Japan and the Politics of Timber in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997);
41. Michael L. Ross, Timber Booms and Institutional Breakdowns in Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
42. See Chris Gregory, Savage Money (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1997);
43. Karen Ho, Liquidated (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
44. Walmart's supply-chain practices are increasingly well documented; see, e.g., Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., Walmart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism (New York: New Press, 2006).
45. See, e.g., Scott Gilbert and David Epel, Ecological Developmental Biology (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer, 2008).