Mycoremediation’s Material Imaginaries

This article explores what mushrooms do in human projects and specifically what they do in a conversation and context framed by neoliberalist rationality. We highlight two forms of neoliberal rationality—homo economicus, or “the economic man,” and consumptive sovereignty—that often shape the way people interact with fungi in the post-9/11 United States. Through establishing the role of neoliberal rationality in mediating engagements with fungi, we examine how such rationality operates and configures metabolic exchanges between humans and fungi, and between humans and metabolic processes more broadly. We close by considering mycoremediation, the biological process of fungi metabolizing toxic compounds. Our goal is to reveal how dominant forms of reason work to direct human action, and in turn how those repeated actions structure our lives. We hope to disrupt reproductions of these logics by turning our ear to other networks we see operating beneath the surface: posthumanist theory and fungal life.