Tending to Suspension

In: Social analysis: journal of cultural and social practice, Band 62, Heft 4, S. 54-77

Abstract

Scenes from mushroom technosciences illuminate forms, practices,
and temporalities of atmospheric attunement. This article reanimates
moments from scientific literature where chemists and mycologists
chase elusive smells and spores, explicating how scientists' experimental
apparatuses of attunement arrange conditions for matsutake to be
reduced and concentrated toward the goal of sensibility. Reduction and
concentration do more than translate atmospheric elusiveness into specification;
achieved through grinding, evaporating, and remixing, they condition
a 'tending to suspension'. Tending to suspension amplifies qualities
and throws subjects and sensorial attention into the middle of volumes
and durations. 'Tending' implies care as well as a 'tending toward'—the
sense that something may develop a tendency. Experimental apparatuses
of atmospheric attunement, tending to such tendings, model a method for
anthropological study of diffuse objects.