I first truly discovered the ‘polyphony,’ ironically, in Japan.

I remember, strangely, the exact moment I first heard the word said aloud outside of discussions with my mother. It was outside of ‘Forestlimit,’ a club in Shibuya that’s popular with artists from the American underground electronic scene. My friend, Orion, had just finished performing his set. Having had too much sake in the hours prior, I had stayed in the green room. It must have been around three a.m., in the early hours of the Sunday dawn, when he finally finished performing. Orion was nothing if not chronically late, and unfashionably so: he had gotten too drunk himself in the hours prior, and our mutual friend, ‘Novo,’ who throws the party Orion was performing at on this night, had no problem moving his set time back. ‘It just has to come after the other artists of the night’ Novo said. We obliged, self-defeatingly. So, when he asked me about the ‘polyphony’ outside of a Shibuya nightclub in the early hours of that Sunday in Japan: I did not expect to hear myself ask the following.

“Are you talking about Bakhtin’s polyphony?” I asked him, slightly unsure of where I was or if I was even still alive.

“What? Who is Bakhtin? I’m talking about Ableton.” He responded, both confused and intrigued at the same time. Ableton is a popular digital audio production program.

As he often does, he quickly dismissed the moment. But as we sobered up (in Japan, trains do not run twenty-four hours a day), waiting to return to our accommodations, over the skies of Tokyo, I began to see three images reveal themselves to me in my stupor: an acrobat, a giraffe, and a rather large woman dressed in Victorian clothing.

My late-night encounter with ‘polyphony’ outside that Forestlimit wasn’t a mere linguistic coincidence: it was an embodied experience of the very concept Tsing deploys in her work. Just as I stood disoriented between academic theory and electronic music production, seeing surreal visions appear in my sake-induced haze, Tsing’s methodology deliberately cultivates productive disorientation. My fragmented perception that night—the acrobat, the giraffe, the Victorian woman—mirrors how Tsing structures her ethnography as “patchwork” rather than linear narrative. The train schedule constraints that shaped our night in Tokyo parallel the “precarious assemblages” Tsing identifies in global supply chains. Even Orion’s music, with its chaotic overlapping elements, performs a kind of polyphony that responds to hypercapitalism as much as Tsing’s methodology responds to dominant scientific discourses. In my encounter with Tokyo’s underground music scene, in the late-night stupor waiting for first trains, I was unknowingly experiencing the very methodological stance that Tsing employs to understand our entangled world: one where meaning emerges not from a single authoritative voice, but from the unexpected juxtapositions and collaborations that sustain us amid capitalist ruins.

Tsing reflects on her own ‘revelation’ when she first heard the polyphony within The Mushroom.

“When I first learned polyphony, it was a revelation in listening; I was forced to pick out separate, simultaneous melodies and to listen for the moments of harmony and dissonance they created together. This kind of noticing is just what is needed to appreciate the multiple temporal rhythms and trajectories of the assemblage.”

(Tsing, 24)

‘TSING’S POLYPHONY’

Bakhtin conceptualised polyphony through literary analysis of Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky’s prose, identifying “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses” within the text. But Tsing isn’t a literary theorist: she’s an anthropologist. Her brilliance lies in transforming a literary concept into an ethnographic methodology for understanding real-world phenomena.

In studying the matsutake trade, Tsing rejects the conventional scientific monologue that would impose a singular interpretive framework. Instead, she allows multiple perspectives to coexist: Japanese matsutake traders value the mushroom as a luxury gift embodying cultural memory and seasonal connection; Hmong and Mien foragers in Oregon understand it through their displaced cultural knowledge and as economic opportunity; forest ecologists view it through scientific frameworks of mycorrhizal relationships. No single perspective dominates.

But as I boarded the famous ‘Hello Kitty’ Shinkansen from Osaka to Hiroshima, none of this was on my mind. What was? A strange mix of what I could remember from Rabelais and His World, and an unreleased song by Orion. It would eventually be titled ‘No Country’ after he could find no alternative.

“All the information was suddenly introduced into my mind. The population, the houses, the expenses, the lifetimes, the people, the furniture and the walls…”

says a woman’s voice in Japanese at the beginning of the song.

How might Tsing understand these lines?

Tsing might deploy the word ‘polyphonic’ to describe such a complex mental landscape. The clues are in the rhetorical devices within the sentence. In her monologue, the woman speaking deploys the phrase ‘suddenly introduced’ before she describes the kind of information she’s introduced to. The use of the word ‘suddenly’ suggests a moment of synthesis.

But, again, Tsing is not a literary theorist. She is an anthropologist, and specifically, an ethnographer. How did she deploy Bakhtin’s conception of ‘polyphony’ onto her methodological research? Here, perhaps we see Tsing’s brilliance: rather than providing a singular, authoritative narrative to ‘settle the subject,’ she provides multiple.

The very structure of Tsing’s book embodies polyphony. Rather than following a linear narrative, her text unfolds as a “patchwork” of discontinuous vignettes, jumping between Oregon forests, Japanese marketplaces, and scientific laboratories. This fragmented structure isn’t accidental. It mirrors her theoretical interest in “patches” and “assemblages” as both ecological and economic realities. Like my disorienting late-night, drunken vision of ‘an acrobat, a giraffe, and a rather large woman dressed in Victorian clothing’ in Tokyo, Tsing’s narrative deliberately disorients to reveal unexpected connections.

And if we consider what she’s responding to—dominant scientific and economic discourses—to invoke the ‘polyphony’ in the first place can be read as a strategic move as well. By presenting the reader multiple ways that people connected to the matsutake trade both ‘know’ and ‘value’ the mushroom, she is demonstrating how these different knowledge systems are themselves engaged in dialogue without any single perspective able to claim complete sovereignty.

When she juxtaposes scientific terminology with the forager’s traditional knowledge, she also invokes Bakhtin’s concept of ‘heteroglossia,’ the way in which meaning emerges from the interaction between different languages and opinions. She avoids constructing a hierarchy that places scientific ‘expertise’ over ‘traditional’ knowledge.

“Heteroglossia, once incorporated into the novel… is another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way.”

(Bakhtin, 324)

This approach resonates with Bourdieu’s critique of scientific objectivity. Like Bourdieu, who acknowledged how the sociologist’s position shapes what can be observed, Tsing recognises her own situated perspective. The polyphony becomes both a storytelling device and her methodological disposition: an acknowledgment of the limits of any single perspective. In An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Bourdieu states,

“I believe that the form of reflexivity I advocate is distinctive and paradoxical in that it is fundamentally anti-narcissistic.”

(Bourdieu, 72)

Through this polyphonic approach, Tsing reveals the precarious assemblages that constitute the global matsutake supply chain. The mushroom’s journey from disturbed forest landscapes to luxury gift markets traverses multiple economic systems, ecological relationships, and cultural meanings. By allowing each voice its autonomy, Tsing exposes the improvisational collaborations that enable survival in what she calls ‘capitalist ruins.’

I recognize now that this polyphonic sensibility pervades much of my adolescent experience: from Orion’s chaotic musical compositions to the “tangible sense of sensitive chaos” I’ve felt in modern cities like Tokyo or New York. Under capitalism, we exist in constant polyphony, overstimulated by competing voices and systems. Tsing’s methodological innovation isn’t just academic, it’s a way of perceiving the world that reveals both its fragility and its resilience.

In this polyphonic space that Tsing creates, we finally glimpse at what conventional histories and scientific narratives so often obscure: the messy, contingent collaborations that make up global supply chains. What traditional economic theories would simplify into clean lines of supply and demand, Tsing reveals as a complex tapestry of precarious arrangements: Southeast Asian refugees foraging in contaminated forests, Japanese cultural nostalgia driving luxury markets, forest ecologies transformed by industrial logging. As I reflect on my experiences exploring Hokkaido’s ‘boring’ (in the best way) streets, far from Oregon’s forests but connected through this humble mushroom’s journey, I realise that Tsing’s polyphony isn’t just theoretical innovation: it’s a necessary epistemological stance for understanding our entangled world. Conventional histories flatten these complexities into convenient narratives; Tsing’s polyphonic approach resurrects the contradictions, tensions, and unexpected collaborations that make survival possible in capitalism’s ruins.

At the end of my stay in Hokkaido, I rushed to text Orion my reading of his work.

“That’s cool, but I’m not sure…” he responded.

He may not have been sure, but I was. Orion’s music presents a chaotic polyphony, an escape from the hypercapitalist environment from which it’s produced. When I write, I do not consciously invoke the ‘polyphony.’ But the way I negotiate storytelling, which can often read non-linearly, is itself my own way of deploying the concept. Tsing deployed it in her methodological discipline, while Bakhtin constructed it (as Tsing uses it).

Works Cited:

Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc J. D. Wacquant. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.

‘Tsing and The Polyphony’

Evanora Unlimited - No Country (Live Action)

Filmed in the woods outside of Berlin, DE in 2023.

Warning: this video includes intense scenes of simulated violence. It is ‘shadowbanned’ from YouTube.

Watch at your discretion.