Fungal Intelligence and the Posthuman: Mycohuman Art, Entangled Theory, and Fungi in (Eco-)Gothic Narratives

Abstract

Fungi have become paradigmatic for the wonders, the adaptability, and the resilience of the nonhuman in publications, ranging from Anna Tsing Lowenhaupt’s anthropological analysis of the matsutake mushroom (2015) to Merlin Sheldrake’s popular take on the ‘world-making’ capacity of fungi (2020). This article explores different conceptualisations of ‘fungal intelligence’ and the posthuman in art, (popular) science, and literature. In a three-step argument, it moves from the world of contemporary art to the recent flurry of textual production about fungi in anthropology and (popular) science and the concomitant construction of fungal intelligence. Readings of Aliya Whiteley’s The beauty (2018) and Silvia Garcia-Moreno’s Mexican gothic (2020) are then used to scrutinise how these literary texts create a posthuman ‘other’ intelligence that is depicted as threatening in its uncanny otherness. In both texts, the monstrosity of the posthuman fungal other is positioned as a new iteration of the classic gothic monster.