Tokyo's Commuter Train Suicides and the Society of Emergence

Abstract

This article considers the treatment of commuter train suicides in Tokyo's commuter train network in an effort to think critically about the lived experience mediated by theories of emergence materialized through “smart” infrastructures. In so doing, it embarks from the question of how the commuter train network thinks the disorder of the commuter suicide in relation to how the network has been restructured in recent decades to handle irregularity as regular. This restructuring, I demonstrate, works to corporealize the network in accordance with an understanding of the body as a paradigm of decentralized complex emergence, which is a concept with roots in cybernetics and artificial life but which has also been adopted in recent political theory to rationalize social, economic, and environmental instability. Materialized in the commuter train network, this concept asks us to think the system as a kind of machinic life that, while generating the potential for new forms of value creation, potentially encourages the experience of commuter suicides as a necessary and recursive process of metabolic renewal within a totalizing system.

Introduction

“…Over recent years, a rapidly growing number of studies have been published in the burgeoning theoretical and empirical interface between anthropology and science and technology studies (see, e.g., Chu 2014;Fisch 2013;Harvey 2012;Harvey et al 2016;Harvey and Knox 2015;Howe et al 2016;Jensen and Morita 2016;Jensen and Winthereik 2013;Larkin 2013;von Schnitzler 2008; for two pioneering studies from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and anthropology respectively, see Star 1999 andHumphrey 2005). It is instructive to reflect upon the ways in which the concept of infrastructure, as developed within this expanding literature, compares to other anthropological concepts with which its shares empirical or analytical family resemblances.…”

Species of (Code) Spaces

“…Smart cities should allow for "spontaneity, serendipity and sociability" (Townsend, 2013, p. 15), because if all randomness is programmed out of the equation, cities will turn into sterilized, homogenous environments of automation. For instance, with reference to the decentralized and almost completely autonomous traffic-control system of Japanese trains -on which the Korean 'smart' ones are based (Halpern, 2014, p. 276 (Fisch, 2013) In short, even if urban life seems to be in an apparent state of equilibrium, it is always a synthesis of smaller, unpredictable situated processes and events -and this is exactly the reason why a margin of indeterminacy is of vital importance to the productive complexity of the smart city. In a similar manner, the cybernetic vision of an architectural system runs on the concept of 'underspecification'.…”

Pandemic cities: biopolitical effects of changing infection control in post‐SARS Hong Kong

“…According to Michael Fisch, the ‘Smart City’ today is increasingly envisioned as a neurological organism, emphasizing density of connection and information flow. The city is presented ‘as a form of an emergent, living organism, in which the symbiotic interaction among distributed systems enables [it] to sense and respond as a global entity to changes in its internal milieu’ (Fisch , 322). The intensified hygiene efforts, as well as the technologies of health surveillance employed in Hong Kong after SARS, underline those findings for the changing biopolitics of the ‘pandemic city’.…”