On the Train: An Anthropology of the Technosocial in Contemporary Japan

This dissertation is concerned with the relations, precepts, practices and conditions that characterize the everyday of the technosocial. In adopting the term technosocial, it approaches the production of the social as a process inseparable from technological conditions. The technosocial marks the convergence of the human and the technological, where the boundaries and structures of causal relations between the two cannot be clearly drawn or determined. While technosocial is a term conventionally applied to practices, environments and phenomena produced through the interface between human and computer technology (cell phones, Internet and so on), in this thesis it encompasses as well the relation between human and architectures and infrastructures of urban space. This dissertation explores the technosocial through the commuter train network in urban Japan. It focuses on Tokyo and the JR East train system, but also considers Osaka, specifically in relation to an accident on a JR West line in 2005. The discussion is not confined to a specific space within the train system or the city. My argument builds on literature that examines the commuter train as a vehicle mediated by relations of capital. It draws on an understanding of the train instrumental in the production of a modern urban subject disciplined to the mechanized tempo of salaried labor and a visual regime commensurate with mass media and consumer practices. I develop these themes for contemporary Japan, where the trains run punctually to the minute and carry a commuter population far beyond the railroad's structural capacity, resulting in a train network that is perpetually on the verge of imminent collapse. It is a system that should not work but ultimately does, and only by virtue of a complicated interaction between human and machine. This condition embodies the technosocial, I argue, and it is articulated in the train system operation pattern, called the daiya. The daiya, I show, emerges from the interaction between society and the commuter train technological apparatus, both of which are always in state of flux. It is differentiated from the train schedule by the manner in which it bespeaks tempo rather than temporality, and it is what allows the train network to operate beyond its structural capacity by harnessing divergence as a productive force. In this context, I suggest that the daiya informs a condition that is analogous to the system of debt and reimbursement in capitalist economy. The economy of the daiya propels a persistent struggle to maintain equilibrium between the tempo of the train apparatus and society. The train accident occurs when this equilibrium collapses. Japan's contemporary commuter train system develops in this dissertation under the sociopolitical and economic conditions of the post-World War Two era. Science and technology are called upon in this era to resolve unprecedented levels of urban crowding resulting from Japan's postwar economic boom, as an ideology of sacrifice in the name of national recovery renders the unendurable endurable. When postwar recovery gives way to privatization of the railroad under a neoliberal shift in the 1980s, and advances in the computerization of train traffic control allow for maximizing transport capacity and profit, science and technology intersect in my discussion with questions of labor and the contemporary nature of mass-mediated culture and society. At stake, I argue, are not only questions of labor and disenfranchisement but also structures of representation and corollary epistemes that have dominated culture and science in modernity. The connection in contemporary Japan between the commuter train...