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CHAPTER 1
Finessing the Interval
You are packed into the train so tight that you feel as if your internal organs are going to be crushed. By the time I arrive at work, I'm exhausted and too tired to do anything. I would do anything not to have to ride the packed train but there is no choice [shoga nai].
Tokyo commuter (a paralegal and law student)
"There is no choice": one hears this phrase often from commuters in Tokyo regarding the packed morning commuter train. Insofar as this phrase seems to offer a succinct and compelling explanation for how and why commuters endure, day after day, the fantastic compression of the packed train, it also has the unfortunate effect of reducing the packed train to a spectacle of compliance. As such, the packed train becomes a mere trope, a metaphor for totalizing forces that lie elsewhere, outside the train, in either the historical processes of technological modernity or the unique and immutable relations of Japanese culture. While the former renders the packed train a discursive effect of the forever-escalating processes of rationalization under industrial modernity, the latter hints at a particular, culturally ingrained, and pathological disposition toward the "authoritarian personality."
How might we understand the packed train in a non-totalizing way, as something other than an expression of capitulation and compliance? Put differently, how might we grasp the packed commuter train as an ongoing process of collective making involving the coemergence of humans and machines? A similar question inspired Gilbert Simondon's efforts throughout the 1950s and 1960s to remediate the conceptual framework for understanding humanity's relationship with technology. In contrast to dominant discourses of the time, which tended to focus on the history of technological development and the social impact of technological objects, Simondon proposed understanding technological elements, machines, and ensembles in more evolutionary terms, from the perspective of their genesis within a particular milieu of relations. In shifting the approach from history to genesis, Simondon reframed the overarching question from how is a technology formed through design — and what is its corollary determining effect on humans — to how does a technology take form through the work of human innovation in conjunction with the conflicts and relationships specific to its milieu. Design, according to the latter formulation, can be understood in terms of what Félix Guattari calls a heteropoietic process, in which thinking is elicited from material relations rather than being something born of the human faculty for abstract reasoning and imposed on the world. The critical question then becomes, To what extent does the technology remain "in formation," which is to say processual or structurally underdetermined such that its performance is able to vary in accordance with information received from its operating environment? This tension between structure and process, routine and contingency animates an organism's or technology's margin of indeterminacy.
Simondon's thinking thus places importance on the degree to which a technical ensemble's margin of indeterminacy permits it to enfold an expanded network of relations — an expanded collective entanglement. Living organisms, in Simondon's thinking, have a high margin of indeterminacy, which means that they can continue to individuate, or form associated milieus within their environment. By contrast, a technical element, machine, or ensemble is understood as having an established or at least far more limited margin of indeterminacy. The extent to which a technology is able to realize a coherent unity of relations while maintaining a margin of indeterminacy is its "degree of concretization," which Simondon parsed as its technicity. Thus technicity is not in a technological object itself but within the quality of its constitutive and emergent relations. Accordingly, it draws our attention to the specific nature of collectivity that forms in connection with a technical element, machine, or ensemble.
Deleuze and Guattari take up Simondon's genetic approach to technology with the notion of a "machinic phylum." A genetic approach offers a novel methodological intervention in encouraging us to ask, as Deleuze and Guattari did about the body, not what a technology is but both what a technology can do and what the limits and possibilities of its collective are. These are the questions I take up in this chapter when exploring the genesis of Tokyo's commuter train network over the course of a century by examining a series of formative phases of rapid urbanization. In tracing these phases, I underscore how the increasing pressure for operation beyond capacity involves the evolution of a tactical dynamic I call finessing the interval within the commuter train network's margin of indeterminacy. To finesse something is to make it work when, logically speaking, it should not. Finesse is about pulling something off against all odds. Invoking terms like flair, panache, or élan, finesse bespeaks a method irreducible to skill, expertise, or systematicity. Finesse transcends the logic of rational methods whereby cause and effect can be situated as calculable corollaries; it involves instead qualities like instinct, affect, and feeling — qualities that are embodied, sensual, and informed by the precarious order of contextual relations. Insofar as finesse bespeaks a human capacity for delicately orchestrating an event or relations, it is also never far from the notion of machination, a term that refuses a simple division between humans and technology. Denoting a kind of trickery effected by virtue of device or contrivance — also terms that refuse simple ontological categorization — machination invokes the notion of a relation between the human and the technological. More importantly, it suggests a relation that transpires as a kind of dialogue in the mode of technicity between provisionally stable processes rather than established and fixed ontologies. Humans and technological ensembles enter into a dialogue only by virtue of a certain openness, an unfinished quality of the ongoing processes that animate both.
In tracking the genesis of operation beyond capacity in Tokyo's commuter train network, I am not suggesting that residents of cities throughout the world need to learn to compress themselves into impossibly packed trains day after day, or even that they should learn to queue in an orderly fashion on the station platform. Tokyo's commuter train network and operation beyond capacity are not models of techno-social organization to be emulated. Rather, they are a collective condition that is good to think with. My argument is that in order to grasp the technicity of the commuter train network we must be able to think with it and reimagine our relationship with technology. In this regard, I do not contend that the notion of capitulation and compliance is wrong, but that it is far too simple in being premised on an underlying adversarial relationship between the human and the technological. Machines do not impose determinations; they elicit relationalities. Similarly, technological systems do not work because they are precise and constraining — or rather, they do not work well when they are precise and constraining. They work when they engender collectivity — that, is when they allow for a kind of co-constituting and mutually beneficial dialogue between bodies and the environment. In this co-constituting labor, collectivity emerges. Operation beyond capacity in Tokyo's commuter train network is exemplary in this regard because it simply would not work if commuters merely capitulated to and complied with the system. The network functions only because of the constant, attentive labor of commuters to adjust to and become with the collective. In short, I am not presenting the genesis of Tokyo's commuter train network as a normative paradigm for a better technological world. I offer it instead as an analogy to think with and thus, hopefully, think more complexly about the limits and possibilities of our relationships with and within technological environments.
Accommodating the Masses
Beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century, commuter demand in Japan persistently increased. There is no shortage of detailed records regarding this persistent increase; there are also numerous scholarly works historically contextualizing it. All of these tell a more or less similar story, centering on three significant phases of development. The first phase was during the rapid urbanization between 1914 and 1918, when the need to supply allied forces during World War I spurred an industrial boom. The second phase began following the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, which caused widespread devastation and fire throughout much of Tokyo. Prior to the earthquake, Osaka (in Kansai) rather than Tokyo was the nation's center of industry and rail development. In that region, rail industry was dominated by private train companies that adopted a commuter-consumer paradigm, developed overseas, of building department stores around terminal stations and expanding lines to reach exclusive resort and recreation towns. Following the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, Japan's national railways took the lead. Reconstruction transformed Tokyo into a modern commuter city with much of the population living in the suburbs and commuting into the city center for work, entertainment, and shopping, placing increased demand on the city's rail networks. Finally, the third phase occurred in the initial decades of the post–World War II era. The program of intense economic growth that was orchestrated under centralized government planning during this period created unprecedented demand for commodity and commuter transport.
In each of these phases, train companies faced the dilemma that the demand for transport exceeded the rational limits of the infrastructure's capacity. This dilemma could not be resolved simply by adding rolling stock (more trains), enhancing system performance, or providing further commuter training. For one thing, access to rolling stock was for a long time severely limited. More importantly, even if train companies realized perfectly punctual operations and managed to discipline the commuter population to march like automatons in precise rows into train cars — the dream of fascist nations — the result would have been inadequate to the demand for transport. The system had to be capable of both handling commuter crowds that could barely fit on station platforms and transporting numbers far beyond the system's capacity. In other words, it is not simply that rationalization alone would not have been enough: it would not have worked at all. Such circumstances demanded not a structurally perfect system of absolute precision and compliance but rather a tactic of finessing the interplay between human and machine. What I call "finessing the interval" refers to precisely such a tactic, which took shape in the interwar period as part of a technique for "accommodating passengers."
In a fascinating and exhaustive history of the development of Japan's railroad system, the Japanese economist and infrastructure historian Mito Yuko describes the emergence of the technique of "accommodating passengers" in order to meet the ever increasing commuter demand. The phrase derives from the Japanese idiom "accommodating customers" (kyaku o sabaku), which refers to the way a restaurant or retailer manages to serve far more customers than the given infrastructure and number of personnel would otherwise permit. Mito offers the example of the typical ramen restaurant in the city with limited counter space that nonetheless accommodates a huge lunchtime crowd. How the ramen shop manages to serve beyond its structural capacity cannot be understood as merely the result of an efficient use of staff, material setting, and customer cooperation. The technique instead emphasizes the interplay between the three. The space and time of interplay is treated as dynamic — as a dimension with a certain parameter for actions, behaviors, and responses — rather than as a setting with a specific operational script. Both the customers and the operators of the ramen shop must remain keenly attuned to the dimension of interplay and ready to adapt to the modulating conditions. Attunement materializes as an embodied and distributed attention interwoven with the setting rather than consciously directed. Attunement involves "sensing the air" (kuki o yomu). It is about the pressure and heat of the air between bodies and things, the texture of smells and sounds that constitute a collective space. Attunement transpires as the capacity to feel with the intensities of one's surroundings, which manifest in the materializations of difference that ripple across the fabric of heterogeneous realities woven into an atmospheric flow. The customer in the crowded ramen shop, even while hunched over a bowl and absorbed in the deeply satisfying process of slurping down hot noodles and broth, remains tuned in to these ambient shifts in intensity.
In much the same way, the technique of accommodating commuters for operation beyond capacity in the commuter train network can't be reduced to the efficient performance of personnel and machines or the training of commuters to comply with a strict protocol. Emphasis falls rather on the interplay between humans and machines and the capacity therein to finesse an optimal dynamic in order to perform beyond expected limits. Within the commuter train network, that dimension of interplay is the system's margin of indeterminacy. As with the ramen shop, attunement and adjustment to the constantly shifting conditions of the dimension of interplay from commuters and personnel, rather than a strict adherence to a predetermined order, is critical. Such attunement transpires on neither a conscious nor subconscious level. It is the effect, rather, of a collective and distributed labor of remaining tuned in to a persistent background connectivity that is registered and relayed corporeally in the actions, behaviors, and responses among commuters. The capacity for such collective attunement results not from an inherent cultural disposition but rather from a relation between commuters and the commuter train network that has evolved over the course of a century in conjunction with the schema of operation of finessing the interval. I will return to the labor of collective attunement among commuters in the next chapter; in the meantime, I want to track how finessing the interval emerged as an infrastructural schema of operation in Tokyo's commuter train network.
As Mito explains, the years around the First World War were critically formative in the development of this schema of operation. Demand for transport increased sharply during this time, nearly tripling on main lines, which insisted that train companies increase their rolling stock. However, access to new rolling stock was extremely limited. Japan had not yet developed a robust manufacturing industry of its own, and imports from the United States and Europe were curtailed by the international conflict. Train companies thus had to increase the traffic density (number of trains per hour) without the benefit of new trains or tracks. The solution developed was twofold: (1) decrease the time required for trains to complete a run, and (2) decrease the turnaround time at the terminal station so as to put the train back into circulation more quickly. This involved several "speed-up" strategies: First, running time between stations was decreased by increasing the overall speed of the train. Second, turnaround time at terminal stations was shortened in part by training cleaning crews to be on standby even before trains arrived at terminal stations. Finally, and most important, dwell time (the stopping time at stations) was decreased from minutes to seconds by expediting the boarding and alighting of passengers.
As a result, between 1914 and 1918 the dwell time at major stations in Tokyo was reduced from around two minutes to one minute or less. At midsize stations, it was reduced to thirty seconds. The strategies developed during this period carried over into the next phase of post-1923 Tokyo. While the period witnessed a number of technological advancements, including the electrification of major commuter-train lines, it also saw dwell time at stations throughout Tokyo during peak hours of congestion decrease to a standard twenty seconds. By 1924, only one year after the Great Kanto earthquake, during rush hours Tokyo's Yamanote Line made a complete circuit in sixty-two minutes and forty seconds (compared with fifty-nine minutes today) while trains on the Chuo Line between Nakano and Tokyo Stations ran with a three-minute headway. By 1925, trains on the Tokaido Line between Tokyo and Shinagawa Stations operated with a two-and-a-half-minute headway. With trains spaced so closely, there was no longer a need for stations to offer waiting rooms, and station architectural design became focused instead on facilitating the continuous flow of commuter bodies through the structure.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "An Anthropology of the Machine"
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