Blockchain Papers

Noriko Aso

Reviewed by: An Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo's Commuter Train Network by Michael Fisch Noriko Aso (bio) An Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo's Commuter Train Network. By Michael Fisch. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2018. xi, 302 pages. $82.50, cloth; $27.50, paper; $27.50, E-book. Michael Fisch employs a science and technology studies (STS) approach in this "technography" (ethnography of technology) of the Tokyo commuter train system, thus contributing to the global literature on trains as iconic machines of modernization. However, Fisch does not consider railway technology in isolation but rather insists that humans and machines must always be considered together, shaped by and shaping the other, in contrast to a technological determinism that would see railroad design as having only a one-way impact on societies. Because human communities are at stake, Fisch embraces rather than shies away from raising ethical considerations through the use of such terms as "technicity," which he defines as a machine's "quality of relations" (p. 16) that "emphasizes a technology's ontological and conceptual affordances, as well as its trustworthiness as a partner of collective life in the present and future" (p. x). The complex and perilous order of Tokyo's commuter train network provides Fisch with a prime opportunity to assess technicity, as he asks what makes for a system that deserves trust. His case study of Tokyo railways provides the answer of yoyū (leeway, margin, or breathing room). Each of the six chapters highlights a set of human actors and nonhuman factors which together either make it possible for the commuter train system to operate beyond (and later without) capacity or cause it to break down. The titles, from "Finessing the Interval" to "Ninety Seconds," all point to the critical necessity of accounting for time within the system. Fisch begins with the engineers of the Tokyo commuter system and how they responded to overwhelming growth in the number of riders over the course of the twentieth century. Rather than pursuing ironclad scheduling as the solution to having to operate beyond capacity, they came to recognize that skillful drivers who practiced "recovery driving" and riders savvy in how they navigated flows were essential to the everexpanding system. Drivers and commuters [End Page 291] created and "finessed" yoyū (Fisch prefers to use the Japanese term throughout), which in turn was incorporated into planning as manageable gaps between principal and operational schedules. Fisch then focuses on commuters and the train spaces they inhabit. Silence, manners, calculation of best connections, and, now, electronic devices and social media produce a commuter railway spatiality that exceeds any mapmaking while maintaining a coherent collective. Having laid out the successes, Fisch turns to darker aspects of the Tokyo commuter railway system. Returning to the system engineers, he examines the adoption of ATOS (Autonomous Decentralized Transport Operation Control System) in 1996. The bottom-up organizational principles of ATOS allow it to embrace irregularity as regular, thereby weakening or even doing away with conventional logistical thresholds. Fisch terms this operating without capacity. Despite the organicism and resilience of this mode of organization, he points out that its very success all but ensures human failure to reckon with environmental and other costs tied to this scale of operation: the network's "extreme capitalism . . . generat[es] a novel, frictionless synergy of human and machine toward boundless consumption" (p. 109). Fisch then goes back to the community of commuters to explore the possibilities and limits of empathy: "can the train teach us to care?" (p. 125). He works through attempts to answer in mass media utopian and dystopian representations, but his most compelling examples highlight how discussion boards, hypertext novels, video games, and other media geared toward consumption during a train ride interact in real time with commuter alienation and/or collectivity. The principal effect has been to maintain the status quo of crowding and other forms of stress by encouraging a mental state balanced between attention and inattention; yet Fisch also catches a glimmer of potential critique in moments when riders take a step or two outside the script. In contrast, commuter train suicides prompt communal disengagement. The railway companies employ euphemisms and cleaner teams to immediately erase...

Brian McCammack

A slim volume that adds to Dominic A. Pacyga’s extensive Chicago scholarship, Slaughterhouse: Chicago’s Union Stock Yard and the World It Made surveys the city’s meatpacking industry from its mid-nineteenth-century origins to its post–World War II demise and beyond. Although the book traces a century and a half of changes in the “Square Mile” of the Union Stock Yard on Chicago’s South Side, the focus of Slaughterhouse is the stockyards’ heyday between roughly 1880 and 1920, when meatpacking helped drive the city’s—and the nation’s—economy. That heyday, facilitated by Chicago’s status as a rail hub, is lauded in chapters 1–4. Chapter 5 affords comparatively less attention to the stockyards’ Depression-era struggles and postwar collapse, which was driven in part by industrial decentralization that highway trucking made possible. The concluding chapter surveys the innovative businesses populating the industrial park that rose from the stockyards’ ashes in the 1990s, propped up by tax increment financing schemes.

Dominique A. Tobbell

Reviewed by: Therapeutic Revolutions: Pharmaceuticals and Social Change in the Twentieth Century ed. by Jeremy A. Greene, Flurin Condrau, Elizabeth Siegel Watkins Dominique Tobbell Jeremy A. Greene, Flurin Condrau, and Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, eds. Therapeutic Revolutions: Pharmaceuticals and Social Change in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 320 pp. $110.00 (978-0-226-39073-4). “The practice of medicine in 1980 looked quite a bit different than it had in 1930,” write Jeremy Greene, Elizabeth Watkins, and Flurin Condrau, in the introduction to Therapeutic Revolutions (p. 8). A major component of the transformation of medicine in these decades was the massive expansion of pharmaceutical research and development that led to the introduction of scores of new prescription drugs, including antibiotics, corticosteroids, minor and major tranquilizers, oral contraceptives, and the first drugs to treat hypertension. This period of transformation has been termed by physicians, the pharmaceutical industry, policy makers, patients, and some medical historians alike as a therapeutic revolution. But as [End Page 224] Charles Rosenberg noted forty years ago in his seminal essay, “The Therapeutic Revolution,” claims of therapeutic efficacy—and thus the basis of therapeutic revolution—are both historically contingent and locally specific.1 This impressive collection of essays by leading scholars in the history and anthropology of pharmaceuticals builds on Rosenberg’s earlier analysis to problematize the concept of a twentieth-century pharmacotherapeutic revolution. By examining the intersections of pharmaceutical innovation and social transformation in North America, Western Europe, and Africa, the essays underscore the historical contingency and geographic specificity of any such revolution, and reveal what was at stake politically, economically, and culturally for the various historical actors that have mobilized the language of therapeutic revolution. The volume can be broken into four sections. The first section, with chapters by Scott Podolsky and Anne Kveim Lie, Elizabeth Watkins, and Nicolas Henckes, considers three classes of drugs held as emblematic of the mid-twentieth-century therapeutic revolution—antibiotics, oral contraceptives, and antipsychotics, respectively—and examines the degree to which these drugs were revolutionary and the political, economic, and social gains made by those who mobilized the rhetoric of revolution. The second section interrogates the measures by which pharmaceuticals introduced in the mid-twentieth century were considered revolutionary: pharmaceutical consumption and statistical measurements of therapeutic efficacy. Using pharmaceutical sales data from IMS Health, Nils Kessel and Christian Bonah show that it was older drug products like analgesics, hypnotics, and sedatives, rather than “revolutionary medicines” like antibiotics and cardiovascular drugs, that dominated the West German pharmaceutical market in the 1960s and 1970s. In their history and ethnography of tuberculosis treatment, Janina Kehr and Flurin Condrau show the ways in which clinical trials data documenting the efficacy of streptomycin to treat tuberculosis in the 1950s was mobilized as “proof of the universal effectiveness of antibiotics regardless of social situation,” even as antibiotic resistance undermined treatment efforts and tuberculosis persisted as a global health concern (p. 135). This “statistical modeling of success” (p. 135), Kehr and Condrau argue, “transformed tuberculosis from a subject of cutting-edge biomedical research into a disease that physicians considered ‘boring’ . . . until it reemerged in the late twentieth century as multidrug resistant tuberculosis and extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis, and thus a subject of renewed biomedical excitement” (p. 12). The third section shifts focus from the United States and Western Europe to the Global South and examines the intersections of pharmaceutical innovation, international development, and global public health, highlighting the spatial-temporal character and political economy of the therapeutic revolution. Jeremy Greene analyzes the ways in which American lawmakers, physicians, patients, regulators, and pharmaceutical companies mobilized arguments about the [End Page 225] cause of and potential solutions to geographic disparities in pharmaceutical access during the 1960s and 1970s in an attempt to shape both domestic health policy and international development agendas. Paul Farmer, Matthew Basilico, and Luke Messac revisit the debate, ignited by Thomas McKeown in the 1960s, over the role of medicine in public health. Their analysis of recent economic, ethnographic, and epidemiological data makes clear that despite the persistent problem of uneven access, pharmaceuticals have contributed to a significant population-level mortality decline in the Global South. Julie Livingston’s history and ethnography...

Harry G. Frankfurt

The most central and familiar lines of argument of the Meditations, Rene Descartes professes to perceive the following propositions clearly and distinctly. Descartes&s;s very sincerity in promulgating it is under a cloud. Considering just what is at stake in Descartes&s; concern with clear and distinct perception will help to identify more fully the source of fascination his argument evokes. Descartes is sometimes thought to have advocated a kind of lunatic apriorism, according to which a person might spin all of philosophy and all of science out of his own head without ever needing to turn to perceptual data. The precise value and import of consistency proofs, particularly in an unlimited context such as one in which Descartes operates, are difficult to specify exactly. It might perhaps be desirable, instead of construing his argument as attempt to prove the consistency of reason, to understand Descartes as attempting just to establish that there is no reasonable ground for doubting that reason is consistent.