Michael Fisch
Biographic Data
| ID | 131814 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael Fisch |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Fisch |
| SIGNATURE | FISCH M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5312-403X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 86 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 24 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1940 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Controlled comparative tensile tests of backed versus non‐backed edges’ adhesion
Backing is a procedure for retouching a stone tool edge to an angle of or near 90°. Archaeologists have recorded backed lithic specimens in the Pleistocene and Holocene around the world. One prominent hypothesis for the occurrence of backing is that it increases a stone tool's adhesion relative to what it would have otherwise been with unmodified, sharp edges. We conducted a highly controlled semi‐static tensile test in which we assessed lithic s…
Staging Encounters with the End in Pre-Apocalyptic-Post-3.11 Japan
his paper offers a critical engagement with endings in relation to formulations of crisis and futures through two sites that stage an encounter with the end. The first is the permanent exhibit at Japan's National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo. This site, I show, asks us to reflect on how we think about the end of civilisation as an immanent crisis to be overcome through an innovation that allows us to escape accountability fo…
Japan’s Extreme Infrastructure
How have massive concrete walls become thinkable as resilient infrastructure for an extreme nature, and what will collective life become in the shadow of such concrete resilience? These questions hold increasing importance as cities and nations throughout the world contemplate the construction of giant concrete barriers to resist the forces of extreme weather and rising sea levels. This article turns to Japan’s ‘fortress-ification’ of its northea…
Stone tool backing and adhesion in hunting weaponry
Another tool in the experimental toolbox
Experimental archaeology continues to mature methodologically and theoretically. Around the world, practitioners are increasingly using modern materials that would have been unavailable to prehistoric people in archaeological experiments. The use of a modern material substitute can offer several benefits to experimental method, design, control, replicability, feasibility, and cost, but it should be directly compared to its “traditional” analogue …
Human behavior or taphonomy? On the breakage of Eastern North American Paleoindian endscrapers
Chapter 6
In the final chapter the location shifts from Tokyo to Osaka, where the discussion deals with a commuter train derailment in late April 2005 that was triggered by a ninety-second schedule delay and which claimed 106 lives. The chapter tracks the circumstances leading up to the accident and the community response in its aftermath. It is concerned with the critical insights into the nature of technological accidents, risk, and the current state of …
Chapter 1
Chapter one traces the emergence of operation beyond capacity in Tokyo’s commuter train network as a schema of operation that evolves in conjunction with rapid urbanization over the course of a century in Japan. In tracing this history, the argument in the chapter delineates the specific collective nature of the commuter train network vis-a-vis its technicity, thus laying the groundwork for discussions in subsequent chapters. The central claim is…
Conclusion
The conclusion reflects on the central themes and methods raised in the text while drawing a connection to current anxieties regarding technological development in Japan that emerged with the nuclear accident in Fukushima in 2011. In this regard, the discussion emphasizes the value of Tokyo’s commuter train network as medium with which to think both the limits and possibilities of human and machine relations for the future.
Chapter 4
Chapter four turns from matters of technicity to remediation through an exploration of convergences between the internet and the commuter train. Its principal concern is to understand how the internet thinks the space and time generated in the commuter train network’s margin of indeterminacy. The question draws attention to how the internet enables simulations of commuter space and time, and how in so doing, the internet encourages a shift from k…
Chapter 5
Chapter five embarks from within a forty-four minute gap opened within the margin of indeterminacy as a result of a commuter suicide. The central concern in the chapter is to understand how the commute collective attends to the challenge presented by the commuter suicide in general and, more specifically, the body on the tracks. While the former, it is shown, is treated within the collective as an event that threatens the network’s operational in…
Chapter 2
The second chapter further delineates the technicity of Tokyo’s commuter train collective by exploring the conditions within the commuter-train car. Specifically, it looks at how in learning to inhabit the commuter train network’s margin of indeterminacy commuters cultivate a deeply ingrained sensibility toward its modulating intensities while developing various strategies for negotiating its paradoxical mediations. In so doing, the chapter aims …
An Anthropology of the Machine
Regenerating Bodies
This article is an expanded commentary on the essay "The Social Life of 'Scaffolds': Examining Human Rights in Regenerative Medicine." In discussing the limits and possibilities of the essay, this commentary suggests that problematizing scaffolds in regenerative medicine as a kind of infrastructure rather than prosthetic opens the way for an understanding of the genesis of regenerative assemblages in ways that help to reframe inherent issues of h…
New ontologies? Reflections on some recent ‘turns’ in STS, anthropology and philosophy
This paper discusses the recent emergence of ontological approaches in science and technology studies (STS), anthropology and philosophy. Although it is common to hear of a turn, or turn, to ontology, more than one line of intellectual development is at stake. In reality, we are witness to a plural set of partly overlapping, partly divergent, turns
The Nature of Biomimicry
Biomimicry is a rising popular ecology movement and method that urges the derivation of innovative and environmentally sound design from organic systems. This essay explores the notion of nature in biomimicry as articulated by the movement's founder, Janine Benyus, and the nature of biomimicry as practiced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) media ecologist Neri Oxman. Benyus's approach, I show, promotes biomimicry as a science of …
Days of Love and Labor”
This article explores the discourses and realities surrounding life and labor in contemporary Japan through a keitai (smartphone) game entitled Days of Love and Labor (Ai to rōdō no hibi). While promising players a simulated employment experience in order to reflect on the possibility of happiness in life, what the game ultimately delivers is a simulation of unmanageable debt and alienation. The author's argument treats Days of Love and Labor as …
Tokyo's Commuter Train Suicides and the Society of Emergence
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 irregularit…
When Patients Choose CAM over EBM—How to Negotiate Treatment
his primary care physician after experiencing several months of fever, night sweats, nonspecific back pain, and "lumps in his shoulders and chest." After a meticulous workup, including a biopsy that revealed Reed-Sternberg cells, he was promptly referred to Dr. Randolph, an experienced and reputable oncologist. After Mr. Crowley was seated in his office, Dr. Randolph pulled up his own chair, leaned forward, and explained that Mr. Crowley had clas…
In search of the real
Murakami Haruki's novelSputnik Sweetheart(2001)is concerned with the condition of language and its restoration. For Murakami, as well as other contemporary Japanese thinkers, anxiety over the condition of language and communication was brought to the fore by the nearly consecutive occurrence of violent events in the winter of 1995. The shock of these events was compounded by the already weakened state of national confidence as a result of the eco…
The Rise of the Chapel Wedding in Japan
This article draws on the author's experience acting as a priest for Christianstyle chapel weddings in Japan in order to investigate the structure of the ceremony, its ritual value, and the potential reasons behind the growing popularity of the chapel wedding style in contemporary Japan. The chapel ceremony has become increasingly popular in Japan over the course of the last ten years at the expense of the formerly popular Shinto ceremony. The ch…
The Rise of the Chapel Wedding in Japan
Nation, War, and Japan’s Future in the Science Fiction Anime Film Patlabor II
Oshii Mamoru’s film Parlabor II engages questions of Japan’s future and its involvement in United Nations peacekeeping forces within a science fiction narrative that allegorically reflects—and critiques—the politics and society of postwar Japan. In addition, the film muses upon the nation’s experience in World War II and the nature of the ensuing peace under the American treaty. What is at stake in Patlabor II is nothing less than Japan’s current…
Contemplation et Vie Contemplative Selon Platon
An Anthropology of the Machine
Tokyo's Commuter Train Suicides and the Society of Emergence
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 irregularit…
Another tool in the experimental toolbox
Experimental archaeology continues to mature methodologically and theoretically. Around the world, practitioners are increasingly using modern materials that would have been unavailable to prehistoric people in archaeological experiments. The use of a modern material substitute can offer several benefits to experimental method, design, control, replicability, feasibility, and cost, but it should be directly compared to its “traditional” analogue …
Stone tool backing and adhesion in hunting weaponry
The Nature of Biomimicry
Biomimicry is a rising popular ecology movement and method that urges the derivation of innovative and environmentally sound design from organic systems. This essay explores the notion of nature in biomimicry as articulated by the movement's founder, Janine Benyus, and the nature of biomimicry as practiced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) media ecologist Neri Oxman. Benyus's approach, I show, promotes biomimicry as a science of …
Staging Encounters with the End in Pre-Apocalyptic-Post-3.11 Japan
his paper offers a critical engagement with endings in relation to formulations of crisis and futures through two sites that stage an encounter with the end. The first is the permanent exhibit at Japan's National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo. This site, I show, asks us to reflect on how we think about the end of civilisation as an immanent crisis to be overcome through an innovation that allows us to escape accountability fo…
Human behavior or taphonomy? On the breakage of Eastern North American Paleoindian endscrapers
Days of Love and Labor”
This article explores the discourses and realities surrounding life and labor in contemporary Japan through a keitai (smartphone) game entitled Days of Love and Labor (Ai to rōdō no hibi). While promising players a simulated employment experience in order to reflect on the possibility of happiness in life, what the game ultimately delivers is a simulation of unmanageable debt and alienation. The author's argument treats Days of Love and Labor as …
In search of the real
Murakami Haruki's novelSputnik Sweetheart(2001)is concerned with the condition of language and its restoration. For Murakami, as well as other contemporary Japanese thinkers, anxiety over the condition of language and communication was brought to the fore by the nearly consecutive occurrence of violent events in the winter of 1995. The shock of these events was compounded by the already weakened state of national confidence as a result of the eco…
Nation, War, and Japan’s Future in the Science Fiction Anime Film Patlabor II
Oshii Mamoru’s film Parlabor II engages questions of Japan’s future and its involvement in United Nations peacekeeping forces within a science fiction narrative that allegorically reflects—and critiques—the politics and society of postwar Japan. In addition, the film muses upon the nation’s experience in World War II and the nature of the ensuing peace under the American treaty. What is at stake in Patlabor II is nothing less than Japan’s current…
Contemplation et Vie Contemplative Selon Platon
Nation, War, and Japan’s Future in the Science Fiction Anime Film Patlabor II
Oshii Mamoru’s film Parlabor II engages questions of Japan’s future and its involvement in United Nations peacekeeping forces within a science fiction narrative that allegorically reflects—and critiques—the politics and society of postwar Japan. In addition, the film muses upon the nation’s experience in World War II and the nature of the ensuing peace under the American treaty. What is at stake in Patlabor II is nothing less than Japan’s current…
The Rise of the Chapel Wedding in Japan
This article draws on the author's experience acting as a priest for Christianstyle chapel weddings in Japan in order to investigate the structure of the ceremony, its ritual value, and the potential reasons behind the growing popularity of the chapel wedding style in contemporary Japan. The chapel ceremony has become increasingly popular in Japan over the course of the last ten years at the expense of the formerly popular Shinto ceremony. The ch…
The Rise of the Chapel Wedding in Japan
In search of the real
Murakami Haruki's novelSputnik Sweetheart(2001)is concerned with the condition of language and its restoration. For Murakami, as well as other contemporary Japanese thinkers, anxiety over the condition of language and communication was brought to the fore by the nearly consecutive occurrence of violent events in the winter of 1995. The shock of these events was compounded by the already weakened state of national confidence as a result of the eco…
When Patients Choose CAM over EBM—How to Negotiate Treatment
his primary care physician after experiencing several months of fever, night sweats, nonspecific back pain, and "lumps in his shoulders and chest." After a meticulous workup, including a biopsy that revealed Reed-Sternberg cells, he was promptly referred to Dr. Randolph, an experienced and reputable oncologist. After Mr. Crowley was seated in his office, Dr. Randolph pulled up his own chair, leaned forward, and explained that Mr. Crowley had clas…
Tokyo's Commuter Train Suicides and the Society of Emergence
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 irregularit…
Days of Love and Labor”
This article explores the discourses and realities surrounding life and labor in contemporary Japan through a keitai (smartphone) game entitled Days of Love and Labor (Ai to rōdō no hibi). While promising players a simulated employment experience in order to reflect on the possibility of happiness in life, what the game ultimately delivers is a simulation of unmanageable debt and alienation. The author's argument treats Days of Love and Labor as …
New ontologies? Reflections on some recent ‘turns’ in STS, anthropology and philosophy
This paper discusses the recent emergence of ontological approaches in science and technology studies (STS), anthropology and philosophy. Although it is common to hear of a turn, or turn, to ontology, more than one line of intellectual development is at stake. In reality, we are witness to a plural set of partly overlapping, partly divergent, turns
The Nature of Biomimicry
Biomimicry is a rising popular ecology movement and method that urges the derivation of innovative and environmentally sound design from organic systems. This essay explores the notion of nature in biomimicry as articulated by the movement's founder, Janine Benyus, and the nature of biomimicry as practiced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) media ecologist Neri Oxman. Benyus's approach, I show, promotes biomimicry as a science of …
Chapter 6
In the final chapter the location shifts from Tokyo to Osaka, where the discussion deals with a commuter train derailment in late April 2005 that was triggered by a ninety-second schedule delay and which claimed 106 lives. The chapter tracks the circumstances leading up to the accident and the community response in its aftermath. It is concerned with the critical insights into the nature of technological accidents, risk, and the current state of …
Chapter 1
Chapter one traces the emergence of operation beyond capacity in Tokyo’s commuter train network as a schema of operation that evolves in conjunction with rapid urbanization over the course of a century in Japan. In tracing this history, the argument in the chapter delineates the specific collective nature of the commuter train network vis-a-vis its technicity, thus laying the groundwork for discussions in subsequent chapters. The central claim is…
Conclusion
The conclusion reflects on the central themes and methods raised in the text while drawing a connection to current anxieties regarding technological development in Japan that emerged with the nuclear accident in Fukushima in 2011. In this regard, the discussion emphasizes the value of Tokyo’s commuter train network as medium with which to think both the limits and possibilities of human and machine relations for the future.
Chapter 4
Chapter four turns from matters of technicity to remediation through an exploration of convergences between the internet and the commuter train. Its principal concern is to understand how the internet thinks the space and time generated in the commuter train network’s margin of indeterminacy. The question draws attention to how the internet enables simulations of commuter space and time, and how in so doing, the internet encourages a shift from k…
Chapter 5
Chapter five embarks from within a forty-four minute gap opened within the margin of indeterminacy as a result of a commuter suicide. The central concern in the chapter is to understand how the commute collective attends to the challenge presented by the commuter suicide in general and, more specifically, the body on the tracks. While the former, it is shown, is treated within the collective as an event that threatens the network’s operational in…
Chapter 2
The second chapter further delineates the technicity of Tokyo’s commuter train collective by exploring the conditions within the commuter-train car. Specifically, it looks at how in learning to inhabit the commuter train network’s margin of indeterminacy commuters cultivate a deeply ingrained sensibility toward its modulating intensities while developing various strategies for negotiating its paradoxical mediations. In so doing, the chapter aims …
An Anthropology of the Machine
Regenerating Bodies
This article is an expanded commentary on the essay "The Social Life of 'Scaffolds': Examining Human Rights in Regenerative Medicine." In discussing the limits and possibilities of the essay, this commentary suggests that problematizing scaffolds in regenerative medicine as a kind of infrastructure rather than prosthetic opens the way for an understanding of the genesis of regenerative assemblages in ways that help to reframe inherent issues of h…
Human behavior or taphonomy? On the breakage of Eastern North American Paleoindian endscrapers
Japan’s Extreme Infrastructure
How have massive concrete walls become thinkable as resilient infrastructure for an extreme nature, and what will collective life become in the shadow of such concrete resilience? These questions hold increasing importance as cities and nations throughout the world contemplate the construction of giant concrete barriers to resist the forces of extreme weather and rising sea levels. This article turns to Japan’s ‘fortress-ification’ of its northea…
Stone tool backing and adhesion in hunting weaponry
Another tool in the experimental toolbox
Experimental archaeology continues to mature methodologically and theoretically. Around the world, practitioners are increasingly using modern materials that would have been unavailable to prehistoric people in archaeological experiments. The use of a modern material substitute can offer several benefits to experimental method, design, control, replicability, feasibility, and cost, but it should be directly compared to its “traditional” analogue …
Staging Encounters with the End in Pre-Apocalyptic-Post-3.11 Japan
his paper offers a critical engagement with endings in relation to formulations of crisis and futures through two sites that stage an encounter with the end. The first is the permanent exhibit at Japan's National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo. This site, I show, asks us to reflect on how we think about the end of civilisation as an immanent crisis to be overcome through an innovation that allows us to escape accountability fo…
Controlled comparative tensile tests of backed versus non‐backed edges’ adhesion
Backing is a procedure for retouching a stone tool edge to an angle of or near 90°. Archaeologists have recorded backed lithic specimens in the Pleistocene and Holocene around the world. One prominent hypothesis for the occurrence of backing is that it increases a stone tool's adhesion relative to what it would have otherwise been with unmodified, sharp edges. We conducted a highly controlled semi‐static tensile test in which we assessed lithic s…
Sociology (15 works) · Political science (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · History (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Art (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Japanese History and Culture (5 works) · Law (5 works)