Democracy's Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest after Apartheid
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Democracy's Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest after Apartheid
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Overview
In the past decade, South Africa's "miracle transition" has been interrupted by waves of protests in relation to basic services such as water and electricity. Less visibly, the post-apartheid period has witnessed widespread illicit acts involving infrastructure, including the nonpayment of service charges, the bypassing of metering devices, and illegal connections to services. Democracy’s Infrastructure shows how such administrative links to the state became a central political terrain during the antiapartheid struggle and how this terrain persists in the post-apartheid present. Focusing on conflicts surrounding prepaid water meters, Antina von Schnitzler examines the techno-political forms through which democracy takes shape.
Von Schnitzler explores a controversial project to install prepaid water meters in Soweto—one of many efforts to curb the nonpayment of service charges that began during the antiapartheid struggle—and she traces how infrastructure, payment, and technical procedures become sites where citizenship is mediated and contested. She follows engineers, utility officials, and local bureaucrats as they consider ways to prompt Sowetans to pay for water, and she shows how local residents and activists wrestle with the constraints imposed by meters. This investigation of democracy from the perspective of infrastructure reframes the conventional story of South Africa’s transition, foregrounding the less visible remainders of apartheid and challenging readers to think in more material terms about citizenship and activism in the postcolonial world.
Democracy’s Infrastructure examines how seemingly mundane technological domains become charged territory for struggles over South Africa’s political transformation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400882991 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/25/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology , #9 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 602 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Democracy's Infrastructure
Techno-Politics and Protest after Apartheid
By Antina von Schnitzler
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-8299-1
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
* * *
Democracy's Infrastructure, Apartheid's Debris
In July 2004, just over ten years after the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as South Africa's first democratically elected president, a violent protest occurred in Diepsloot, a mostly informal township settlement inhabited by about 150,000 residents north of Johannesburg. Trash cans were overturned, sewage spilled in the streets, two council offices were burned, and the major road leading to the wealthier suburbs was blockaded with burning tires. Cars that dared to drive past were pelted with stones. The police responded with massive force, deploying water cannons, stun grenades and rubber bullets. The entire settlement was blocked off and designated a crime scene, a blanket indictment reminiscent of apartheid policing tactics during the 1980s. For three days, only minibus taxis were allowed in and out of the area, while journalists and other onlookers were barred from entry.
One of the first large-scale violent expressions of discontent in the postapartheid period, the protest caught government officials, politicians, and the police off guard. It also starkly interrupted the nation-wide celebrations of ten years of democracy that had begun three months earlier. Most immediately, it was unclear how the protest should be handled and by whom. Senior police officers deployed in the area appealed to the provincial government arguing that this was a "political situation" that required the intervention of the ANC-led government. The provincial minister for housing, Nomvula Mokonyane, countered that residents were involved in "criminal acts," which, as such, she maintained, were the responsibility of the police. This initial interpretive quarrel already hinted at the incomprehension and bewilderment the protests had caused amongst government officials and public commentators alike. Although many within the ANC establishment had been quick to dismiss previous, smaller demonstrations as staged by "ultraleftists" or disgruntled former party members, given its scale and intensity, the situation in Diepsloot was left in an interpretive vacuum for days. Who were the protesters, and how could residents be so ready to resort to violence and destroy public infrastructures? Through what interpretive grids could protest in the postapartheid period be rendered intelligible?
Initial media accounts of the protesters as irrational, faceless mobs soon gave way to interpretations translating them into more familiar vocabularies. As a media report by a prominent journalist put it, clearly in an effort to render Diepsloot and its predicament legible to his largely middle-class readership, the township was "not much like a luxury holiday resort" and could only be described as a "sprawling, dusty, rubbish-strewn area." This characterization, of course, described many places in South Africa and could not fully explain the situation. Meanwhile, government and ANC commentators cast the demonstrations in conspiratorial terms, arguing that the protesters had been incited by "outside forces" with criminal or even counterrevolutionary intent. Others suggested that the protesters had yet to learn the proper codes for civic engagement in a liberal democracy. Eventually, President Thabo Mbeki himself publicly deplored the residents' lack of patience and understanding of the functioning of democracy. The protests thus also became an occasion to dispel latent anxieties over postapartheid state legitimacy and the rule of law by forcefully reasserting the state's monopoly on violence; at issue here too was a battle over the intelligibility of state authority (Roitman 2005). Casting the protests as criminal rather than political acts served to transcend such uncertainties and re-established boundaries around the shape of legitimate civic behavior.
The Diepsloot protest, as an event, shook the public imagination, precisely because it posed a challenge to the very project of postapartheid "transition." Indeed, the protest challenged not merely a particular policy or a specific local councilor; more fundamentally, it challenged the dominant imaginary of South Africa's liberal democracy, in which the political domain is clearly delimited, where violence is the prerogative of the state, in which citizens have "channels" of communication, and where a thriving public sphere provides the location for deliberation and debate. Thus, the protest could be seen as not merely a moment of opposition, but as an instance of what Rancière (1999) calls "disagreement," that is, a challenge to the very terms and assumptions of an existing political language game. Perhaps most glaringly, the protests exposed the growing chasm between the ANC-led government and many poor residents of informal settlements and townships, and the declining capacity of the nationalist language of liberation to rein in discontents.
The standoff was eventually brought under control by a mix of police repression and attempts at conciliatory meetings with residents, but Diepsloot was only the spectacular beginning of a series of protests all over the country that would continue in the years to come. Year after year since then, demonstrations, "riots" and public violence have preoccupied state officials and the public imagination. Various initiatives to address them have been unable to stem the tide of discontents. By 2013, police statistics showed a massive incidence of protests while many journalists regularly called South Africa the "protest capital" of the world. Two years later, in 2015, the Gauteng Premier announced that the province was setting up "war rooms" in each municipality to deal with the protests directly.
Over time, the term "service delivery protest" has come into common usage, often entirely independent of the form or content of such protests. "Delivery," the fetishized goal of the immediate postapartheid period, conjures up histories of unfulfilled expectations for transformation, but also narrowly circumscribes the terms through which such protests can be understood. Framed in this way, the protests become simple, if perhaps "unreasonable" and "impatient," claims for material resources from the state, often linked to an assumed, deeply embedded "culture of entitlement" amongst residents of townships and informal settlements.
Less often remarked upon is the striking form many of these protests take and the centrality of infrastructure as both object and medium of making claims on the state: protesters have spilled sewage and rubbish in the streets, destroyed water tanks, blocked roads, and ripped out pipes and meters; indeed, it is often this feature that leads many commentators to see such protests as "irrational" outbursts. Less visibly, the postapartheid period has also been defined by widespread illicit acts involving infrastructures, such as the nonpayment of service charges, the bypassing, tampering, or destruction of water and electricity meters, and illegal connections to services. Such protests and popular illegalities often uncannily resemble the tactics of the antiapartheid struggle. Yet, today, they lack the political languages of liberation that authorized and gave them meaning in the past. In the absence of such larger narratives, nonpayment, illegal reconnections, and violent protests are often framed by officials and the media as irrational, amoral, or criminal acts. Thus, they become the responsibility of the courts and a diverse array of experts, including engineers, utility officials, or local bureaucrats.
If violent protest is often indexical, an effort to "gain visibility" and to render "palpable" questions and concerns for which there is no space in the public sphere (Zizek 2007: 53), this book explores the terrain which these protests periodically catapult into the public imagination. As a political spectacle, the Diepsloot protest and its reception pointed to the gulf that divided the location of formal politics from a seemingly apolitical administrative terrain that makes up the experiential reality of many, especially poor, South Africans. If the normative domain of postliberation politics and civil society is located in spaces such as media and party offices or parliamentary and city council debates, everyday experiences of the state are often primarily shaped by waiting lists for housing, latent threats of evictions or forced removals, leaking pipes, inaccessible infrastructures, illicit electricity connections, intermittent and unreliable incomes, disability grant and indigency applications, and frequently unresponsive councilors and ward committees. This precarious terrain is connected to the state primarily via administrative bodies and is subject to their actions and discretionary powers, ranging from modest care to abject neglect and, at times, capricious intervention. These are places whose primary connections to the state are mediated by police, courts, utility officials, local bureaucrats, and, as I will elaborate in the chapters that follow, by technical-administrative devices such as meters, pipes, wires, and official documents and certifications. Here, as in many poor townships and informal settlements in South Africa, residents come into contact with and are interpellated by the state not only as citizens, but also, and often primarily, as members of "population," entangled in administrative relations and procedures and the objects of governmental care or neglect (Chatterjee 2004).
This book explores how such administrative links to the state became a central political terrain during the antiapartheid struggle and how this terrain persists in the postapartheid present. Infrastructures, fiscal relations, and judicial procedures thus emerge as sites in which the ethical and political questions once central to the antiapartheid struggle continue to be mediated, negotiated, and at times contested. In the paradoxical context of "liberation and liberalization" (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001), in which citizenship has been extended to an unprecedented number of people at the same time as the entitlements conferred by citizenship are often in question, I examine the techno-political forms and registers in which contemporary conflicts unfold and in which claims on the state are expressed. Given that the normative locations of politics are often de facto inaccessible to many poorer township residents and shack dwellers, this book attends to a politics that takes shape in less visible locations and in often unfamiliar technical forms. I explore this techno-political terrain conceptually, historically, and ethnographically, not only in order to understand the rise of protest in South Africa in more open-ended terms, but also because this terrain provides a productive vantage point onto a number of broader questions concerning formations of postapartheid citizenship, modes of narrating historical transformation, and conceptions of the political.
Below, I map the larger concerns that animate this book and the critical historical and conceptual problem-space in which my narrative unfolds. The next section introduces the small piece of infrastructure that became the lens of my ethnographic and historical research. I then provide a theoretical discussion of the concept of techno-politics developed in this book. The second half of this chapter sketches the paradoxical historical moment of the "transition" and its aftermath, which is the intellectual and political horizon against which the questions I ask throughout have taken shape and become intelligible.
THE SOCIAL LIFE OF A PREPAID METER
The chapters that follow explore a range of larger questions — about citizenship, social obligation, and the political — by historically and ethnographically following the life of a small device: a prepaid water meter. A prepaid meter is a device, which, apart from measuring networked services such as electricity, gas, or water, automatically disconnects users in cases of nonpayment. In order to access services, users have to purchase and load up credit tokens in advance, either by entering a numerical code or by using a magnetic key or card. Failure to do so results in immediate "self-disconnection." While the meter is one of many increasingly sophisticated infrastructure technologies that mediate access to flows of goods, information, and money in many places of the world today, it is also a distinctly South African thing. First deployed during the 1980s to help combat the antiapartheid rent boycotts, in the past two decades, and in a context of ongoing mass nonpayment and neoliberal reforms prescribing "cost recovery," prepaid meters have become ubiquitous, making South Africa the place with the largest number of installed prepaid meters in the world. Although prepaid meters are increasingly also being installed in middle-class homes, where they are often preferred to untrustworthy municipal bills, for now the meters are primarily deployed in poorer, historically black townships and informal settlements. Beyond the by now standard prepaid cell phones, most residents in places like Phiri, Soweto, where I carried out much of my research, are now connected to electricity and often water via prepayment devices. "Living prepaid," with often only temporary access to services and flows of water or electricity punctuated periodically by cutoffs, has thus become an increasingly normal condition for many poorer residents of informal settlements and townships.
Living prepaid mirrors life in a moment in which income has become precarious, where reliance on a regular monthly wage is the exception rather than the norm. Here, payment for basic services is no longer shaped by the cyclical temporality of regularly recurring monthly salaries and bills; instead, income as well as payment is often incremental and ad hoc. The increasing deployment of prepaid meters — and the end of monthly utility bills this entails — thus reflects larger temporal and experiential shifts in which access to services is unstable and where the threat of automatic disconnection due to nonpayment is always present.
Beyond structuring life temporally, the meters are also semiotic instruments aimed at shaping behavior, enforcing metrological scrutiny, and curtailing consumption. While the threat of cutoff is what makes many residents object to prepaid meters, it is paradoxically also this ability to prevent debts from accumulating that often makes them attractive. Prepaid meters, in this sense, are technologies of precarity that reflect the multiple dilemmas and vicissitudes of life after the "end of the salary" (Mbembe and Roitman 1996). Thus, they provide a window onto larger shifts in experiences of time, consumption, and life after formal employment.
Today, prepaid meters have become the normal state of affairs for many and are most often an unremarkable aspect of daily life. And yet, as I elaborate in this book, the meters continue to be unruly, periodically becoming the subject of public debate, protest, and legal action. They are also often bypassed or "bridged" by residents, making the meters useless and giving residents free access to services. Here, a technical politics develops involving engineers and residents in a battle over securing and bypassing the devices.
My focus on the prepaid meter as both an ethnographic object and an analytic vantage point is in part due to this ubiquity and political salience in South Africa. When I arrived in Johannesburg to begin my fieldwork, prepaid water meters were what most preoccupied social movement activists, affected Soweto residents, and what drew the attention of the media. However, beyond their ubiquity and political visibility, I focus on the meters also because of their peculiar techno-political history. As I explore in Chapter 4, the prepaid meter was first invented in nineteenth-century Britain to extend gas to the working classes. Then called "penny-in-the-slot-meter," it became integrated within the larger Victorian project of moral reform and working class "improvement." In the 1980s, the prepaid meter was appropriated and redeveloped in South Africa by apartheid-era engineers as a technical tool to counter the antiapartheid "rent boycotts." Renamed the "Budget Energy Controller," and used primarily for electricity, it was deployed, in the words of one apartheid-era bureaucrat I spoke to, as a "political technology" that was specifically designed to break the boycotts. It is this techno-political history of the meter in the late-apartheid period that has ironically turned South Africa into a global industry leader in the development of prepayment technology and one of its primary exporters in the aftermath of apartheid.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Democracy's Infrastructure by Antina von Schnitzler. Copyright © 2016 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixChapter 1 Introduction 1
Democracy’s Infrastructure, Apartheid’s Debris
Chapter 2 The “Discipline of Freedom” 31
Neoliberalism, Translation, and Techno-Politics after the 1976 Soweto Uprising
Chapter 3 After the Rent Boycotts 65 Infrastructure and the Politics of Payment
Chapter 4 The Making of a Techno-Political Device 105
Chapter 5 Measuring Life 132
Living Prepaid and the Politics of Numbers after Apartheid
Chapter 6 Performing Dignity 168
Human Rights and the Legal Politics of Water
Conclusion 196
Infrastructure, Democracy, and the Postapartheid Political Terrain
References 203
Index 233
What People are Saying About This
"Why does protest in contemporary South Africa focus on seemingly apolitical things such as leaky pipes and water meters? What do these inconspicuous infrastructures tell us about the state's attempt to fashion new democratic citizens? Grounded in deep ethnography, von Schnitzler's book is an imaginative work about the everyday technologies and popular illegalities that form postapartheid life in South Africa."—Brian Larkin, author of Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria"Democracy's Infrastructure takes an incisive, illuminating look at the technopolitics of water in South Africa. Through close and careful observation, this book reveals how specific technological mechanisms enable and constrain government projects, and how forms of measurement and pricing shape new, market-oriented subjects. This is a major contribution, one that joins the study of social movements and political resistance to the new anthropology of infrastructure in an entirely convincing way."—James Ferguson, author of Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution"Using the example of the prepaid water meter as a starting point, this richly interdisciplinary book explores the politics of infrastructure in post-apartheid South Africa. Its argument is built on extensive primary research combined with a thorough grounding in a wide range of existing literature."—Matthew Gandy, University of Cambridge"A theoretically savvy account of how the distribution of prepaid technologies in apartheid South Africa dovetailed with the emergence of new forms of neoliberal governance, Democracy's Infrastructure shows how technology continues to animate life there today. One of the most innovative post-apartheid studies in recent years, this is required reading for those interested in understanding the complexities of the South African democratic transition."—Steven Robins, University of Stellenbosch