Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological literature that seeks to theorize infrastructure by drawing on biopolitics, science and technology studies, and theories of technopolitics. I also examine other dimensions of infrastructures that release different meanings and structure politics in various ways: through the aesthetic and the sensorial, desire and promise.

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The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure

This collection of essays, based on the Locke Lectures that Nagel delivered at Oxford University in 1990, addresses the conflict between the claims of the group and those of the individual. Nagel attempts to clarify the nature of the conflict - one of the most fundamental problems in moral and political theory - and concludes that its reconciliation is the essential task of any legitimate political system.

Equality and Partiality.

The publication of Michel Foucault’s lectures at the College de France in the late 1970s has provided new insight into crucial developments in his late work, including the return to an analysis of the state and the introduction of biopolitics as a central theme. According to one dominant interpretation, these shifts did not entail a fundamental methodological break; the approach Foucault developed in his work on knowledge/power was simply applied to new objects. The present article argues that this reading — which is colored by the overwhelming privilege afforded to Discipline and Punish in secondary literature — obscures an important modification in Foucault’s method and diagnostic style that occurred between the introduction of biopolitics in 1976 (in Society Must Be Defended) and the lectures of 1978 ( Security, Territory, Population) and 1979 (Birth of Biopolitics). Foucault’s initial analysis of biopolitics was couched in surprisingly epochal and totalizing claims about the characteristic forms of po...

Topologies of Power: Foucault’s Analysis of Political Government beyond ‘Governmentality’

Neo-liberal urban planning policies: A literature survey 1990–2010

Part of the difficulty in pinning down trust in government may stem not only from the amorphous characteristics of trust but also from the equally vague characteristics of government. Accordingly, systematized approaches to understanding trust in government are likely to be incomplete if they are only applied to trust and not government as well. This study attempts to build upon existing attempts to pin down characteristics of trust in government by deconstructing the terms trust and government and assessing the relationships among the various components within South Korea. To analyze the determinants of trust in governments, the present research performs multiple regression analyses of The Social Trust Public Opinion Survey (2004) focusing on the current trust level across society, market, institution, and government. Our findings indicate that the significance of different determinants of trust varies by area of government. These findings add to existing literature in the field as they imply assessments of trust in government are better made when they address specific offices or branches of the government.

Trust in Government

Since the first general elections in 1994, the post-apartheid state has been faced by widespread non-payment of service charges in townships, often interpreted as a ‘culture of non-payment’ held to stem from the anti-apartheid rent boycotts of the 1980s. After the spectacular failure of a campaign to encourage payment for services, and in a context of neoliberal reforms prescribing ‘cost recovery’, many municipalities resorted to the large-scale deployment of prepaid meters, devices that self-disconnect households following non-payment. This article focuses on Operation Gcin'amanzi (Zulu for ‘Save Water’), a controversial large-scale project initiated by the recently corporatised utility, Johannesburg Water, to install prepaid water meters in all Soweto households. Taking this project and the protests against it as a point of departure, I trace the history of prepayment technology in South Africa from its initial development as a depoliticising device in the context of the rent boycotts, to its present de...

Citizenship Prepaid: Water, Calculability, and Techno-Politics in South Africa*

Democracy's Infrastructure

In this article, I explore the politics of infrastructure in South Africa by focusing on the “travels” of a small technical device. Since the end of apartheid, prepaid meters have been widely deployed in South Africa's townships to curb the nonpayment of service charges. Yet many residents have bypassed their meters, enabling them to illicitly access electricity or water. I track the micro-political battle between residents tinkering with the technology and engineers trying to secure it, arguing that infrastructure itself becomes a political terrain for the negotiation of central ethical and political questions concerning civic virtue and the shape of citizenship. To investigate this techno-political terrain, I trace a genealogy of the meter from Victorian Britain, when it was invented as a tool of working-class “moral improvement,” to the late-apartheid period, when it was re-assembled as a device of counterinsurgency against the anti-apartheid “rent boycotts.” In each moment, I suggest, the meter was harnessed to distinct ethical regimes and political projects. Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork with engineers in contemporary South Africa, I explore the semiotic-material work required to make the device functional in the post-apartheid moment. Tracing the travels of a small technical device across time and space, I argue, opens up conceptual space to rethink the relationship between ethics, politics, and technics.

TRAVELING TECHNOLOGIES: Infrastructure, Ethical Regimes, and the Materiality of Politics in South Africa

Democracy's Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest after Apartheid

Since the end of apartheid, rights-based languages of human dignity have often been central to articulating state obligation and making claims on the state in South Africa. In this article, I explore this moral–legal politics by focusing on a legal case brought against the City of Johannesburg by five Soweto residents on the basis of their constitutionally guaranteed right to water. Examining the epistemologies and evidentiary practices on which it was built, the debates and protests that surrounded it, and the residents’ informal articulations of their discontents, I use the legal case as a lens to explore how the political terrain has been transformed in South Africa in the context of this rise of human rights and the law as languages and modalities of politics. Thus, I explore how citizenship—as a set of techniques, imaginaries, and practices—is refashioned via languages of humanity, and I highlight the ambivalent ethical and political effects of this shift.

Antina von Schnitzler

Papers

Citizenship Prepaid: Water, Calculability, and Techno-Politics in South Africa*

Democracy's Infrastructure

TRAVELING TECHNOLOGIES: Infrastructure, Ethical Regimes, and the Materiality of Politics in South Africa

Democracy's Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest after Apartheid

Performing dignity: Human rights, citizenship, and the techno-politics of law in South Africa