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Democracy's Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest after Apartheid by Antina von Schnitzler Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press , 2016. Pp. xii, 238. £22·95 (pbk).
Reviews
Corralling Black people with razor wire is an enduring feature of South Africa's institutional liturgy. It has been performed during conflicts and negotiations, repression and healing, under every regime. The striking mineworkers at Marikana were thus contained, before being shot by the police in 2012. Frank Wilderson, recalls, in his award-winning Incognegro, a massacre, well into the transition to democracy, of ANC supporters at a squatter camp. The army encircled the site with razor wire, after cutting access to water trucks, with the aim of preventing outsiders' access.
In a country, like South Africa, defined by gratuitous state violence on, and dereliction of, Black lives, is razor wire part of 'infrastructure'? How do utilities of death overlap with local services - water, electricity, sanitation - deemed to assist life? How does the articulation of bureaucratic management of water and police management of space specifically shape Black existence? Does it place South Africa within the 'afterlife of slavery', a global reality of, in Saidiya Hartman's (2007: 6) words, 'skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment'? Are infrastructures of citizenship and belonging clearly demarcated from structures of Black endangerment and fungibility? One should expect a scholarly study of South Africa's techno-politics of governance and resistance to address persistent racial hierarchies and antiblackness. Yet such questions are completely elided in Antina von Schnitzler's Democracy's Infrastructure.
The book analyses the restructuring of municipal services in post-apartheid Johannesburg by focusing on the introduction of corporate management principles and techniques, chiefly 'prepaid meters', forcing users to purchase water before consumption. For von Schnitzler such developments reveal a shift toward neoliberal assemblages of devices, ideologies, policies and subjectivities, displacing rights-bearing citizens with individualised customers. While rooted in the late-apartheid conversion to free-market economics, these measures blossomed in the post-1994 dispensation, which addressed Black social expectations by depoliticising them into administrative and technical problems of...