TRAVELING TECHNOLOGIES: Infrastructure, Ethical Regimes, and the Materiality of Politics in South Africa
TRAVELING TECHNOLOGIES: Infrastructure, Ethical Regimes, and the Materiality of Politics in South Africa
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旅游技术：南非的基础设施、道德制度和政治的重要性
DOI：
10.1111/cuan.12032
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发表时间：
2013
影响因子：
1.9
通讯作者：
Antina von Schnitzler
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Antina von Schnitzler
在这篇文章中，我通过关注一个小型技术设备的“旅行”来探索南非基础设施的政治。自种族隔离结束以来，预付费电表已在南非的城镇广泛部署，以遏制不支付服务费的现象。然而，许多居民绕过了他们的电表，使他们能够非法获得电力或水。我跟踪居民修补技术和工程师试图确保它之间的微观政治斗争，认为基础设施本身成为一个政治领域的谈判的核心伦理和政治问题，有关公民美德和公民的形状。为了研究这个技术政治领域，我追溯了从维多利亚时代的英国，当它被发明作为工人阶级“道德改善”的工具时，到种族隔离后期，当它被重新组装作为反叛乱的反种族隔离“租金抵制”的装置时，仪表的家谱。在每一个时刻，我认为，米是利用不同的道德制度和政治项目。借鉴我与当代南非工程师的民族志实地考察，我探索了在后种族隔离时代使设备发挥作用所需的符号材料工作。我认为，追踪一个小型技术设备在时间和空间上的旅行，开辟了重新思考伦理、政治和技术之间关系的概念空间。
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.