ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about the technical micro-politics involving residents, engineers and utility officials in a seemingly perennial struggle over the enforcement and evasion of payment. The political theory has often paid little attention to the material, embodied or affective grounds of political action; indeed, the political has often been defined by its location in a public realm unconstrained by the “urgency of the life process”. The chapter explores how the techno-political terrain is fashioned in contemporary South Africa. It describes a technical war of position in which minute technical innovations become crucial tactical moves dependent on engineers’ capacity to mobilise local knowledge and interpretive skill. Tracking the travels of the technical devices and ethnographically following the work of neutral technical mediators' inscription may thus enable us to “describe” a politics in unfamiliar places and in unexpected forms.
