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 (Reference Hartman2007: 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 efficiency and fiscal sustainability. In the poorest sections of Soweto, the result often was diminished access to water as residents had to painfully choose how to balance meagre financial resources with a multiplicity of urgent needs and life-or-death emergencies.

The book's true protagonist is the prepaid water meter, a vessel allowing neoliberalism to travel to South Africa by recoding the country's history of struggle into a present of personal responsibility for the sake of nation-building. It does so by tackling the internal contradiction of the neoliberal project – its presupposition of universal, market-oriented conducts in culturally specific contexts – by operating as a pedagogical tool for calculating individuals sagaciously weighing needs against assets. At stake is a transition from a ‘modernist’ politics of ideologically driven struggles to emerging ‘life strategies’ on the precarious boundary between survival and collective agency. It is at this point that the author's neglect of blackness, which remains South Africa's overwhelming context of poverty and punitive governance, fatally undermines the book's architecture.

Von Schnitzler provides extensive theoretical and bibliographic coverage to many aspects of her socio-technical assemblages, from neoliberalism to public management, from political conceptualisations of citizenship and belonging to the subtleties of signification. Yet, she completely ignores critical theories of race and Black authors, for example Simone Browne (Reference Browne2015), who forcefully argue that it is not possible to write the history of modern infrastructures without grounding it in the longue durée of the surveillance and objectification of blackness. For a book that repeatedly alludes to overlapping temporalities and the unresolved legacies of the past, this is a major flaw.

Environmental theorist Diana Leong (Reference Leong2016) shows that the denial of privatised water in the African American communities of Detroit is isomorphic with the hydropolitics of rationing on slave ships. In both cases, the wheels of financial capital are oiled by Black disposability, not citizenship or subjectivity, and by the denial of human relationality, rather than changing social contracts. Similarly, the words of technocrats and experts quoted by von Schnitzler drip with racism. Under the thin crust of economic rationalism, they have an unmistakable enslavist and colonial aftertaste. One gloats that, thanks to the prepaid meters’ impersonal numerical logic, he does not have to ‘feel sorry for the poor’ anymore. Others praise the meters’ imperviousness to the ‘impolite’ and unreasonable self-destructiveness of township dwellers ‘stealing’ municipal water. Von Schnitzler substantially relies on such expert opinions in encapsulating the novelty of corporatised infrastructure. She does not, however, wonder how they resonate along a Black temporality that well pre-dates the passage from ‘late apartheid’ to neoliberalism. When local residents bring prepaid metering to court, persistent racial discrimination is the key ethical ground for their legal challenge; it is on this ground that a judge initially vindicates their case, a decision ultimately reversed, since the complainants’ suffering is deemed not as extreme as historically expected from those who are black and poor.

So, why isn't such a blatant recurrence of raciality as a ‘strategy of power’, in Denise da Silva's (Reference Da Silva2007) words, part of the book's ideational, affective and technical assemblages? If anything, von Schnitzler repeatedly reassures her readers that neoliberal individualisation implies a move to a post-racial era, despite the evident interlocking of poverty, distress and antiblackness her own interviewees lament. When describing the gut-wrenching testimony of Sofia Malekutu, von Schnitzler introduces her as a ‘poor elderly woman’. Being Black – a position encompassing the youth and the old, males and females, the destitute and the not-so-poor – is made inessential to her grammar of suffering. One starts hearing the voices of residents only in the final quarter of the book, after its conceptual scaffolding of agency, citizenship and subjectivity has either obscured antiblackness as a specific paradigm of subjection or pushed its pained self-awareness to the sidelines. It almost goes without saying that, in South Africa's ethnographic ‘case’, the ‘poor’ – invoked as place-specific members of abstract globe-spanning collectivities (‘postcolonial subjects’, ‘subaltern actors’, denizens of the ‘global South’) – must also be Black. Blackness is for von Schnitzler so obviously hypervisible that it does not warrant any theoretical reflection, scholarly dialogue or ethico-political emphasis.

The book’ chronopolitics has a lot to do with its faults. Von Schnitzler's break between a ‘modernist’ colonial and apartheid governance of race and post-racial neoliberal individualization is schematic and overstated. One can find public exhortations to black consumerism and family-oriented personal ethos – evidence, for von Schnitzler, of the contemporary neoliberal zeitgeist – in native administrators’ affidavits before the 1904 Transvaal Labour Commission. Defining Black targets of the state's action as singular or collective entities is of little consequence to the far more substantial question of how liberal political economy has used both categorisations in its repressive positioning of Black objects, not subjects, in the wake of colonial conquest and white rule. Saidiya Hartman, a representative of the Black scholarship von Schnitzler disregards, documented how liberalism thwarted Black agency following ‘travestied’ emancipations, a theme Christina Sharpe (Reference Sharpe2010) and Tiffany Willoughby-Herard (Reference Willoughby-Herard2015) have specifically probed in southern Africa.

The book ends with a meditation on legalism as a terrain for ‘the poor’ to make claims on the state. Following the general tone of her argument, von Schnitzler strives to define political possibilities amidst the constraints of judicial litigation. But, at this point, the implications of legal protocols with the structurally violent politics of, as Sharpe writes, the ‘ongoing disasters’ of global antiblackness are decidedly out of the frame.