Producing Democracy away from Consumption: Private Security Guards in Nairobi, Kenya

• In Event: Knowing Democracy

Abstract

Private security guards tasked with moving cash around the city of Nairobi, Kenya, are constantly lifting, counting, and handling cash, a property of the state. This association with state property and the maintenance work of a public infrastructure gives the guards access to the power that comes from mass subjectivity, a public. At the same time, the discourse surrounding the ideal of a public sphere encourages state agents like cash-in-transit guards, to disassociate themselves from things of the state. Administrators in the Nairobi city county offices, for example, run projects with the aim of separating state agents, like politicians, from things of the state, like land, and private guards from public space.
STS has helped move studies of democracy and political representation away from typical separations between people and things. But the production of knowledge of how to move past these separations has led to a sometimes-narrow focus on the immediate access to mass subjectivity that comes with consumption and the re-appropriation of symbols and display. The aim is to broaden the kinds of approaches we have to political representation given the fact that in the past they have been so closed down by the idealized separations between people and things. Data is offered on how infrastructural arrangements around cash present opportunities for new political subjectivities as well as how different objects and their infrastructures offer grounds for different political orders.

Author

• Nathan Dobson