Modes, Mods, and Modesty: The Semiotics of Power Disconnection in Urban Africa

• In Event: Materiality, Meaning, Agency & Value - I

Abstract

In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, patrol teams dispatched by the national power utility Tanesco draw a distinction between disconnected households that surreptitiously reconnect through the meter, and those that simply bypass it. Drawing on a mixture of Maussian and semiotic literatures, this paper builds on this ethnographic case to offer a reading of the power network in which citizens (1) usually interpret its components (utility poles, wires, meters, current) as tokens of an underlying social relation with the state but (2) sometimes phenomenologically bracket them as ‘mere’ objects whose technical affordances can be freely repurposed. Between these two poles lies a zone of modification in which components can be altered in ways that strain and potentially transform their underlying meaning. Manifesting what many Tanzanians call ujanja, or cleverness, this zone shows the power network to be virtual space structured by the modal interplay of possibility and necessity, prohibition and permission. In semiotic terms, cleverness entails reflexively iterating the range of sign-interpretant relations that correspond to an object within a given ontology.

Author

• Michael Degani, Johns Hopkins University