"The body, enlightened by electricity, was not docile, but ecstatic." 
 -- James Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders 

In the 2005 French action film District B13, in which Luc Besson offers up a merely vehicular script through which to showcase the spectacular acrobatics of Paris's (more accurately, the banlieues [suburbs] of Paris's) newest offering to choreographed martial-artistry, parkour, a cop, Damien (Cyril Rafaelli), and a badass banlieusard called Leïto (David Belle) square off in an abandoned factory in a Paris ghetto. The cop shouts his abstract allegiance to the state: "Liberté, fraternité, égalité!" The ghetto youth responds with his material allegiance to the city's decaying slums: "Eau, gaz, électricité!" The battle begins, rages awesomely, and then ends in an alliance between the two characters when they realize, in the middle of the action, that they are on the same side after all, that the ideals of liberty, brotherhood, and freedom need to be unified with the material infrastructure of water, gas, and electricity for the ideals to have any real weight or meaning. The scene is a perfect reduction of the problem this 

essay addresses, the essential tension between democratization and modernization and, in particular, the status within global modernity of what I call, a little inexactly, public utilities: water, gas, and electricity.