Che Guevara, who once spoke hard truths, now a popular consumer-cultural icon. Flickr/Emanuele. Some rights reserved.
Impunity is not simply a juridical, technical problem, or some sort of loophole in the law that lawyers, politicians, bureaucrats, and activists can close with greater effort. Impunity lies at the heart of a dispositive that encompasses, neutralizes and even recuperates almost all attempts to redress it. We have come to this disturbing realization on the basis of both empirical and theoretical attempts to understand how contemporary legal, political or civil-society practices run the risk, despite their benevolence, of falling into the propagandistic rhetoric, social conformism and bureaucratic indifference that feed impunity.
In his book The Social Production of Indifference Michael Herzfeld provides an especially interesting interpretation of the symbolic roots of modern western bureaucracy, which, he argues, is not result of a process of rationalization. Bureaucracy, whose role is so central to contemporary societies, seems to Herzfeld to be quite distant from–and almost stands in contradiction to–the foundations on which our contemporary world has been built. Contrary to commonly held opinion, bureaucracy does not create responsibility through clear hierarchies of command, but rather indifference and ‘deresponsabilization’. The circle of deresponsabilization is presented as a sort of fatalist theology, where bureaucracy becomes a system that constantly legitimizes its own behaviour precisely by shifting blame from one part of itself to another in a Kafkaesque manner that calls for bureaucracy’s reinforcement as an antidote to its own failings.
