Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [41]
This inbuilt complicity pervades the negotiation of all relations of power in Rome. The apparent impunity of high officials of the church illuminates two of the most important dimensions of this dynamic. First, even the most elevated prelate-and, by extension, the most powerful and apparently incorruptible public servant-cannot be presumed innocent, since all human beings are subject to temptation and none are capable of resisting it absolutely. Second, repeated acquittals-significantly, defendants who are acquitted are "absolved" (assolti) in Italian-reinforce already existing power. To take a secular example, senator-for-life Giulio Andreotti, seven times prime minister during the post-World War II years, was acquitted on charges of conspiring in a political assassination.35 One of his bitterest local critics in Monti admitted that there was simply not enough evidence, and that, because that evidence had all been provided by recanting (pentiti3C ) mafiosi, it could not stand up to the imposing distinction and imperturbable self-confidence of this national leader (a man, not coincidentally, of welladvertised religiosity). They might, said his critic, have been able to do it to "some other kind of person" (un'antra persona)-a clear indication, this, that accountability has less to do with what happened, or even with what people think happened, than with the relative social position of the players. Thus, an elderly lady of rightist views (and a former student of Fascist-era anthropology) declared that Andreotti was far too intelligent to have been mixed up in such affairs, whereas she could believe anything of the late Socialist leader Bettino Craxi. Blame and exoneration emerge from hierarchy, ideology, and the situation of the moment, not from justice in an abstractly civic sense. Romans also understand that, as a hardware store proprietor wife sagely observed, politics is "the art of the possible" (1'arte del possibile).
But this attitude may also favor accommodation-or surrender-to external powers, notably the economic forces that increasingly bear on city management. The resulting changes have an inevitable impact on the prevailing sense of temporality. In particular, the new civic order requires a form of accounting that is less embedded in social experience than in a theory of management by measurement-what one group of anthropologists has aptly called "audit culture.i37 Such a system may be no more able than others to regulate people's sincerity than is the penitential rite of confession, although its rhetoric may suggest otherwise 38 In Rome it finds a precedent in the precise accounting whereby a penitent's time in Purgatory is reduced through indulgences and pious acts signifying contrition. But it parts company from local perceptions in rejecting the idea that human imperfection makes compromise a necessity and deferring perfection to an eternal afterlife, aiming instead to create an aridly ideal-typical society in real time.
This managerial ideology treats eternity in a very different fashion. Instead of glorying in the partly rotten and forever pulsating fabric of society and architecture, it aims to fix cultural form for all time. It arrests and dissolves the process of material corruption and claims, speciously, to abolish political corruption as well). Above all, it routinizes the management of blame and responsibility, reducing ethics to a numerical audit and history to an aseptic chronicle of names and dates. Rome's eternity, thus managerially reformatted, is reduced to a taxonomic device that spreads classification across the ground in the form of fences and labels. By defying the corrosive passage of time, it parts company from Catholic doctrine and social experience, since it opposes to both the hubris of permanent preservation. To achieve that goal, either it must expel the present inhabitants (messy