Struggles and Breaches: Bureaucratization as the Site of Enunciation of the Political

As the examples of asylum seekers, the politics of compassion, research, and standards have suggested, bureaucratization is not something external to society. It unfolds through the actors who are targeted by it and who, consciously or not, play an active part in this process. The neoliberal art of government operates through the intermediary of individuals who, as we have seen, are a fundamental and paradoxical cog in the production of indifference. It is this sense in which we can say that what we are witnessing is not a bureaucratization “from on high,” but a much wider and more complex process of “bureaucratic participation.”1 This participation stems from different processes, but these all converge to shape bureaucratization.