Transparency Instrumentality

LETICIA BARRERA

Chicago, Illinois

Congreso; Law and Society Association; 2010

Law and Society Association

In the context of political instability following the 2001/2002 economic crisis in Argentina, public skepticism in political and legal institutions gained momentum merging with enduring critiques about the workings of the Argentine judicial system. Issues such as transparency, accountability, and legal predictability rapidly moved to the top of the political agenda, advanced in particular by NGOs. In response, a set of “transparency regulations” were adopted by the Argentine Supreme Court alongside a discourse of change, accessibility and openness to public scrutiny. Transparency, as encountered in my field, appeared both as means and end: the rubric of good governance fostered by the reformist discourse, and the way that private and institutional actors sought to advance the legal reform agenda and to gain legitimacy beyond the legal community. Based on ethnographic data collected within Argentina´s Supreme Court and among Argentine NGOs, this paper elaborates on the means-ends relationship that transparency entails, taking transparency as an object of performance, of my subjects´ performance. As a performative device, transparency reveals itself as polysemic and indexical, rather than the just apparently apolitical principle that prompts visibility, accountability and predictability. In other words, transparency, like accounts, may be assumed to further different meanings for different audiences (Carruthers 2002; Grossman, Luque and Muniesa 2008). In using transparency as an analytical tool, a means to make persons and relations ethnographically visible, this paper inquires into the mediations and representations upon which transparency calls. In doing so, I also seek to articulate a more dynamic legal-political field for critique, and to offer a different approach to legal forms and practices; one that shifts the analysis away from the rhetoric of “speaking truth to power” (Kennedy 2004) that pervades conventional socio-legal critique in Argentina.