Surveillance policy was compromised by the sentry guards meant to enforce it

Evidence

While bringing to light the problems inherent in writing the text was intended to argue that texts do not write themselves, stressing the problems of reading the text, on the other hand, served to argue that laws and regulations also do not implement themselves; they need an agency for their verbal content to be translated into tangible reality. As was shown with the apparently trivial example of sentry guards mentioned in chapters 4 and 5 the policy of surveillance that was crucial for the disciplining of the army was never as neatly and unproblematically implemented as Foucault or Mitchell have argued: it was constantly compromised by the activity of the one minor agent who was supposed to carry it through, the sentry guard. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1700

Categorization

• XREF: Directly challenges Foucault’s panopticon model and Mitchell’s reading of Egyptian disciplinary power. — connects to: Privacy law fails because it guards doorways while surveillance already occupies the rooms — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1532