Workers in new bureaucracies become their own auditors under internalized surveillance

Evidence

It’s hard to believe that public services are not more clogged with bureaucracy than they were pre-Thatcher. Certainly, education is choked with the stuff… targets, action plans, log books, all of them required conditions for funding by the Learning and Skills Council, and assessed by Ofsted, whose threat no longer takes the form of an invasive external entity arriving every two or three years, but has become introjected into the institution itself, through the permanent panoptic vigilance of a bloated managerial strata determined to over-compensate in order to fully ensure it is meeting central government’s demands. This is the reality of “market Stalinism” in education. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 489 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

In the late eighteenth century, philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed a prison structure that would allow for constant surveillance of prisoners. Bentham labeled this semicircular prison structure the panopticon. It allowed for the control of prisoners because guards were able to constantly watch them and prisoners were aware they were constantly being watched (Lyon 1994). In Discipline and Punish, Foucault built on Bentham’s panopticon and developed the concept of panopticism, which is the process wherein certain populations are subjected to constant surveillance and discipline, highlighting relationships of power in society: “The Panopticon is a marvelous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it, produces homogenous effects of power” (1995: 202). For Foucault, the structure of the prison is no longer physically necessary for social control because individuals are aware of their visibility and internalize their own subjection: “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection” (1995: 203). The power of surveillance is not just in the state’s ability to surveil but in the self-surveillance of a society’s population. — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 44 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source
• XREF: connects to: Control societies replace external surveillance with internalized self-policing — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 48; Surveillance controls populations chiefly through internalized self-policing — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 44; External inspection has been introjected as permanent internal surveillance — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 489 (+6 more)

Related

• External inspection has been introjected as permanent internal surveillance (similarity 0.91)
• Surveillance controls populations chiefly through internalized self-policing (similarity 0.85)
• Visible surveillance makes subjects police themselves without any force (similarity 0.81)
• Control shifts from external surveillance to a deterrence system internalized as the self. (similarity 0.81)
• Control societies replace external surveillance with self-policing but require the subject’s complicity. (similarity 0.81)
• New bureaucracy makes workers their own permanent auditors (similarity 0.80)
• Control societies replace external surveillance with internalized self-policing (similarity 0.79)
• Reality television feedback replaced external surveillance with self-integrated control (similarity 0.79)
• Public authorities cannot police all offences, so citizens must self-monitor (similarity 0.78)
• Digital self-tracking makes each person a self-surveilling guard and inmate in one. (similarity 0.78)
• Internalized discipline makes the human inspector functionally superfluous (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• External inspection has been introjected as permanent internal surveillance #corroborates (0.90) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 489
• Control societies replace external surveillance with internalized self-policing #corroborates (0.85) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 48
• Surveillance controls populations chiefly through internalized self-policing #corroborates (0.85) — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 44
• Complete surveillance requires those watched to begin monitoring themselves. #corroborates (0.85)
• Control shifts from external surveillance to a deterrence system internalized as the self. #corroborates (0.80) — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 108
• External surveillance becomes internalized as self-imposed bodily discipline #corroborates (0.80) — , Selod, Saher - Forever Suspect_…, 512
• External surveillance becomes internalized and self-imposed discipline on women’s bodies. #exemplifies (0.72) — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 371