Paul and others
Rather than capitalism Nik Rose situates it in the fundamental liberal
question of how do we rule from a distance. In regards to the current thread
of testing that question is answered through such technologies as the audit
and other "calculating regimes". Yes, it Foucauldian, but it allows me to
make some sense of the spiralness of testing.
A paragraph from Rose (1999) *Powers of Freedom* that might be pertinent.
He discusses the audit in various fields; education, medicine, goverment
etc.
pp 154-55
"Audits of various sorts have come to replace the trust that social
goverment invested in the professional wisdom and the decisions and actions
of specialists. In a whole variety of practices - educational, medicine,
economic, organizational - audits hold out a promise - however specious - of
new distanciated forms of control between political centers of decisions and
automonized loci - schools, hospitals, firms - which now have the
responsibility for the goverment of health, wealth, and happiness. Power
suggests audit is a technology of mistrust, designed in the hope of
restoring trust in organizational and professional competence. Yet it
appears that the very technologies of mistrust perpetually fail to immunize
the assemblages they govern from doubt. Mistrust is generated not only by
the organizations and individuals pronounced unhealthy by audit, but also by
the pronounced healthy that nontheless fail. Hence a proliferation of the
audit serves only to amplify and multiply the points at which doubt and
suspician can be generated. Whilst audits have become key fidelity
techniques in new strategies of goverment, they generate an expanding spiral
of distrust of professional competence, and one that feeds the demand for
more radical measures which will hold experts to account."
nate
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