Audit, neoliberal governmentality, and authoritarian control

Singapore stands out as a "model" of governmentality that travels across Asia, with a seductive appeal that is built on the mechanisms of authoritarian control that it consistently deploys to silence dissent.

Many of these techniques of authoritarian control, deployed in Singapore, are not the grotesque authoritarian excesses one witnessed in China three decades ago at Tiananmen Square, or ones that one witnesses now.

The authoritarian control exercised in Singapore is sophisticated, dressed up in the language of democracy. Meant to produce processes of internalization such that disciplined subjects self-censor, knowing from model performances of control the price to be paid for not towing the line.

Seemingly democratic forms of management, directed at producing supposed clean governance, are often the tools deployed to control dissent and silence alternative voices.

One such tool, dressed up as an instrument of clean governance, is the audit.

The audit is deployed in specific settings to mark and target critical voices that document the excesses of the state, its limits and failures, and the large gaps in its model of governance. In these scenarios, as a disciplinary tool, the audit is designed to invoke fear in the person targeted.

It is meant to destroy the very courage or conviction that threatens the structure.

In the very act of targeting, the audit sends out its chilling message, toe the line or else.

Irrespective then of the outcome of the audit or the veracity/ridiculousness of the allegations made, the audit is used as a tool to plant and spread disinformation, planting the seed of doubt about the person alleged to have participated in irregular behavior.

It also works to send out a message to all those around, you follow similar pathways of critiquing, you will be targeted, bullied, and maligned. Authoritarian control works perfectly in alignment with neoliberal governmentality, enabling the profit-extracting role of the state through techniques of disciplining in everyday organizational life.

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems with w...

The Suit Walks the Corridor

The Suit Walks the Corridor At ten past nine on a Monday the corridor on the top floor of the administration building fills with the sound of expensive shoes. The carpet up here was laid in the last refurbishment and still gives slightly underfoot, the way a good hotel lobby does, and the doors along it close with the soft, well-engineered thud of a German car. Along this carpet, in the direction of the lift marked Executive, comes the suit. It comes in navy and in charcoal, in the odd daring pinstripe, in the female version too, a tailored jacket over a silk shell, and heels that announce themselves on the tile of the lift lobby a full three seconds before the person arrives. The suit carries a flat white from the good cafe, the one that closed the student cafe to open, and a lanyard that swings with the confidence of a thing that opens doors. The suit passes the framed founding professors, who were photographed in gowns and look, at this distance, like a row of disapproving pe...

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