ABSTRACT
The chapter addresses how regulation of society by standardisation, using the concepts of registration, certification, and accreditation, is extended to ever new areas of human functioning, and the requirements of this regulation are increasing in its demands. Behind it all, argues the author, lie increasing demands for more control, in larger areas of human activity. The chapter tries to pinpoint how this is a result of the panoptic machinery. The panopticon, it is argued, can serve as a concept for the understanding of these processes in dialectical interaction with Freud’s concept of the uncanny. The word panopticon can be translated as the all seeing, or total gaze. The idea was a building where each room could be monitored from any point and where everybody could see everybody. In the 1980s and 1990s, it is argued, the ideology of “new public management” intensified the liberalisation of the free market and increased the desire for standardisation. The author argues that it represents an attempt to establish a uniform inter/national/social character, an ISO character, one that is conformist and can be applied everywhere in the world. The cultivation of the symbols, politics, and ideology of nationalism can be seen as a regressive step back to primary identification to the local group in the face of the threats caused by globalisation. 186The anger and anxiety created by new challenges, it is argued, brings forth extreme nationalism with the cultivation of clear, impenetrable boundaries between the in-group and those conceived of as “others”.
