ABSTRACT
The advent of the "audit society" is perhaps the most powerful and pervasive manifestation of this transformation. This chapter explores how our characteristic states of mind have been subject to a process of social transformation that shapes our possibilities for depth knowledge in modern welfare. It concerns the different qualities of overall mental and social functioning that may be generated by different characteristic forms of such scrutiny. The retreat by government in the 1980s and 1990s from direct responsibility for a wide range of social provision led to the emergence of forms of discipline, ordering, and surveillance that have a noticeably irrational character. The chapter illuminates collective state of mind in various ways, which include making use of clinical material from psychotherapeutic work. It exposes society to deep anxieties about how these social spaces should be governed, and what kinds of events and processes might happen within them, anxieties that needed a new form of governance.
