Auditing and the unconscious: Managerialism’s memory traces
Abstract
This paper takes J.M. Coetzee’s “The Mind of Apartheid” as a point
of departure in thinking about audits in universities. Using the
psychoanalytic framing of apartheid that Coetzee puts in place,
audit is likened here to a form of obsessional neurosis. If this is
indeed a plausible diagnosis of audits – and this should remain
a question for deliberation – then a set of questions emerges for
post-apartheid universities, which the paper seeks to develop. By
what scenes from the past are audits haunted? What memory traces
do audits reactivate? What phantoms do audits seek to exorcise?
Can we speak of the demons by which auditing is possessed? And
what sort of working through the past would this call for?