This paper explores a "critical incident" in relation to a Further Education Funding Council inspection during 1995. The FEFC's short lived and under-researched "project" is discussed against the background of the Major Government's "Back-to-Basics" policy. The FEFC, through its inspection regime and the ways in which that inspection informed "good" practice in relation to appraisal, self assessment and annual subject review, had the discursive power to construct a commonsense reality that it then attempted to insert into the cultural life of the further education sector. Making use of a critical incident, the paper attempts to identify the FEFC discursive patterns as a cultural arbitrary and describe the way in which this surveillance based "strong discourse" was used in an effort to reconstruct the subjectivity of teaching staff. The FEFC could engage in this form of symbolic violence because of their dual role as controllers of the inspection regime and the financial distribution body that could determine if colleges remained open or were closed.