GE 20 (8782)

NUMERRON CHERRY GRACE L.

THIR EXAMNINATION

ANSWERS:

1.

Foucault presents the social actor as a mere body. Although alive, it leads a sort
of group life without the imperatives of knowledge in modern society. It is only upon
being invested by discourse that the body acquires an inner forum that disciplines it and
makes it an individualized subjective of power. A reversion is created in Foucault’s
thought by claiming that the soul is the prison of the body. Discourse imposes
conditions on what the individual can employ in thought and behavior. As Foucault is
not an interactionist, he underemphasizes the motives of the individual. Upon
researching his texts however, three main processes seem to surround the body.

First, bodies are categorized, trained in procedures and placed in hierarchies.

This is mainly where power is being exercised upon individuals. Secondly, there is
implicitly an incentive factor responsible for both individuals being motivated by
discipline, and the collective motive for discourses about optimization of health and life
in the human sciences. Thirdly, the capacity for the body to learn makes it both docile
by incorporating knowledge, and later to constitute itself by means of using discourses
to shape the self in a liberating way. The latter two processes are implicit, but necessary
conditions for the subjectivities process to have an effect in the first place.

Foucault’s theory and interactionist theory grounds both fluidity of behavior and
linguistic imperatives in stable frames. The intersection between discourse, incentive
and social action is articulated. Social individuals and their incorporation of discourse
are embedded in tangible, incentive-based relationships in order to maintain
competence. Such a conception suggests limits for relativism in how individuals are
constituted by discourse. This also connects individuals to structures by suggesting
links between learning and interaction. It is argued here that since structure and action
are connected an overly free subject is useless to sociology. The somatic aspect
suggests conditions for this freedom.

2.

People have a strong intuitive sense of where they are looking at, or where their
gaze is directed. In contrast, previous reports found evidence for large deviations
between subjective and objective gaze, in particular before saccadic eye movements. In
the present study we asked how subjective gaze shifts when we make a saccade.
Participants were asked to make a saccade towards an endogenously cued target 6°
from fixation. A flash was presented for 25ms at any time between cue onset and 200
ms after their average saccade onset.

This demonstrates that people have the perception that their eyes are moving
continuously from fixation to the saccade goal long before the actual start of the eye
movement. It shows that people have very little knowledge about their actual eye
position at any given moment in the vicinity of a saccade. They are unaware of the time
when they make a saccade, and they cannot make use of the retinal position of objects
to correctly indicate their objective gaze.

Scientific gaze depended more on presumed basic principles and the claims to
be logically deduced from them. Part of the change that marks the Scientific Revolution
and the cultural/intellectual movement of the Enlightenment was a suspicion of such
inherited beliefs and the replacement of them with systematized empirical observation,
to which would be applied inductive procedures rather than deductive inference. As
basic and fundamental as the practice of observation would seem, the concept is not as
simple or as unproblematic as one might expect. One merely looks (or possibly also,
listens, smells, etc.). Nothing could seem simpler.

3.

Self-surveillance devices can also protect the innocent from unjust procedures by
providing them with an alibi (Dennis, 2008, p. 353). In other words, these gadgets have
the potential to safeguard us from jail time. For example, a man named Hasan Elahi
was frustrated with always being detained for his appearance and mobility after the 9/11
attacks, so he decided to deal with this by using his smartphone’s map to indicate to
officers the exact spot he was at during the time an event took place with even taking
pictures to provide evidence that he was not involved in any crime that he was
suspected to be in (Dennis, 2008, p. 352).

For this reason, Elahi’s self-surveillance is both a measure of safety and a hassle
for him as he is forced to document his life, so that he is not questioned for every move
he makes because of his looks and lifestyle (Dennis, 2008, p. 352). Even though self-
surveillance technologies can create an alibi it unfortunately becomes a matter of
privilege as those who are considered the “norm” are not scrutinized as much as those
who stand out (Kang et al., 2011, p. 34). With that being said, self-surveillance starts to
affect powerless individuals even though this is not how the gadgets were designed to
be used (Dennis, 2008, p. 352). Instead the purpose of using these devices was for us
to use them to take initiative in our protection without expecting others to do it for us
(Dennis, 2008, p. 352)