politics

Name:
Course:
Professor:
Date:
Life in the Glass Box
Question 1
Routine surveillance function can act as a type of power. It is bound up with political repression, but that it also performs a generative function, helping in eliciting and constructing forms of behavior and knowledge that are useful politically. It is at the center of regulation that produces discipline in people. The power is perceived as the capability in controlling phenomena, and it does not appear as a theater that is spectacularly vicious, but as a precisely measured space, time, and human body regimentation. Again, the power is not displayed for empirical political effect before an excitable crowd, but it is hidden in a house of detention. This advancement is about organizing and harnessing life’s forces unlike the traditional domination of disciplinary power. Therefore, Foucault refers to it as bio-power. Discipline produces practiced and disciplined bodies. Discipline normally makes the force of body increase in economic terms of utility and makes the same body forces diminish in political terms of obedience. People become more useful as they become more obedient. Therefore, since surveillance function accompanies all the process of instilling discipline, it acts as a type of power.
Question 2
Surveillance, if done for a long period, instills discipline through forced self-regulation. The result of constant surveillance is citizens that are loyal, obedient patients, trained soldiers, useful docile bodies, and productive workers.

If people are observed externally, they tend to monitor and police themselves to the extent of confessing, counting calories, opening their doors to the long form of Census, signing their real names at the entrance of hotel registers, paying their taxes, reeling off their numbers of Social Security and their dates of birth. Record keeping, the primacy of files, constant surveillance, as well as nature and labor are the foundations of the whole organization of contemporary life.

Question 3
There is a connection between surveillance, knowledge, and power. It is clear that the knowledge produced by formal observation can justify a wide range of interventions from the intrusive but well-meaning to outright persecution and physical punishment. Once identified and understood, the deviant can be helped, redirected, segregated, imprisoned, or destroyed by doctors, psychiatrists, superintendents, social workers, managers, or police agents.
Question 4
Saying that something is socially constructed means that it examines the development of understandings of the world that are jointly constructed. It assumes the significance, meaning, and understanding is not developed separately within the individual, but through coordination with other people. Games are good examples of social constructions. They often exist due to particular sets of conventional rules. The sets of social conventions and the willingness to adhere to them make games meaningful in any social context.
Question 5
Disciplinary power can be defined as the type of power exercised by people who have more power than the subordinates to make the subordinates behave in a manner that the people in power wish them to. According to the argument by Foucault, power structures control the actions of people directly, and also indirectly where people tend to be easier to control such that they discipline themselves to behave in the way that the organization or people in power wishes them to. The rules imposed at work on the subordinates serve as good examples of disciplinary power. The subordinates make sure that they follow them, and even enforce them upon other people.
Question 6
The power and authority described by Weber are exactly the same as disciplinary power. He says that if the state of domination has to exist, the subordinates must follow the authority that is claimed by the authorities.
Question 7
In the Panopticon prison, the prisoners are aware that they are under constant surveillance. This makes them adopt the observation of the police and the overseers themselves. They have to do what the police and the one controlling them wish them to do. In such a prison, power is possible because the prisoners are the subordinates and the police have more power than them.

Surname PAGE * MERGEFORMAT 3