Introduction to Foucault

This quick introduction on Foucault serves as the starting point for the next author that Nae will be covering in his series on Postmodernism authors. Stay tuned in the coming days for the entire series!

Michel Foucault is a french philosopher that wrote a lot of political theories, specifically developing the idea of the panopticon and biopolitics. Learning about Foucault and biopolitics is important as a debater because you encounter it in all types of fields and literature bases, especially those that talk about managing life.

Nae starts with explaining biopolitics and the panopticon. However, if you want the full context, Nae recommends reading the History of Sexuality and other works by Foucault.

A panopticon is a way to think of the punitive system that Foucault was designing to talk about prisons. It was a circular prison with a tower in the middle that could see into every prison cell because they’re in a circle surrounding the tower. The idea behind the concept is that your cell could always be being watched or looked into and it is that which stops or prevents prisoners from following the rules and/or laws. The panopticon forces communities to act in a specific way because the omnipresent “watchmen” is always there, even if they aren’t.

Biopolitics is a larger system of managing life through politics. Biopolitics is a field of study between human biology and politics. Questions that ask how populations are managed are almost always biopolitical in nature. For Foucault, biopolitics is a particular type of politics that is about regulating populations through biopower. Various surveillance technologies are a good example of biopolitical panoptic power.

Nae thinks Foucault is a great argument on both sides of the 2021-2022 high school policy debate topic about water.