Foucault in the Woodland, by Daniel Thurot

Over at the insanely clever (or cleverly insane) Space-Biff! blog of Daniel Thurot, he writes ably on Foucault’s take on power and biopolitics as it is expressed in Cole Wehrle’s game Root. Cole Wehrle wrote about Foucault’s ideas in this regard in his Root designer diaries as well, this is a good expansion on that.

It’s just… oh, go and read it!

https://spacebiff.com/2021/11/04/foucault-in-the-woodland-1

This is part 1 of a series of 3. What he has written so far in summarizing Foucault resonates with the underpinning ideas in some of my games on irregular conflict… this is unconscious on my part since my Poli Sci education did not involve reading him, but still, DINGGGG, and I present my current favourite Fouquote where he flips Clausewitz’s dictum about war being a continuation of politics by other means:

“It may be that war as strategy is a continuation of politics. But it must not be forgotten that ‘politics’ has been conceived as a continuation, if not exactly and directly of war, at least of the military model as a fundamental means of preventing civil disorder. Politics, as a technique of internal peace and order, sought to implement the mechanism of the perfect army …. It is strategy that makes it possible to understand warfare as a way of conducting politics between states; it is tactics that makes it possible to understand the army as a principle for maintaining the absence of warfare in civil society.”

(Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1986): 168)

And here is Part 2:

https://spacebiff.com/2021/12/02/foucault-in-the-woodland-2/

And here is Part 3, when it pops up:

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