Power does not radiate from a single centre; it is produced inside everyday relations at school, in hospital, at work. If it is everywhere, we need not look for a single centre of resistance either.
We are used to looking for power in the head of state, the police officer, the boss or the head of the family. We think of it as a force that stands above us, gives orders and uses coercion when necessary. Michel Foucault broke this habit when he said that power is not something spreading through society from a single centre but something produced within everyday relations. The hospital, the school, the prison, the barracks, the family, sexuality and the production of knowledge were not for him fields outside politics. They were mechanisms of power that showed how people are classified, watched and normalised.
A relation that operates rather than a possession
It matters that Foucault did not treat power as property carried in someone’s pocket. When a ruler changes, all relations of power do not end; because power lives on in rules, in professional knowledge, in architecture and in how people look at one another. Power operates when a teacher assesses a student, when a doctor classifies a body against the norm, when a company converts an employee into a performance score.
This approach does not mean everyone is equally powerful. The state, capital and institutions have far heavier instruments at their disposal. Yet those instruments cannot be effective unless they combine with the small relations of everyday life. People apply the rules, supervise one another and exclude those who do not fit what counts as normal. Power is produced not only by the intentions of those who oppress but by the repetition of ordinary behaviour.
Power does not only forbid
Seeing that power is not merely a force saying “no” is one of Foucault’s most disturbing contributions. Power also produces identities, knowledges and ways of behaving. It defines who is healthy, successful, dangerous, productive or normal. People begin to see themselves inside these definitions and develop behaviour to match.
School does not merely give a child information; it teaches them to divide their time, to queue, to ask permission and to be assessed. The performance system at work does not only measure the employee; it also determines which behaviour is valuable. Social media does not only open a space for expression; it shapes how we must speak and present ourselves in order to be visible. Power does not merely limit us; it makes us into people of a certain kind.
If it is everywhere, is it unbeatable?
Saying that power can be found in every relation may at first produce hopelessness. If there is no clean space outside it, where will resistance begin? Foucault’s answer is that wherever there are relations of power there is also the possibility of counter-conduct. For power is not a one-way, completed domination but a mobile relation in which behaviours try to affect one another.
Resistance is therefore not only marching on the palace or seizing the state. A patient demanding a say over their own body, students questioning the form of assessment, employees rejecting performance criteria together and people transforming the identities imposed on them are resistance too. These are not unimportant because they are small; they are political because they touch the point at which power operates.
Resistance can have its own power
Seeing power as a distributed relation also makes it harder for oppositional movements to declare themselves innocent. An organisation opposing the state may build a rigid hierarchy within itself. A community demanding freedom may not tolerate someone who thinks differently. If the same people always take the floor, if information is held in a few hands and if criticism counts as disloyalty, the alternative structure can reproduce the old power under another name.
Resistance must therefore look not only at the power it targets but at its own relations. How are decisions taken? On whom does invisible labour fall? Who can speak comfortably, who stays silent? Does leadership turn into permanent privilege? The thought that power is everywhere does not make struggle meaningless; it forces struggle to be more honest and more careful.
Seeing that we could be otherwise
Foucault offers no ready model of a free society. For some readers this absence is a disappointment; but it also carries a caution that prevents a single prescription for salvation from turning into a new authority. His approach shows that the institutions we now see as natural and inevitable were built within history. What has been built can be changed.
The first step of resistance is sometimes not giving a grand answer but asking how the existing answer was produced. Why does this behaviour count as normal and that one as deviation? Who set this criterion? Whom does the collected information serve? Can we object to the file that defines us? These questions break power’s invisibility.
If power is everywhere we are not obliged to look for a single centre of resistance. Every point in everyday life where obedience is produced can be a beginning at which the relation could be built otherwise. The point is not to find a place entirely purified of power; it is to allow no relation to become unquestionable, unalterable and one-directional.
Saying that power operates everywhere does not mean every relation is equally oppressive. A parent setting limits for their child, a manager being able to dismiss an employee and the state depriving a person of their liberty do not produce the same consequences. Although all relations involve guidance, they differ in resource, duration, violence and the possibility of objection. Without that distinction the concept of power turns into a word that explains everything and distinguishes nothing. Using the space Foucault opened requires reading the small circulations of power together with the large inequalities.
Today normalisation operates not only in school, hospital and prison but in the measuring tools on our phones. How many steps we take, how much we sleep, how productive we are, how many people a post reached are continually converted into numbers. Sometimes these data help us understand ourselves; but when the number becomes the target it starts to govern our behaviour. We may come to care about our sleep score rather than sleeping well, about the engagement rate rather than saying something meaningful, about visible activity rather than doing the work well. Discipline no longer comes only from outside; a person becomes their own supervisor.
Resistance can arise in exactly these micro-fields. Employees questioning scoring criteria together, students building other ways of learning against a single definition of success, users refusing data collection are interventions that look small but change the relation. Even so we must know the limits of individual escape. Deleting an application may protect our attention, but it does not by itself abolish the attention economy. When personal tactics do not combine with shared rules and organised objection, the system merely changes users.
The productive side of power shows that resistance too is not only saying “no.” Other measures, other institutions and other forms of relation must be built. In a community that calls itself horizontal, sharing invisible labour, making expert knowledge accessible, making decisions revocable and asking why those who stay silent do so are the everyday work of resistance. If power is everywhere, freedom is not an empty space without power; it is a continual practice of rearrangement that prevents relations of force from freezing into domination.