Comment: “Power flows throughout the system like blood in the capillaries of our body.” (Foucault) (2010, 20 Marks)
The statement paraphrases Michel Foucault‘s picture of power in its capillary form of existence, the point where power reaches into the very grain of individuals (the 1975 interview “Prison Talk”, collected in Power/Knowledge, 1980). It swaps the question of who holds power for the question of how power works. The image is accurate about modern power, but it leaves out the state and gives the critic nowhere to stand.
Unpacking the Image
Blood in the capillaries is everywhere and unseen, and it belongs to the body’s own working. The image makes five claims.
- Exercised, not possessed. No sovereign or class owns power. In the 1976 lectures (Society Must Be Defended) power circulates through a net-like organisation, and individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application.
- Micro-physics. Power rises from the timetable, the drill and the medical file. The state codifies these local relations; it does not create them.
- Productive, not only repressive. Discipline and Punish (1975) traces the move from the sovereign’s scaffold to disciplinary power, where surveillance, normalisation and examination produce docile bodies. In Jeremy Bentham‘s Panopticon (1791), an inmate who never knows when he is watched ends up watching himself.
- Power/knowledge. Psychiatry, criminology and statistics do not just describe the delinquent and the abnormal. They constitute them, and that is itself power.
- Resistance. Where there is power, there is resistance (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 1976). It sits inside the relation and is as dispersed as power.
The Strongest Case
Models centred on the sovereign cannot explain why people obey when nobody commands them. The capillary model can: the norms have become their own. It also suits the digital age, where platforms govern through visibility, scoring and nudges rather than orders.
Critiques
- Normative confusion. Nancy Fraser (1981) and Jürgen Habermas (The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 1985) argue that if every truth is power’s product, Foucault cannot say why domination is wrong. He quietly relies on the norms he unmasks.
- Freedom and truth. Charles Taylor (1984) held that power makes sense only against the freedom or interests it thwarts, and Foucault dissolves both.
- Power everywhere, power nowhere. Steven Lukes (Power: A Radical View, 2005 edition) insists that degrees of domination be told apart. The parent, the teacher and the torturer are not alike.
- The missing heart. Nicos Poulantzas (State, Power, Socialism, 1978) answered that capillaries need a heart. The army, the law and concentrated capital are more than one node among many.
The Indian Illustration
- Partha Chatterjee (The Politics of the Governed, 2004) shows the postcolonial state governing enumerated populations more than rights-bearing citizens. The governed bargain back in political society.
- Aadhaar made more than a billion residents biometric records, which is power/knowledge at scale. The Supreme Court upheld it in 2018, a year after Puttaswamy made privacy a fundamental right, but barred private firms from demanding it.
- Caste survives less by statute than through everyday policing of marriage, food and space, which is capillary discipline.
- Yet India’s 65 internet shutdowns in 2025 were sovereign power switched on from the centre. Foucault himself held that discipline works alongside sovereignty rather than abolishing it.
Conclusion
On how modern power works, the statement holds: power is dispersed, productive and internalised. It misleads only as the whole story. Power runs through capillaries, but the state and capital still act as a heart that concentrates and pumps it. The fuller account joins Foucault’s micro-physics to a theory of those centres.