But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.
Michel FoucaultWhat makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression
Michel Foucault[Knowledge is governed not by] a theory of knowledge, but by a theory of discursive practice.
Michel Foucault