excerpt

"These knowledge domains – épistèmes – provided ‘rational’ arguments for sustaining particular power regimes, which became, in Foucault’s terms, capillary power (power that stretches into the smallest and most private aspects of life). Through such shifts, power became largely invisible, a series of commonsense and inevitable ingredients of life...and a thing we accept ‘for our own good’, rather than ‘power’ in its widespread sense, therefore, Foucault...talks about ‘surveillance’: power is exerted by means of a panoptic organisation of society, in which all aspects of our lives are visible and open for inspection...Decentralised, capillary power thus strengthens the power of the centre rather than weakens it".