01The problem with power
The standard left account of power says: power is held by someone, used against someone else, and liberation means taking it away from them. Kings have power. Capitalists have power. The state has power. The question is who controls the apparatus.
Foucault thought this missed something fundamental. Power isn't primarily a possession — something held and wielded from above. It's a relation, produced everywhere in a society, operating through the smallest gestures and habits of daily life. And crucially: it doesn't only suppress. It produces. It produces subjects, knowledge, desires, identities.
You can't just seize the state and redistribute its power, because the problem isn't the state's monopoly on power. The problem is that power is diffuse, productive, and reaches into you — into your body, your habits, your understanding of who you are and what you want.
02Discipline: power through the body
Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1975) opens with a description of a public torture and execution in 1757, then jumps eighty years to the timetable of a reformatory — prisoners waking, eating, working, studying, sleeping on schedule. The contrast is the argument: something fundamental changed in how power works.
Pre-modern power was spectacular and intermittent. It made examples. It tortured, executed, and displayed. Modern power is continuous and invisible. It doesn't make examples — it shapes individuals. The scaffold gave way to the school, the hospital, the barracks, the factory: institutions designed to produce useful, docile bodies through the constant regulation of time, space, and movement.
Pre-modern power said: don't, or else. Modern power says: here is how a person is. Here is how to become one. Discipline doesn't just constrain behavior. It produces it.
Discipline works through examination (making individuals visible and comparable), normalisation (establishing a standard and measuring everyone against it), and hierarchical observation (watching from above, always). These three mechanisms, applied in schools, prisons, hospitals, and factories, produced a particular kind of human subject: one who internalises the gaze, who regulates themselves.
03The panopticon
Jeremy Bentham designed a prison called the panopticon in 1791: a circular building with cells around the perimeter, a tower in the center. Guards in the tower can see every cell. Prisoners can't see into the tower — they can't tell if anyone is watching.
The effect: inmates must assume they're always being observed. They police themselves. You don't need to actually watch everyone if the architecture produces the feeling of being watched. The real efficiency isn't surveillance — it's the internalization of surveillance.
Foucault's insight is that this is the logic of modern power generally, not just prisons. Every institution that observes — school grades, performance reviews, credit scores, medical records — operates panoptically. You behave as if you're being watched because you might be. And eventually you don't need to be. You've become your own guard.
04Normalisation
The examination — the test, the diagnosis, the review — doesn't just measure. It produces a norm and locates everyone in relation to it. Average, above average, below. Normal, abnormal. Passing, failing.
This is how power becomes knowledge, and knowledge becomes power. The categories of psychology (mentally ill / mentally healthy), criminology (criminal / upstanding), medicine (sick / well), and education (intelligent / slow) are not neutral descriptions of pre-existing conditions. They're produced through practices of examination, enforced through institutions, and lived as identities by the people subjected to them.
The person who is told they are disordered, or criminal, or backwards, doesn't just get categorized — they often come to understand themselves through that category. The category does work on them. That's normalisation: the production of subjects who understand themselves in terms set by power.
05Biopower and population
By the 18th century, Foucault argues, power started operating at a new level: not just the individual body but the population. Birth rates, death rates, health statistics, migration patterns — the management of life itself became a political project.
He called this biopower: the extension of disciplinary power to entire populations, managing their health, reproduction, and vitality as political resources. Public health campaigns, vaccination programs, census-taking, urban planning — all of these are biopower in action, shaping population dynamics in the interests of productivity, security, and growth.
Biopower isn't sinister in itself — public health is a good. Foucault's point is that managing life is never politically neutral. Who counts as the population whose life is to be optimised? Whose death, by contrast, is acceptable or even desirable? Achille Mbembe extended this to its logical conclusion: if biopower manages life, necropolitics decides who may be let die.
06Why this matters for the commons
If Foucault is right, liberation isn't just a matter of seizing state power or ending exploitation. You have to address the disciplinary mechanisms that reproduce the subjectivities — the self-understandings, the desires, the habits — that make enclosure seem natural.
The commons doesn't just require different institutions. It requires different people, in the sense of people who have practiced being different — who have spent time in institutions that produce different assumptions about governance, cooperation, and authority. Prefigurative politics, in this light, isn't just strategically useful. It's necessary: it's how you build the subjectivities that a commoning world requires.
The panopticon also explains why commons governance needs transparency without surveillance. Ostrom's design principles for sustainable commons include mechanisms for monitoring — but the key is that monitoring is mutual and participatory, not hierarchical. The difference between a community watching itself and a state watching a population is the difference between accountability and discipline.
Key texts: Discipline and Punish (1975); The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1976); Society Must Be Defended (1976 lectures). For Foucault and the commons specifically, see Sylvia Federici's dialogue with his work in Re-enchanting the World (2019).