Power

From Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality: An Introduction:

"Power must be understood in the first instance as the mutliplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies. Power's condition of possibility...must not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a sequence from which secondary and descendant forms would emanate; it is a moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of inequality, constantly engenders states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable...The omnipresence of power [exists] because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere...Power is not an institution or structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed wih; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society." (92-3)