If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but to say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it?What 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 (Foucault 119).
Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Power.” Power/knowledge : selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977. Edited by Colin Gordon. Pantheon Books, 1980, pp. 109-133.