…As Frank Lentricchia has cogently argued, for Foucault power is virtually a metaphysical principle:

In his social theory power tends to occupy the "anonymous" place which classical treatises in metaphysics reserved for substance: without location, identity, or boundaries, it is everywhere and nowhere at the same time .... To put it as Foucault puts it is to suggest that power has no predominant direction, no predominant point of departure, no predominant point of terminus. Like the God of theism, it is ubiquitous; unlike God it has no intention…

And unlike God, its effects are malevolent. Foucault provides the ultimate fulfillment of a nightmare vision of a world so perfectly administered (Adorno), so thoroughly bureaucratized (Weber), that reality itself is constituted through the insidious, invisible workings of power. "The exercise of power," says Foucault, "is a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action." The very entrance upon a field of action implicates the agent in a web of power relations that predetermines the scope and direction of his action. Power may presuppose freedom, but it remains itself the primary term: freedom is simply that which power requires for its actions, and is thus brought into being in order to provide the necessary conditions for power's enactment.

This totalizing vision of an entrapping world organized not primarily but exclusively by structures of domination and submission, implicit in much New Historicist work, becomes an explicit source of concern in Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Greenblatt rather ruefully acknowledges that although the topic of his book is the creation of the Renaissance self, in the course of its writing "the human subject itself began to seem remarkably unfree, the ideological product of the relations of power in a particular society." Similarly, in the struggle between containment and subversion, containment remains the dominant mode, as in all logic it must since it has itself summoned up subversion in order to reconfirm, over and over, its dominance. Given this prescribed dynamic, individual and contingent political action is revealed as an illusion: whatever acts may be undertaken, they are instantly inscribed within already established structures.

From Lee Patterson, “Historical Criticism and the Claims of Humanism,” in Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 65-6