In Foucault's understanding of the power that circulates throught the subject of regulation, there can be no actual apparatus because there is no sharp distinction between what is produced and what is regulating - we are not simply targets but vehicles of power. Thus, to paraphrase Nietzsche awkwardly, we must be able to conceive regulation without the regulator, to understand regulation as only and always materializing in its effects, and to understand these effects as specific to that which is being regulated.

Wendy Brown, "The Impossibility of Women's Studies" (1997) 9 Differences 79 at 87