Political power is not exercised only through laws and formal institutions; it also manifests itself in the way spaces are organized, movement is regulated, and the limits of social presence are defined. One way to observe the logic of power in action is to examine moments when a place becomes the subject of intervention not merely as a building, but as a social space. Before viewing the recent sealing of cafés as a collection of scattered incidents or purely executive decisions, it may be necessary to pose a more fundamental question: what kind of technique or policy is sealing, exactly? What does the state regulate through sealing? Is the issue merely a violation committed by a business establishment, or are the real objects of intervention the social relations and spaces that make those relations possible?

If we look at the experience of sealing cafés, restaurants, bookstores, galleries, and other public spaces, it appears that what is most exposed to intervention is neither objects nor even the place itself, but the relationships formed within that place. A café is not merely somewhere to drink coffee; it is a space in which people gather without formal organization, converse, build social networks, and reproduce society at the scale of everyday life. From this perspective, sealing cannot be understood merely as an administrative measure; it must be understood as one of the techniques for governing public space and regulating social life. In addition to closing a specific place, sealing conveys a message about the limits of presence, gathering, and accepted forms of collective life.

Perhaps from this perspective it becomes possible to understand why, after major crises subside—for example, war—public spaces once again become focal points of intervention. During periods of crisis, society becomes a source of solidarity and resilience; but as external pressures diminish, politics once again turns toward organizing and controlling the spaces of everyday life. The central question, therefore, may not be why a particular café has been sealed, but why sealing repeatedly becomes one of the tools for regulating public space. This question is less about cafés themselves than about the state’s relationship with space, society, and the possibility of the spontaneous formation of collective life.

The Politics of Closing Versus the Politics of Building

Every political system, inevitably, faces a fundamental choice: does it produce social order by expanding society’s capacities, or by restricting them? These two approaches should not be regarded merely as two managerial methods; they are rooted in two entirely different conceptions of society. In the first approach, society is assumed to be a productive force—a space capable of generating trust, cooperation, social capital, and new forms of participation. The second approach, however, sees society less as a source for producing order and more as a field of uncertainty—a field that must be continuously regulated, controlled, and contained.

On this basis, public policy cannot be reduced solely to a collection of state actions. What the state refrains from doing, or makes impossible, is equally important. Government does not act only by building institutions, streets, cultural centers, or development programs; at the very moment that it builds, it also removes; at the same moment that it opens one possibility, it closes another. An analysis of power therefore requires simultaneous attention to two dimensions: the politics of building and the politics of closing.

The politics of closing should not be understood simply as shutting down an activity or restricting a place. It is, in fact, a kind of reconfiguration of the social field; a process through which certain forms of presence, certain modes of gathering, and certain social relations lose their legitimacy, or at least become more costly to sustain. The effects of sealing a place are not limited to that place; they alter the geography of social interaction as a whole. Every public place is a node of relationships, memory, trust, and interaction, and eliminating it is something more than eliminating an economic activity; it amounts to removing part of the city’s social infrastructure.

By contrast, the politics of building rests on the assumption that social cohesion emerges from expanding spaces of interaction rather than restricting them. Society develops the capacity to produce trust, solidarity, and responsibility when it has arenas in which shared life can be experienced. Building public space, therefore, goes beyond an urban development or cultural project; it constitutes a form of investment in the possibility of society itself taking shape.

The distinction between the politics of closing and the politics of building is ultimately not a distinction between two executive techniques; it is a distinction between two rationalities of governance. The main question is not how extensively a state uses restrictive tools. The question is how it formulates the problem of social order: does it see order as the product of expanding society’s capacities, or as the result of restricting its possibilities? The answer to this question also determines how the state confronts public spaces, civil institutions, and forms of everyday life.

Sealing and the Politics of Producing Social Discipline

One of the less examined dimensions of the politics of sealing is the effect it produces beyond the immediate object of intervention, on structures of perception and mechanisms for regulating social behavior. Sealing cannot be understood merely as removing a place from the cycle of activity; through the public display of interventionist power, it produces a perceptual order concerning the limits of social possibility. Its function operates simultaneously at two levels: materially, by closing a specific space; and symbolically, by producing and generalizing awareness of the possibility of closure. This dual function elevates sealing from an administrative-executive measure into a technique for regulating social behavior.

Within this framework, power operates by organizing the horizon of possibilities, not by directly imposing restrictions on one particular actor or place. When a public space becomes the object of intervention, the effect extends metaphorically from one place to an entire semiotic field and redefines people’s relationship with the broader category of similar spaces. The consequence is the internalization of the logic of control: before any action or collective presence, individuals and groups are compelled to calculate permissible boundaries, possible costs, and the likelihood of intervention. What occurs in this process is a shift in the center of control from outside to inside; a passage from external discipline to social self-regulation, in which the mere possibility of intervention—even when no intervention occurs—becomes an effective factor in shaping behavior.

From this perspective, sealing should be analyzed within the broader theoretical framework of disciplinary policies, whose ultimate objective is not the elimination of a specific behavior, but the prior regulation of the field of action. The conceptual distinction between retrospective punishment and disciplinary technique is reproduced precisely here: in the first case, power is reactive and responds to an act already committed; in the second, power is anticipatory and productive, seeking from the outset to organize the conditions of possibility of action within a prescribed framework.

Sealing also has a semiotic and communicative dimension. The closed door of a place is not merely a signifier of the end of its activity; its symbolic function is to redefine the boundaries of public space and to remind people that collective spaces are not autonomous spheres immune from intervention, but territories that always exist in a condition of potential readjustment by power. On this basis, analysis of sealing cannot be reduced to quantitative indicators such as the number of places shut down or the economic losses caused. The political importance of this policy lies in the transformation it creates in the relationship between the social actor and public space: a transformation through which social presence—before being an experience grounded in participation and interaction—becomes an act requiring calculation, caution, and constant assessment. In this respect, sealing must be understood simultaneously as a mechanism for stopping space and as a technique for producing self-reflective, self-limiting subjects; a mechanism that fundamentally redefines the way public space is experienced and inhabited.

After Crisis: The Return of Control Policy to Everyday Life

Crises always transform the relationship between state and society. Under wartime conditions, society is redefined as a vital resource for survival, resilience, and cohesion. In confronting an external threat, the state needs social capacities, collective solidarity, and citizen participation more than ever. In such moments, society moves beyond being merely an object of management and becomes an asset for overcoming crisis. But as the emergency subsides, this relationship can change once again; the society that was indispensable during the crisis can once more become a field to be regulated, managed, and controlled.

The sealing of public spaces after a major crisis such as war cannot be understood as a collection of scattered actions or isolated decisions. These measures should be understood within the framework of the gradual return of a governing logic; a logic that, after the external threat declines, turns its attention toward internal ordering and the management of everyday spaces. The end of a crisis, in other words, does not necessarily mean the end of emergency policies; part of the logic of control developed during the crisis can persist in new forms and within everyday spheres.

Public spaces acquire particular importance in this context because they are sites where informal forms of communication, interaction, and collective experience emerge. What makes these spaces sensitive is not their economic activity or cultural function; it is their capacity to create social relationships outside predetermined frameworks. Intervention in these spaces, for this reason, must be analyzed as something more than an executive or commercial matter; such interventions are part of a broader conflict over the definition of the boundaries of the public realm and legitimate forms of social presence.

Ultimately, the issue of sealing cannot be understood only through the question, “Why was this place closed?” The more fundamental question is how a political system confronts society after a crisis: does it seek to transform the social capacities formed during the crisis into capital for building the future, or, once the threat has passed, does it return to managing and restricting those same capacities?

From this perspective, sealing is a sign of a larger issue: the relationship between power and society at the moment when the state of exception comes to an end. Perhaps the most important question is whether a return to normal order after every crisis necessarily brings a return to the same previous methods of control, or whether it can become an opportunity to redefine the state’s relationship with social spaces and society’s collective possibilities.

Footnotes:

1- O’Farrell, C. (2015, May 14). Foucault and disciplinary space. Refracted Input.

2- Purcell, M. (2002). Excavating Lefebvre: The right to the city and its urban politics of the inhabitant. GeoJournal, 58(2–3), 99–108.

3- Purcell, M. (2014). Possible worlds: Henri Lefebvre and the right to the city. Journal of Urban Affairs, 36(1), 141–154.

4- Sus, V. (2025, September 1). What Foucault’s panopticon reveals about hidden power. TheCollector.