Power, Discourse, and the Displacement of the Filter in the Digital Age: A Foucauldian Reading

Introduction

Not everything that can be thought can be said, and not everything that is said is destined to circulate. This intuition, formulated with particular clarity by Michel Foucault in his analysis of the order of discourse, remains a privileged key for understanding the present. In the contemporary digital landscape, shaped by networks, platforms, and systems of algorithmic feedback, the problem no longer takes the classical form of socially enforced censorship. What is changing is the locus at which control over what counts as admissible in the public space operates. The filter has not disappeared; it has been displaced. To grasp this displacement, and its effects on power, enunciation, and the constitution of the subject, requires a return to Foucault, not in order to apply his concepts mechanically, but to read in his work the mutations of a discursive regime that today manifests itself in unprecedented forms.

The Policing of Discourse

In L’ordre du discours (1970), Foucault describes a series of procedures that limit what may circulate as legitimate discourse. Among them are direct prohibition, the division between reason and madness, and the will to truth—understood as the ensemble of rules that determine what will be heard as true. Yet the decisive dimension of his analysis does not lie in explicit censorship, but in the everyday mechanisms that operate almost invisibly.

Ridicule, the demand for credentials, the normalization of tone and style, and the privileging of certain “serious” trajectories together form what might be called a symbolic police. This is not an identifiable censor, but a field of forces that renders certain statements unsayable even before they are formulated. Power, in this sense, does not merely prohibit; it produces anticipatory silences.

Dispositifs and Positions of Subjectivity

Foucault does not conceive of power as a negative law, but as a dispositif: a heterogeneous network that articulates discourses, institutions, practices, techniques, and affects. A dispositif does not merely regulate; it actively produces subjects, forms of knowledge, and identities. The university, the labor market, or the artistic field all determine which combinations are intelligible and which appear suspect.

In L’archéologie du savoir, Foucault emphasizes that the subject does not preexist discourse. There is no sovereign voice that freely expresses itself, but rather positions of enunciation made available within a given field. Often, the problem is not that a statement is false, but that it lacks a place from which it can be recognized as valid discourse. Institutional unintelligibility thus functions as an efficient mode of exclusion.

The Provisional Suspension of the Filter

The digital space introduces a significant variation into this configuration. Networks, forums, and platforms do not operate—at least not immediately—through the same mechanisms of symbolic policing. They do not require a coherent prior identity, do not penalize hybridity, and tolerate incipient or unfinished forms of expression. In this sense, they provisionally expand the field of what is enunciable.

This suspension of the prior filter does not amount to legitimation. What emerges instead is a space of experimentation in which positions of subjectivity can be tested without immediately paying the symbolic cost imposed by classical dispositifs. When someone claims that, for the first time, they are able to define themselves from a position that was previously not discursively viable, this is not merely a psychological act. From a Foucauldian perspective, it marks access to a new position of enunciation.

From Anticipatory Control to Deferred Cost

The central displacement does not consist in the disappearance of power, but in its temporal reorganization. In the regime analyzed by Foucault, the group filtered in advance: it decided what was admissible within the discursive field, what counted as serious, and what could claim legitimacy. This structuring violence was exclusionary, but it also performed a function of prior selection.

In the digital environment, the filter shifts to a later stage. One speaks first, and judgment arrives afterward, in the form of visibility, persistence, or indifference. No one says “no” immediately; the subject must decide whether what has been said is worth sustaining. Symbolic risk is individualized. The distinction between a singularity capable of transforming a field and a form of eccentricity that merely turns in on itself does not disappear, but it is no longer guaranteed by a collective instance. There is no technical rule that separates the two; the distinction remains historical, retrospective, and conflictual.

Subsequent Normalization and Subjectivation

A naïve reading would celebrate this openness as liberation. Yet every dispositif generates new forms of normalization. The digital landscape standardizes ways of speaking, shifts validation toward metrics and feedback, and smooths conflict through recognizable patterns. The absence of immediate policing does not entail the absence of power.

From the perspective of a later Foucault, attentive to ethics and the care of the self, the decisive question is not whether this regime is better or worse, but what kind of subject it produces. Judgment no longer emanates from the group; it is internalized. Discernment, self-critique, and tolerance for failure become central demands. The subject increasingly becomes an internal instance of selection.

Conclusion

The digital landscape does not liberate speech; it displaces the site from which it is governed. The suspension of the prior social filter reduces certain forms of symbolic violence, but it introduces new burdens for those who speak. Artificial intelligence, in this framework, does not constitute a radical origin, but rather an intensification of a preexisting logic of amplification, standardization, and deferred control. The contemporary challenge is not to choose between censorship and total openness, but to reflect on how criteria are formed when the policing of discourse no longer stands at the door, but installs itself within the subject.

Bibliography

• Foucault, Michel. L’ordre du discours. Paris: Gallimard, 1971.
• Foucault, Michel. L’archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1969.
• Foucault, Michel. Microphysique du pouvoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1977.
• Foucault, Michel. L’usage des plaisirs. Paris: Gallimard, 1984.
• Foucault, Michel. Le souci de soi. Paris: Gallimard, 1984.