What Can Be Said: Foucault and the Silent Architecture of Discourse

Aim and thesis

The article will argue that, in L’ordre du discours, Foucault does not merely describe censorship or repression but uncovers a prior and more decisive level of control: the set of procedures that determine what can enter discourse at all. These mechanisms operate across institutions, disciplines, and cultural practices, and remain highly operative in contemporary society.

Introduction: The Illusion of Free Speech

Modern societies often present themselves as arenas of open debate, where ideas circulate freely and disagreement is resolved through argument rather than exclusion. Speech appears, at least in principle, unrestricted. Against this reassuring image, Michel Foucault advances a far more unsettling claim. In his 1970 inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, later published as L’ordre du discours (The Order of Discourse), he insists that discourse is never simply free. Long before ideas are exchanged or contested, societies establish procedures that determine who may speak, what may be said, and which forms of expression will count as knowledge. In many instances, certain ideas or perspectives never reach the stage of speech at all, they are excluded before anyone even has the opportunity to articulate them.

Discourse as a Regulated Practice

Foucault’s intervention does not target isolated acts of censorship. His concern lies with the underlying organization of discourse itself. “In every society,” he writes, “the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized, and redistributed by a certain number of procedures” (Foucault, 1981, p. 52). These procedures do not merely limit expression from the outside; they shape the very conditions under which something becomes intelligible as discourse. Speech, in this sense, is a regulated practice rather than a spontaneous overflow of thought.

Among these regulatory mechanisms, Foucault identifies what he calls procedures of exclusion. They operate across domains—law, science, art, and education—and are sustained by institutions rather than individual intentions. Their effectiveness lies precisely in their impersonality. No single authority needs to intervene for exclusion to occur; the structure of discourse itself performs the filtering.

Prohibition: The Visible Limits of Speech

The most immediately observable mechanism is prohibition. Certain subjects, statements, or forms of expression are explicitly forbidden. Topics may be declared taboo, dangerous, obscene, or politically unacceptable. Prohibition draws attention because it is legible as repression: one can point to a ban, a sanction, or a formal rule and identify what has been disallowed. Yet for Foucault, this form of exclusion is neither the most subtle nor the most decisive. Its visibility often conceals the more pervasive operations that operate beneath the surface.

Division and Rejection: Who Is Allowed to Speak

A second mechanism functions through division and rejection. Here, exclusion does not target a statement but a speaker. Foucault’s paradigmatic case is the historical separation between reason and madness. The speech of the mad person is not answered, debated, or refuted; it is dismissed in advance as meaningless. As he notes, madness “was excluded, the madman being rejected and his words treated as noise” (Foucault, 1981, p. 53). What matters is not whether what is said is true or false, but whether it is recognized as discourse at all. Once a speaker is disqualified, their utterances no longer enter the space of discussion.

This logic extends well beyond psychiatry. Discursive legitimacy is unevenly distributed, and many voices are rendered inaudible not through suppression but through classification. Sometimes, authority is measured by formal markers: being asked “Are you an academic?” or “Do you hold a PhD?” can determine whether one’s words are taken seriously. Certain forms of speech are deemed unserious, unqualified, or irrelevant before they can be assessed on their own terms. Exclusion here operates silently, without the drama of overt censorship.

The Will to Truth: Authorized Knowledge

The most far-reaching mechanism is what Foucault calls the will to truth. Unlike prohibition, it does not appear as a constraint. On the contrary, it presents itself as a commitment to reason, rigor, and objectivity. Yet this will to truth is inseparable from institutional supports: disciplines, methods, vocabularies, and norms of validation. Foucault emphasizes that truth is not opposed simply to error but to what fails to meet the criteria of knowledge. “Each society has its regime of truth,” he writes, “its ‘general politics’ of truth” (Foucault, 1980, p. 131).

Within such regimes, statements are not excluded because they are false but because they do not conform to authorized forms of intelligibility. They may lack the correct terminology, methodology, or institutional backing. As a result, entire ways of speaking disappear from view without ever being contested. The will to truth exerts a quiet, durable form of power: it organizes silence by defining relevance.

Contemporary Resonances

Foucault’s framework provides insight into modern discursive life. Today, exclusion often takes the form of invisibility rather than overt repression. Discourses circulate unevenly, gaining legitimacy through institutional recognition, technical language, and formal credentials. What fails to align with these conditions does not provoke controversy; it simply fails to register. The question is no longer only who is censored but whose speech never acquires the status of speech in the first place.

Conclusion: Thinking Beyond the Spoken Word

Foucault’s analysis invites a shift in critical attention. Instead of focusing exclusively on explicit limits to expression, it urges examination of the silent architectures that precede them. Discourse is shaped long before words are spoken, through rules that determine intelligibility itself. To think critically about power, then, requires asking not only what is said and who says it, but also what remains unsayable—and why.

References

Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (C. Gordon, Ed. & Trans.). Pantheon Books.

Foucault, M. (1981). The Order of Discourse (I. McLeod, Trans.). In R. Young (Ed.), Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader (pp. 48–78). Routledge.