Before Consent: Foucault, Chomsky, and the Organization of Public Discourse
Michel Foucault’s The Order of Discourse and Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent begin from different problems. Foucault is concerned with the procedures through which discourse is controlled, selected, organized, and redistributed. Herman and Chomsky are concerned with the institutional mechanisms through which mass media select and shape the information that reaches the public. One examines the order of discourse; the other examines the political economy of its circulation.
Yet read together, the two works illuminate a problem that neither addresses from exactly the same angle: what happens between something functioning as discourse and something becoming publicly consequential?
Not everything that can be said acquires the same conditions of circulation. A statement may be grammatically possible, intellectually coherent, legally publishable, and still remain marginal. Another may be repeated across newspapers, broadcasts, interviews, institutional reports, and political speeches until it acquires the appearance of the obvious. The difference is not necessarily a difference in truth. It is a difference in position, authorization, visibility, repetition, and reach.
This distinction matters because public discourse is not simply the sum of statements that have been made available to the public. There is a distance between sayability and circulation.
Foucault helps us understand the first side of that distance. His concern is not merely with explicit censorship or with the prohibition of particular propositions. He asks us to look at the procedures that organize discourse before and around individual statements: who may speak, under what conditions, according to which rules, within which institutional and disciplinary formations, and with what claims to truth.
Herman and Chomsky move the problem into another register. Their propaganda model asks why some information receives sustained public exposure while other information, even when available, receives little attention. Their answer is institutional rather than conspiratorial: ownership, advertising, sourcing, political pressure, and ideological assumptions systematically shape what the mass media select, emphasize, and repeat.
The two analyses therefore meet at a precise point. Foucault explains why discourse is never simply what is said. Herman and Chomsky explain why public discourse is never simply what has been said.
The movement between the two is the problem of this essay.
2. Foucault: The Order Before the Statement
Foucault’s inaugural lecture at the Collège de France begins with a deceptively simple hypothesis: in every society, the production of discourse is controlled, selected, organized, and redistributed according to a number of procedures (Foucault, 1971). The crucial word is not merely controlled. It is the entire sequence.
Discourse does not emerge into an empty space.
There are procedures of exclusion. Certain forms of speech are forbidden; others are disqualified. There are distinctions between what counts as reason and what is dismissed as madness, between what is regarded as true and what is treated as error. There are also procedures governing who is authorized to speak and from which institutional position. The physician does not speak in the same way as the patient; the judge does not occupy the same position as the accused; the scientific statement does not acquire its authority simply because someone happens to utter it.
Foucault’s point is not that individuals are incapable of saying whatever they wish. It is that the significance and force of an utterance cannot be understood solely at the level of individual intention.
A statement enters an already differentiated field.
This is why Foucault’s analysis is more demanding than a theory of censorship. Censorship suggests that a statement exists first and is subsequently prevented from appearing. Foucault directs attention to the more complicated processes through which statements are qualified, authorized, classified, connected with other statements, and made to function within particular regimes of discourse.
The problem is therefore not simply: What is forbidden?
It is also: What is authorized, what is disqualified, what is recognized as knowledge, and what procedures allow an utterance to acquire force?
This changes the meaning of freedom of speech. The absence of an explicit prohibition does not mean that all statements occupy equivalent positions. One may be free to speak without possessing the institutional position from which speech acquires authority. One may publish without entering the circuits through which discourse becomes consequential.
The notion of a “grid” is useful here only in a limited sense: intelligibility is never entirely produced by the individual speaker. Statements become intelligible within historically organized fields of knowledge and discourse. But The Order of Discourse shifts the emphasis. The question is no longer only how a culture orders what it can know. It is how discourse itself is subjected to procedures of selection, qualification, organization, and distribution.
This is where Foucault’s analysis becomes politically significant. Power does not operate only by saying no. It operates through the organization of what can count, who can speak, what can be recognized as true, and which statements can enter established circuits of knowledge.
But there is still another problem. Even when a statement has crossed these thresholds—when it is legitimate, intelligible, authorized, and available—it has not thereby acquired an audience. A discourse can exist without circulating widely.
It is at this point that Herman and Chomsky become indispensable.
3. Herman and Chomsky: The Filter After the Statement
Manufacturing Consent begins from a different institutional landscape. Herman and Chomsky do not primarily ask how discourse becomes possible within a field of knowledge. They ask how the mass media operate within a political economy.
Their propaganda model proposes that the production of news is systematically shaped by structural filters. In the original 1988 formulation, these include the size and ownership of media organizations, their dependence on advertising, their reliance on information supplied by governments and powerful institutions, the production of “flak” against troublesome reporting, and the ideological framework represented at the time by anticommunism (Herman & Chomsky, 1988).
The importance of the model does not lie in the five filters as a checklist. Its deeper claim is that information does not enter mass circulation under neutral conditions.
The media are not simply channels through which already existing information passes. Institutional arrangements affect what is selected, what is emphasized, which sources are treated as authoritative, how much attention a story receives, and whether it remains visible long enough to become part of public awareness.
This is why the propaganda model should not be reduced to censorship.
Censorship implies prohibition. Filtering can operate without prohibition.
A story does not have to be banned to disappear from public attention. It may simply receive less space, fewer repetitions, weaker sourcing, less prominent placement, fewer follow-up reports, or less institutional reinforcement. Conversely, another interpretation may be continuously reproduced because it fits established structures of ownership, advertising, sourcing, political legitimacy, and professional practice.
The absence of censorship does not imply equality of circulation.
This is the point at which Manufacturing Consent extends the problem raised by Foucault. If Foucault asks about the procedures that organize discourse, Herman and Chomsky ask about the institutional mechanisms that organize its public reach.
The distinction is important. The two analyses should not be collapsed into one. Foucault is not offering a theory of media ownership, and Herman and Chomsky are not simply translating Foucault into the language of journalism. Their objects and levels of analysis differ.
But precisely because they differ, they can be placed in sequence.
Foucault shows that discourse is already ordered before it becomes an object of mass circulation. Herman and Chomsky show that, once discourse enters the mass-media system, its circulation remains institutionally differentiated.
The result is a double asymmetry.
There is an asymmetry in who can speak with authority.
And there is an asymmetry in whose speech acquires public reach.
The first concerns the order of discourse. The second concerns the political economy of circulation.
Neither requires a central censor sitting behind the system deciding, message by message, what the population will believe. The mechanisms are more ordinary and therefore more difficult to see. Decisions made within institutions, repeated according to professional routines, economic constraints, political pressures, and established assumptions can generate regular patterns without requiring a single coordinating intelligence.
The system does not need to say, “Suppress this.”
It can simply make some things easier to hear than others.
And that difference becomes decisive when circulation becomes repetition.
4. From Circulation to Consent
The word manufacturing in Herman and Chomsky’s title can easily be misunderstood. It can suggest a conscious operation in which someone deliberately constructs the opinions of an otherwise passive population. That is not necessary for the argument.
The more difficult question is precisely this: How much intention is required for a system to produce systematic effects?
Institutions are composed of decisions. Those decisions have motives, interests, assumptions, routines, and constraints. Yet the cumulative result can exceed the intention of any particular participant. A journalist may follow ordinary professional conventions. An editor may select what seems newsworthy. An advertiser may make an ordinary commercial decision. A government official may provide information to the press. None of these acts, taken individually, needs to amount to propaganda.
The question concerns their patterned interaction.
The political significance of filtering becomes clearer when we add time.
A statement that appears once has one kind of public existence. A statement that appears repeatedly has another. Repetition does not guarantee belief. It does something more subtle: it increases familiarity, stabilizes associations, and makes certain formulations available as ready-made descriptions of events.
What is repeatedly encountered begins to function less like one possible interpretation and more like part of the background against which alternatives are judged.
This does not mean that audiences simply absorb whatever they are given. People resist, reinterpret, mock, reject, and contradict public discourse. But rejection itself can occur within a field already structured by unequal circulation.
A person may reject an answer while accepting the terms in which the question has been posed.
That distinction is crucial.
Suppose public discourse repeatedly presents a political problem through a limited set of categories. An individual may disagree about the solution while never questioning the categories themselves. The disagreement is real, but it takes place inside a field whose boundaries have already been partially established.
Here the two books converge without becoming identical.
Foucault helps explain why the categories available for thinking are never entirely innocent. They belong to organized discursive formations, institutions, disciplines, and procedures of truth.
Herman and Chomsky help explain why some of those categories acquire disproportionate public visibility.
The first concerns the organization of discourse. The second concerns the organization of attention. Between them lies repetition, and repetition changes the conditions under which something becomes thinkable, discussable, familiar, or obvious.
This is where the political problem of consent becomes more precise. Consent does not have to be produced by persuading everyone of a proposition. It can also emerge from a field in which some descriptions of reality are continually present while others struggle to achieve comparable visibility.
Consent, in this sense, is not necessarily agreement with every message. It may be accommodation to a field of meanings whose basic organization has become difficult to perceive.
5. Before the Answer
Taken separately, The Order of Discourse and Manufacturing Consent illuminate different mechanisms.
Foucault shows that discourse is subject to procedures of exclusion, qualification, authorization, organization, and distribution. The speaker does not enter a neutral space in which every utterance has an equal chance of becoming meaningful or authoritative.
Herman and Chomsky show that mass communication is not a neutral space either. Institutional structures filter information and distribute public attention unevenly. What reaches large audiences, what remains visible, what is repeated, and what becomes established as common knowledge are shaped by conditions that cannot be reduced to the intentions of individual communicators.
The connection between the two is therefore not that they offer the same theory of power. It is that they allow us to follow a sequence. What can function as discourse is not necessarily what will become public. What becomes public is not necessarily what will become familiar. And what becomes familiar does not have to be believed in order to structure the field of disagreement.
The political question is consequently not only who gets to speak.
It is what happens to speech once it enters a field in which authority, attention, repetition, and legitimacy are unequally distributed.
This also explains why the problem cannot be solved simply by distinguishing truth from falsehood. A true statement may circulate weakly. A false statement may circulate extensively. Between the truth of a proposition and its public effectiveness lies a whole institutional machinery.
Foucault makes us suspicious of the idea that discourse simply expresses what is already there. Herman and Chomsky make us suspicious of the idea that public discourse simply reflects what society already thinks.
Together they point toward a more uncomfortable proposition: public discourse helps organize the field within which thinking, disagreement, and consent become possible.
The crucial political question therefore comes before the answer.
Consent begins before the answer.
References
Chomsky, N., & Foucault, M. (2006). The Chomsky-Foucault debate: On human nature (J. Rajchman, Ed.). The New Press. (Original work published 1971)
Foucault, M. (1970). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1966)
Foucault, M. (1971). Orders of discourse. Social Science Information, 10(2), 7–30. https://doi.org/10.1177/053901847101000201
Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. Pantheon Books.
Saussure, F. de. (1983). Course in general linguistics (R. Harris, Trans.). Duckworth. (Original work published 1916)
Comments
Post a Comment