Aesthetic Investigations and Foucauldian Practices

In the years since Foucault's death in 1984, his works have gained an ever-widening circle of adherents and, more importantly, have been the basis for innumerable critical studies in fields as far ranging as sociobiology and legal ethics. Foucault's enormous intellectual range and ability to traverse disciplines have made him especially useful to cultural studies. Within cultural studies, concepts such as the panopticon, the episteme, and the specific intellectual have been readily adopted; however, cultural studies practitioners often fail to grasp the specificity of Foucault's critical interventions or their internal complexity. In the following essay, I look first at how a few critics have employed Foucault in their work. I then turn to a text Foucault himself edited and taught, ”I Pierre Riviere”, in hopes of locating a core of residual energy that cannot be readily pressed into the service of an overarching theory or method. In sum, this essay suggests that while we may readily accept Foucault's influence and usefulness for different fields, we should not overlook the specific context in which Foucault's own work occurs or, more generally, overlook a resistance in post-structuralism to being transformed into a systematic and coherent enterprise.