Reading Cultural Studies, Reading Foucault

Rimi Khan

Postmodern Culture, Vol 15(1).

2004

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2004.0041

This article tracks the reception of Foucault within cultural studies and examines the difficulties involved in mobilising Foucault’s ideas within the field as it exists in its current orthodoxies. The theoretical and methodological problems that arise when deploying Foucault’s ideas turn largely on cultural studies’ conceptualisations of power, subjectivity, and discourse, and reveal a dialectic between structure and agency that appears to define and constrain cultural studies’ critical agenda. The article surveys some of the ways in which the investigative possibilities raised by Foucault’s work have been put to use within cultural studies—including figures such as Stuart Hall, Judith Butler, Tony Bennett, and Ian Hunter. It is argued that the tenets of cultural studies’ criticality manifest themselves as a series of ongoing, irresolvable tensions. Following Hunter, it is contended that these dilemmas are imbricated with a more profound opposition that is central to the formation of the modern subject. It is, however, also a certain reading of Foucault that opens up a less burdened space of analysis—providing the tools for generating an alternative pragmatics that enables tangible interventions into specific historical problems.