Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (review)

In 1977, at the first summer institute of the newly formed Marxist Literary Group, Eagleton, along with Fredric Jameson and Stanley Aronowitz, lectured for three weeks, explaining the literary criticism which was based on Louis Althusser's French Marxism and expounded so forcefully in Criticism and Ideology. In a new introduction, Eagleton says that this work was so compelling because it reflected the optimism of the 1970s, when radicals and activists successfully ended the Vietnam War or brought down a conservative British government.

I considered the book compelling not because I felt much political optimism but because during the Cold War scholars and critics assumed that in Marxist (read "communist") theory politics dominates theory, history dominates aesthetics, and content dominates form. The book counters this view. In the remarkable chapter 3, "Towards a Science of the Text," Eagleton elaborates Pierre Macherey's distinction between the text's aesthetic forms and its ideological representations or languages. Macherey says that the formal methods which the critic employs do not show the historical realities of the author's life; rather, ideology, which represents history, imposes on the author's productive labor the gaps and distortions which these methods reveal. ¹Eagleton grants that the productive labor of the author accounts for the text but argues that, as a drama, the text and the production diverge. That is, the labor produces but does not explain the text, which is independent of it. Eagleton also grants that the formal methods of the critic reveal the influence which ideology exerts on the text's production, but he argues that, in addition to gaps and distortions, the influence can take many different forms. This complex view gave formal methods a critical import even the cold warriors would respect.

Since he has long rejected the Althusserian science of Marxism in favor of the Hegelian aesthetic theories of the Frankfurt School and others, in the introduction he adds that his tone is overconfident and his Althusserian outlook an embarassing reflex of the Catholic upbringing which he shared with Althusser. He suggests that, although the book has valuable insight, it has been neglected because in the 1980s and 1990s conservative governments defeated the left and rendered Marxist theory virtually outmoded and irrelevant.

He also blames the defeat of Marxism and the left on post-Marxists, but they have elaborated the Althusserian methods which he now finds so embarrassing. For instance, like Eagleton, Macherey went on to reject the Althusserian notion that science and, by analogy, formal methods transcend and oppose their enabling ideologies, but he still supports an earlier claim that an author produces a text in certain conditions while readers interpret it in very different conditions. Similarly, Tony Bennett and John Frow reject the Althusserian view but claim that the intertextuality of semiotic theory opens the text to its readers, whose productive activity gives it its meanings. ²As Warren Montag points out, in place of this historical account of a text's reception, Eagleton develops in chapter 2, "Categories for a Materialist Criticism," a structuralist account of a text's modes of production and consumption. ³They include the GMP (general mode of production), LMP (literary mode of production), GI (general ideology), AUI (authorial ideology), AI (aesthetic ideology), and Text. Eagleton argues that in very different ways a text employs these modes of production and kinds of ideology but cannot be reduced to them. Unlike the Althusserian account of criticism, these general categories never caught on perhaps because the post-structuralists whom Eagleton considers right-wing critiqued them so forcefully.

In chapter 1, "Mutations of a Critical Ideology," Eagleton faults the work of Raymond Williams because, instead of adopting "revolutionary" Althusserian Marxism, he develops a left liberal version of the humanist criticism promoted by the British scholar F.R. Leavis and his journal Scrutiny. It is well-known that Althusserian theory opposes such humanist criticism; however, in Problems in Materialism and Culture(1980), which influenced the Birmingham School and other versions...