Interview: Terry Eagleton

Author(s): James H. Kavanagh, Thomas E. Lewis, Terry Eagleton

Source: Diacritics, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Spring, 1982), pp. 52-64
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/464791
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52
INTERVIEW

TERRY EAGLETON

JAMESH. KAVANAGHand THOMASE. LEWIS

LEWIS:RosalindCoward said that your Criticismand Ideology has had little

impact on literarycritical practice in England. Is that true?
EAGLETON:It is almost certainly true of practicalcriticism. I think what the
book did was to sketch in a possible method or set of methods, which are not
seen really worked out in practice.
I do not think that is true of the theory of the book. I think for example that
the notion of the literarymode of production (Chapter2) - that has been taken
up. Not necessarily in a detailed way, but I think it has. It is really importantto
see the book in its historicalmoment and context. I think that it was a necessary
theoretical intervention at a point where things were brewing up in Englandin
the wake of the late 1960's Marxist revival. A lot of people were thinking in
those directions, but it needed to be formulated, and it was clear that the first
person to formulate it on paper was going to draw fire. And that was partof the
intention of the book - a kind of putting the cards on the table. The book cer-
tainly attracteda lot of theoretical debate in Englandand elsewhere, and, to that
extent, I would have thought it did have an impact. But it was, as I say, largelya
theoretical debate.
LEWIS:To be fair to her and to you, she did mean at the level of practical
analysis.
EAGLETON: Yes, oddly enough I had included in the book originallya long
analysis of Conrad'sThe SecretAgent that was tryingto show in some detail how
the thing worked out. That was then taken out of the book because it looked a
bit odd structurally,and in fact appeared later as an article. So there would have
been an example of that.
KAVANAGH:I think she also meant in radical signifying practices, like the
independent cinema. The suggestion was that people working in alternative
literaryand cultural practices did not know what to do with your work.
EAGLETON: Yes, I can understand that, but I think again that is relevant to
the book's historicalmoment; it was very self-consciously a theoretical interven-
tion. I think that since then, and perhaps as an effect of the book, arguments
within BritishMarxistcriticism have shifted. For example, Tony Bennett's book
is a straw in the wind. But they have shifted away from, say, a theoretical Marx-
ist criticism that still in its methods and tones remains within the academy, as I
think Criticism and Ideology does, towards a more politically-oriented
criticism- looking at institutions, looking for alternativecultural practices, look-
ing for a relation between cultural and political practices. I take that now to be
the emphasis, the trend. Signs of that, for example, are the shift from the
moment of production to the moment of consumption. Again, if you compare
my book to Bennett's, that is marked. I think that's the direction things should
go.
DIACRITICS Vol. 12 Pp. 53-64
0300-7162/82/0121-0053 $01.00 ? 1982 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
 I would now be critical of what seems to me the residual academicism of Criticismand
Ideology, which did not tackle the questions that would now seem most relevant. I suppose
one could say these were questions of cultural revolution, of the political use and appropria-
tion of artifactsin political struggle. I think it is also fair to say a lot of that concern has post-
dated the book. There have been developments in radical theatre, in the work of Screen in
film, and so on, that were not as much available when the book was written. It was
necessary to begin with a kind of putting of the house in order- at once a critique of the pre-
history of Marxistcriticism, as I try to do in the Williams'chapter, and then simply a specify-
ing of the protocols and procedures of a science of the text. All that, as you are implying,
remained very remote from cultural practice; but I think it was a necessary condition for
developing one.
KAVANACH:Maybe we can shift that to another level of generality, and ask what you
think now about the relationship between theoretical and ideological or practical tasks. Do
you think Althusseriantheory addresses this relationship adequately?
EAGLETON:I would say that the task of a Marxist critic was not primarily in the
academy, although that is where inevitably we do most of our work. The task of a Marxist
critic is difficultto define, because we do not yet have the materialconditions for specifying
it. We would only have those given certain political circumstances, where we would
discover what has to be done. But I would now want to say that we are doing a kind of
holding operation, mainly working within the academy. It is necessary to engage in
ideological struggleat the level of the texts and artifactsthat the establishment has selected as
ideological instruments,terrainsof struggle;that is not a task to be sniffed at. But I have been
trying, in my own cultural work and political practice since Criticism and Ideology, to
become much more involved with looking at the relevance of cultural studies to revolu-
tionary political practice. That again is not easy because the conditions do not fully exist for
it. But I think it is clear that, unless the cultural theory is brought to bear within the
ideological struggle in some way, then it is for a Marxistof no value, and it will be simply
theoreticist.
On the point about Althusseriantheory I suppose I was always to some degree surprised
by being described tout court as an Althusseriancritic.
LEWIS:Could you explain?
EAGLETON:Well, in the sense that both Criticism and Ideology and Marxism and
LiteraryCriticismare at various points critical of central concepts of Althusseriantheory. It
would be truer to say that, while there is no single major concept of Althusser'sthat I would
not have serious reservationsabout, and did not have serious reservationsabout even when
writing Criticismand Ideology, nonetheless, Althusserianismas a kind of style, or frame of
thinking, was then a valuable one-valuable not least in its opening of certain areas, in its
reaction against Hegelian Marxistcriticism. So Althusserianismwas the atmosphere and the
framework out of which that work came.
On the other hand, I would now, as then, feel seriously criticalof a lot of Althusser'scen-
tral concepts. The difference between my position now and then would be that I do not
think that in writing Criticismand Ideology I really saw at all what I would now see as the
relationship between what is wrong or limited about Althusser'sconcepts theoretically and
his political practice. I would like to argue now that, whereas there is never any conflation of
the theoretical and the political, there is, nonetheless, a real relation in all ways. What inter-
ests me now in Althusserian criticism is how Althusser's unsatisfactory concepts can be
related to the political practice of what I would still call Stalinism.
KAVANACH:Could you specify some of the key concepts or moments in the theory
that you think show that relationship?
EACLETON:Yes. I would choose three or four areas that I found, on the one hand, pro-
ductive in combatting various Hegelian Marxisttheories, but on the other hand, related to
Stalinism.
One is the clear theoreticism of Althusser's at least early insistence on the effective
autonomy of theoretical practice. Insofaras that is tryingto bend the stick against a historicist
notion of theory, whereby theory would be no more than the self-consciousness of the
revolutionaryclass, it is a necessary insistence upon the specificity of theoretical production.
At the same time, it raises grievous epistemological problems: for example, Althusser

54
 ominously draws many of his models of theoretical practice from mathematics; there is the
Spinozan influence behind it; there is almost no concern with the problem of evidence in
the relation between theory and practice. Although I felt uneasy about that at the time of
Criticismand Ideology, I would now want to relate that much more firmlyto a very specific
history of Althusser'sown fight within the PCFas a kind of closet left Maoist sympathizer
attempting to establish a theoretical position within the PCF primarilyby establishing the
autonomy of theory, by appealing to Marx and Engels and Lenin in ways he could use
against practice in the PCF.
The other point is that in the writing of Criticismand Ideology I was much too uncritical
of the expansionist definition of ideology in Althusser, which I also think is related to
Stalinism;that is, if ideology becomes effectively coterminus with lived experience, as the
early Poulantzas wrote, then it seems to be essentially deprived of any political cutting-edge
as a concept. It has been removed from the terrainof class struggleto, firstof all, a primarily
epistemological category, and then one that could effectively be synonymous with culture,
or with lived experience. That relates to the suppression of the class struggle in Althusser,
which I also find mars the essay on the ISAs;there is an apparently inexorable subjecting of
the subject to what looks suspiciously monolithic or super-ego-like ISAs,or set of ISAs.That
seems a drastic simplificationof the real contradictory process of interpellationfound in any
particularsocial formation.
LEWIS:But is that due so much to the theoretical formulation, or to the examples- such
as the church -that Althusser uses. It always struck me that the elimination of theoretical
practice as an autonomous fourth practice has been replaced in some places by signifying
practices, that presumably correlate to aesthetic practices, autonomous from ideological
practice. But is not the purpose of limiting the social formation to three practices (as in
Hindess and Hirst)-ideological practice now including aesthetic and others - precisely to
restore the notion of contradiction and class struggle as taking place within ideological prac-
tice?
EAGLETON:Yes, that is right, and I would agree with that to an extent. But I think the
example of the church flows logically from the mistaken theory. I think, first, that Althusser
gets Lacan wrong with the categories of imaginaryand symbolic. Althusser'snotion of the
subject being subjected through interpellation looks very much like the censoring moment
of the super-ego, what in Lacan'ssystem would figure as the birth of the subject. But, in fact
Althusser is talking about the imaginary; he's talking about the ego, which is obviously for
Lacan the tip of the iceberg of the subject. So there are definite confusions in Althusser's
appropriation of Lacan.
Nor do I think it is possible to develop a theory of ideology purely from the category of
the imaginary, and a lot of the work of Screen- the work clustered around Althusser and
Lacan, including the work of Ellisand Coward - has suffered from attempting to generate up
a theory of ideology purely from the imaginary. This, in turn, has its roots theoretically in
Althusser'smistakingof the ego for the subject. The question still remains: how are subjects
contradictorily inserted, interpellated in what are inevitably contradictory discourses?
Althusser's notion of an ideological formation also still has a strong residual func-
tionalism about it. One has to ask where are the contradictions in this. Macherey asserts
straight off that ideology is non-contradictory.
LEWIS:As do you, in Criticismand Ideology. If we have got to restore notions of con-
tradiction and class strugglewithin ideology, what then happens to the hermeneutic value of
a concept like absence? Does the whole notion of symptomatic reading just disappear?
EAGLETON:That is another way of asking whether earlier and later Macherey are
incompatible. EarlierMacherey is certainly primarilyabout absence, symptomatic reading,
the presumption of the homogeneity of an ideology, and therefore the possibility of embar-
rassing it only by forcing it into a revelation of its silences. The later Macherey sites
ideological discourse much more within contradictoryclass practices in the academic appa-
ratus. I do not see why they should be mutually incompatible. Francoise Gaillard used a
good phrase when she said that ideologies were homogenizing but never homogeneous,
that the thrustor tendency of an ideology is to attempt to unify, but it won't quite crack it. In
that sense, the need for symptomatic reading and the attempt to disarraythe ideology are
still important because of ideology's continual attempt to homogenize, and its tendency to

diacritics/ spring 1982 55

succeed in doing so in a particularsituation. At the same time, one can equally look at an
ideological formation as an attempt at homogenization of elements that are in fact contradic-
tory, and therefore the other kind of analysis would be appropriate, too.
KAVANAGH:Would a critical programor procedure flowing from Althusseriantheory,
then, still center on "symptomaticreading"and "absence"?
EAGLETON:Yes. I would think so. I still find the notion of symptomatic reading a very
valuable one, and not least the way in which it has been developed in the hands of
Macherey. It is less and less confined to Althusserianism, in the sense that there are many
relations between that and what is known as deconstruction. It seems to me that Macherey's
work was an excellent work on deconstruction, but has not been taken up by the so-called
deconstructionists, no doubt because he was talking not just about presence but propertyas
well. Macherey was a known Communist, a known ally of LouisAlthusser, and therefore in
many ways less fashionable and acceptable than other actors, like Derrida, whose magnum
opus appeared in the same year. So symptomatic reading is a valuable concept; it is
Althusser'sconcept, and it has been usefully developed in other directions since. Going back
to the previous point, if the notion of symptomatic reading is predicated upon the assump-
tion of the homogeneity of the discourse, then that needs to be challenged, and other kinds
of methods need to be developed, as the later Macherey has done.
KAVANAGH:How do you relate the attempt to develop what one might call a politi-
cized theory of textuality to the other post-structuralisttheoretical positions that are now au
courant: the Kristeva- Tel Quel position, the Derridianposition, and the Foucauldian posi-
tion?
EAGLETON:What has to distinguish the materialist reading of texts from a non-
materialistone cannot ever just be a matter of technique, cannot be a matter of theoretical
or critical methods. It must be a matter, first, of the way you locate the text among and
within other practices, and second, relatedly, a matterof why you are doing it anyway. What
purposes, which are other than textual purposes, you hope to fulfill. Derrida himself, in a
recent seminar, remarked- somewhat to the scandalization of some of his acolytes who
were present-that deconstruction was not a textual practice. He said that deconstruction
was a political practice, and that unless it involved the analysis of the materialconditions of
possibility of a text, it was simply being used wrongfully. It seems to me if that remark of
Derrida is taken seriously, then most of his disciples have been systematically mistaking him
most of the time.
Equally, it is fashionable (among many North American critics particularly),to run
together Derridaand Foucault,as if because they both live on the left bank or whatever, they
can be easily married. But this is almost a category mistake, because certainly Foucault is
speaking all the time of the relation of discursive to non-discursive practices. Marxismwould
certainly want to interrogatethe banal bourgeois pluralismthat backs Foucault'sposition on
that. The extreme nominalism of Foucault's position seems to me absolutely no different
from many strainsof bourgeois ideology. Indeed, it is necessary to have at least two readings
of Foucault'swork. One would be for its deep value for a Marxismthat has in some of its
developments become so concerned with general theories that it has not had a real theory of
conjuncture. The second and simultaneous one must be a readingof Foucault'swork as con-
sistently and quietly anti-Marxist.The relations between those two things need still to be
thought out.
So I think the two distinct emphases for Marxismwould be: first,where you locate the
textual practice in the firstplace; and, second, why you are doing it. I do not think these are
differences of theoretical approach - although I would like to qualify that somewhat by say-
ing that a study and calculation of the political and ideological effects of texts, is obviously a
central element of Marxist criticism, and is significantly absent from those forms of
deconstructionism which, in a formal way, may look as though they are doing much the
same thing- maybe taking the text apart, maybe showing its hidden points of limitationand
weakness, and so on.
The other point at stake is obviously the epistemological point. I would still want to
assert that for Marxisma science- shocking word - of the text and of ideologies is possible,
or is usually possible, given certain historical knowledge that may or may not be available to
us, depending on which text we are taking. To say that a science of the text is possible is not
56
necessarilyto saythatit is the mostimportantthing;it alldependsuponwhatyou aredoing.
The mostfruitfulway of usinga text mayactuallybe to talkaboutits mode of politicalinser-
tion into the presentand to tryto transformthat mode of insertion.It may not be.
When we speakof the distinctnessof theoryand ideology,one thingwe perhapstend
to forgetis that nothingcan be more ideologicallyefficaciousthanthe truth.If,forexample,
in a teachingsituationyou are tryingto demystifycertainideologicalreadingsof a text by
reinserting thattext into its ideologicaland historicalcontext,thatitselfmayhaveone of the
most powerfullytransformative politicaleffectson the studentyou are teaching.Butwhat
you do depends on the situation.
KAVANAGH:Do you still find some value, then, in relatively traditional political cri-
tiquesor interpretations
of texts, the traditionalMarxistdemystification?
EAGLETON: Yes, Ithinkso. Ido not go alongwiththe argumentthatthe Text,capitalT,
is some unknowable Ding an sich. I think that it is possible to have something that we can
call a knowledge,as againstan opinion or a prejudiceabout the natureof a
satisfactorily
historical formation or a mode of production. I do not see why that does not apply also to
ideology. And certainly, as I said, sometimes, particularlyin teaching practice, thats the
importantthing to do. When, however, one, as I think one must, looks at teaching practice
withinthe contextof revolutionary culturalpoliticsas a whole, then one findsoneselfdoing
othersortsof things,one findsoneself beingmuch moredirectlyinvolvedin the politiciza-
tion of texts, in the transformation of the uses of texts, and so on.
KAVANAGH: You mentionedDerridaand Foucault.How about Tel-Quel-Kristeva?
EAGLETON: Whateverindubitablevaluetherehasbeen in the earlierwork,particularly
of Kristevaand of the Tel-Quelgroup,the culminationof thatparticular sagamustinevitably
throwsome retrospective criticallight.Butwhathashappened,whatis happening,whatwill
probably go on happening, is that quite a lot of people who were from the outset petit-
bourgeoisidealistsin materialist
clothing,are beingrevealedin their,as it were, nakedreal-
ity.Andthe suspiciousalacritywithwhich one can zip intoand zip out of Marxismas some
fashionable stopping-off point, is grotesquely contrastable with what one regards as the
Marxisttradition.
The Marxisttraditionis not-and it is lamentablethat it needs even to be said at this
point- is not a traditionof "theoreticians."
Bythe Marxisttraditionwe meana traditionthat
has for one and a halfcenturiesinvolvedliterallymillionsof men and women in life and
deathstruggles.Andwhateverwe meanby Marxisttheory,unlessfromthe beginningwe put
it in thatcontext,then we are no morethan idealists.Whatis painfuland embarrassing for
somebodywho allieshimor herselfto thatMarxisttradition- to the livinghistoricalstruggles
of men andwomen thatarestillgoingon - in dealingwithpeople likeKristeva andTel-Quel,
is that one is inevitablyforced into a theoreticistand idealistframeworkfromthe outset.
Whatever one can take of value, and there are things that one can take of value from that
work, has to be seen with that suspecting glance.
LEWIS:Is there-and if there is, would you define it-a difference between, the
aestheticeffect and the ideologicaleffect?
EAGLETON: I think the differenceis usefuljust in this: that when one talks of the
aestheticeffect,one drawsattentionto the multipleeffectsof a particularkindof ideological
practice that we know as art- given of course that "art"is an enormously historicallyvariable
and relative term. It has at least the therapeutic effect of reminding oneself of the specific
modesof ideologicaleffectivityof this practiceratherthanthat.Itis simplya way of differen-
tiatingbetween differentideologicalpractices.
The dangerobviouslyis thatone maythen beginto fetishizesomethingknownas "the
aestheticeffect"as invariable,or relativelyinvariable.Again,the rathertoo easy way in
which Althusserian criticsappropriatedthe essentiallyformalistnotionof estrangementor
distantiation veers dangerously in that direction; one was tending to assume there was
alwaysone kindof aestheticeffect, called "estrangement." RaymondWilliamshas pointed
out, Ithinkrightly,thatat certainhistoricalperiodswhen avant-garde
artis in full-scalerevolt
against certain traditionalist and realistic modes it will tend to privilege the estrangement
effect as its specific definition of the aesthetic; but that is by no means the only definition.
I tried, in the "Science of the Text" chapter in Criticism and Ideology, to assert the
relative autonomy of the aesthetic from the ideological, but to show that in the process of

diacritics/ spring 1982 57

analyzing a text- and this is really what I meant by a "science of the text"- one was tracking
through a very complex process of interaction, whereby the aesthetic is always overdeter-
mined by the ideological, where there is no aesthetic device which is not always-already-
ideological at some level, whereby, then, that device takes and processes ideological
materials- that do not just springfrom the aesthetic region of ideology, but come from other
surrounding ideological discourses as well.
So it is a vexed question to which I have no simple answer. I want to resistwhat seems
now a dangerous tendency to overpoliticize texts, which again is a bending of the stick
against Marxist academicism. This overpoliticization is, as it were, the most generous,
perhaps the most productive of errors, but one which, insofaras it still speaks of something
we agree to call a text, inevitablyfinds itself involved in a discussion of certain specific effects
that are traditionallyknown as aesthetic. We might want to change the word, and there's no
reason why not, but that's what we are dealing with.
Very simply, if one looks at the concrete practices of a Brecht, say, then this distinction
looks a bit different. There would not be a distinction for Brecht between saying: was the
play ideologically effective- did it actually transformthe subject in the direction of certain
kinds of practice? and, was it aesthetically so? One would find that one could translate one
term into the other, at least in the sense that one was talking about ideological effects in a
particular mode, utilizing particular kinds of devices. When one speaks of aesthetics in
general, one usually talks about some sort of relation between what are crudely called the
psycho-analytical and the ideological, a relation that we do not yet know very much about.
The word "aesthetic"is a sign saying "Dig here." That'sabout as far as we can go.
LEWIS:Is the trajectory of Althusserian criticism necessarily to become subject-
centered? The analysis of literarytexts and the notion of ideology as interpellation-func-
tional, contradictory, or otherwise- is that what Althusseriancriticism is all about? To define
the ways in which particulartexts attempt to construct social subjectivity?
EAGLETON:One of the things wrong about Althusser'stheory of ideology is that it is
reduced to the subject. It is of absolute importance to claim that ideology among other
things interpellatesthe subject; and insofaras that has never been formulated as clearly and
affirmativelyas it has by Althusser, that is a very importantaspect of Althusseriantheory. At
the same time, what gets squeezed out in Althusser'stheory, making it excessively subject-
centered, is the whole tradition and area of work to be developed in Marxism, stemming
from Marx'sown work in Capital,concerning non-discursiveideological practices- by which
I mean the way in which Marx shows that commodity fetishism itself, directly related to
economic practices, is for him the primarygenerator of ideology, to the point where one can
validly put to Marx the question: Well if this is so, then why do you need ideological appa-
ratuses at all? Althusser bends the stick the other way: there is now no longer a relation
between economic and ideological practices, other than economic practices contributing
and generating ideological ones. The only relation now is that ideological practices actually
equip economic agents. It'sall in that direction.
One wants to look at not only the relation of ideology to such non-discursive practices
as economic practices, but also to political non-discursive practices; I do not find it very
helpful to say that a classic piece of ideological discourse like Locke's Treatise on Civil
Government is about interpellatingthe subject. Indeed, you can use it, and it has been used,
to interpellate subjects, the subject, but there are functions of ideological discourse that can-
not be reduced to that. One could move relativelydirectly from a certain real political con-
stitution of society to an ideological discourse, or vice versa-without going through the
detour of the subject, without saying that this discourse can only be understood in terms of
its rhetorical techniques of hailing, its mechanisms for interpellating,the subject.
LEWIS:What about fiction?
EAGLETON: There Althusseriantheory is on much stronger ground, in that among the
various ideological discourses and practices, what people have called literatureor fiction is
the one that is most obviously relevant to social subjectivities. It is just that one must then
beware of reading every other kind of ideological practice through that optic, because then
one is in - as I think it is true to say of the useful but perhaps ratheruncriticalnotion of signi-
fying practices-one is in danger of reducing the whole of ideology to discourse. Then we
are in a familiarkind of epistemological bind: to say and to assert quite rightlythat there is no

58
practice that does not happen and is not carried within discourse, is not the same as reduc-
ing practices to discourse. And I think there has been such a tendency within the
Althusserian ideological argument.
If I could just add to that. It is also a tendency that has to be looked at historicallyand
socially. Because nothing will be more attractive to a group of essentially petit-bourgeois
intellectuals than to know that, as it were, they are dealing at their own level. The sociality
and materialityof discourse, which are two emphases that we vitally have begun to recover,
as against a Cartesianor Saussurean legacy, can then very easily stand in for politics. All the
drama, all the arguments, all the traditionalconfrontations one has had within political prac-
tices then occur cranked up a level, to the level of discursive practices. That, of course, has
the very convenient effect of then repressing the relation between discursive and political
practices.
KAVANAGH:We talked about the notion of the over-politicization of texts. Could you
say something about the notion of seeing certain forms as intrinsicallyreactionary or pro-
gressive- the notion of avant-gardeor distantiatingtexts as intrinsicallypolitically progressive
from the point of view of Marxism,or of classical realism, representationalmodes of fictional
discourse and the representational aesthetic effect, as something intrinsically reactionary
because of the way it constitutes the subject? I'mthinking especially of your remarkin a New
Left Review article suggesting that what we need now is a kind of "materialistrealism."
EAGLETON:Nothing reveals so clearly the isolation of this kind of theoretical discourse
from a practical politics as the rapidity with which people have rushed to endorse those
alternative positions-either realism as progressive or realism as reactionary, or whatever.
And I say that because I do not honestly think that in different material conditions, when
actually confronted by a revolutionary process, with the pressing business of using a text,
that you could affordthat kind of luxury.One can adduce as evidence the practice of Brecht,
who is of course an incurable bricoleur, in the way in which he will pinch something from
every position, but who does that because he sees that the revolutionary political process
simply will not stop for those dogmatisms.
And they are dogmatisms, in the sense that, curiously, on the one hand you get an
extreme form of conjuncturalism, which asserts that you can only ever measure or assess a
particulartext at all in a very limited and specific historicalcircumstance, linked at the same
time to a very general theory assertingthat realism is always regressive. I reallydon't see how
those can be combined; if you are taking a conjuncturalistline, then it would seem logical to
say that a realisttext could indeed in some situations have certain progressiveeffects, and an
avant-garde text conversely might have certain reactionary effects.
In that New Left Review article, I tried to say that the whole argument suffers from a
drastic shortage of history. The collective memory has repressed the moment of the revolu-
tionary emergence and challenge of realism as a progressive force, as a rapidlysecularizing
and demystifying genre against the aristocraticforms of non-realism, the great feudalist and
traditionalistgenres. It is only by virtue of such a repression that we can now look at realism
in a universalizingway and say that it will always have a reactionaryeffect with the fixing of
the sign or whatever.
But whether representation will have a reactionaryeffect really does depend on where
you happen to be standing at the time. It may well be that the anti-realistargument is right
for this political moment, that it will be the forms we've received from the great revolutionary
avant-garde movement, all the way from the Futuriststhrough to Brecht, that will be most
viable. It may indeed be that intellectuals tend grossly to overestimate the extent to which
the masses are in the grip of realism. Indeed, if one looks around at many popular cultural
forms, they don't use realism very much. They use techniques that are certainly akin to the
techniques of modernism- in however debased and reactionary a way. It may be much
more our problem - partly because we are having to fight an academic right-wingestablish-
ment which is still very deeply in the grip of realism.
KAVANAGH:This relates to a problem that you perhaps slighted in Criticism and
Ideology: the necessity of thinking the different moments of textual production and textual
consumption. One might have, for example, a textual practice which one could evaluate as
politically progressive at the moment of its production, and it can become available at
another historical moment for consumption in the opposite way.

diacritics/ spring 1982 59

a
 EAGLETON:Quite. In that sense the necessity to cut any internal link between the
moment of production and the moment of consumption is important. I do not think I was
ever arguing for a fixed and inexorable relation between them, which would make the
moment of production totally determinate of the various moments of consumption.
KAVANACH:I meant, rather,that you put aside a littletoo easily the necessity of study-
ing the moment of consumption.
EAGLETON:Absolutely. I think that is a serious gap in Criticismand Ideology. I think
ironically that what has happened since is perhaps the reverse. There is now a kind of car-
nival of consumption, a fetishism of consumption. The classic move now-while perhaps
asserting parenthetically that, yes of course in some way the text does constrain the
hermeneutical process- is to go on to a total hermeneutic plurality.The political point of
that, I think, must be taken; because it is certainly one way of defusing potentially revolu-
tionary texts to say that they can be dragged into any kind of ideological matrix that you
want.
KAVANAGH:In what sense, then, can we speak of an ideology as intrinsic to a par-
ticular text, or in what sense must we recognize that the ideological significance of a text will
always be provided by some kind of critical-theoreticaloperation- the author perhaps being
the first such actor, the first reader of the text? Does any given text have a certain intrinsic
ideological significance which constrains interpretation,or is a text always at any moment an
instantiation of a certain ideological operation given at that moment.
EAGLETON:Well, no doubt, somewhere, somebody is claiming that you can read
Pilgrim'sProgressas an example of Hobbesian hedonist materialism.Ithink one wants simply
to be an old-style nineteenth-century rationalistabout that and say that, insofaras the word
"knowledge"has any value at all, we can know that the text Pilgrim'sProgressstands in an
extremely complex and transformative relation to an ideological subformation we call
Puritanism.Now, that is not to say that one could not indeed construct the text within the
ideological frame of hedonist materialism- one could. It is to claim that texts are not clay in
one's hands; that texts do, like objects in scientific experiment, offer certain resistances to
certain modes of appropriation.It may well be an interestingoperation to read Pilgrim'sProg-
ress in that way, but it would be interesting to see how it was done by systematically
transposingor transformingelements in order to render them pliable to this kind of reading. I
think you would find that that is what you were doing.
KAVANAGH:But are we not now back to the ideological/theoretical relativeautonomy.
To state that one can do something with a text in ideological practice, in teaching practice
for example, that one knows would be impermissible in a theoretical practice-does not
allowing that possibility implicitly reinvoke the distinction between ideology and science?
EAGLETON:I think there is a slight difficulty here again over the meaning of the word
"ideology,"and I wonder again whether one is perhaps too quickly expanding that term. But
certainly, if one is talking about literarycriticism, political criticismas a process of transform-
ing the subject, then that is not separate from theory because it has definite cognitive
elements. It would be a simple, in fact Stalinist, notion of literatureand ideology to see it
merely as affective, to carve the world up between cognition on the one hand, which is
theory, and ideology on the other hand which is somehow wholly affective. I certainly think
that literarytexts are not reducible to the cognitive, but they definitely contain cognitive
elements, a fact which prevents any such neat categorization. Perhaps teaching practice is
not the best example to take, because what one is by definition tryingto do there is to articu-
late the two. In that sense I think a Marxistis a Platonist.A Marxistbelieves that rhetoricand
philosophy, rhetoric and dialectic, go hand in hand, and that you cannot be a good rhetori-
cian unless you are a good dialectician too-as against a notion that you can be a good
rhetoricianregardlessof the truth or falsityof what you are saying. In that sense Marxismis in
line with a Platonic, ratherthan a sophistical tradition.
But if one looks at other kinds of practice, such as Brecht on Coriolanus,one is in a dif-
ferent situation, where the "originalmeaning"of the text is certainly something that Brecht, in
his reflections on the text, is continually encountering, but where it is deliberately being
made redundant for quite valid political reasons.
KAVANAGH: Is there no sense, then, in which you think a relatively strict
ideology/theory distinction is relevant to this process? Perhapsone must explicitly state: 'This
60
 operation is, strictly speaking, theoretically impermissible, and may not give us any
knowledge of the text, but it is necessary and appropriate in this context for specific pur-
poses." Is this not what Marxistpolitical movements often do in recuperating petit-bourgeois
nationalist historical figures as foreshadowing anti-imperialiststruggles?Must we not have
something like the ideology/theory distinction precisely to understandthe problems with, as
well as the necessity for, such operations?
EAGLETON: Yes. I would defend that distinction, in the sense that knowledge is always
an asymptotic process, always a matter of approaching the object and never quite getting
there. But that, it seems to me, is really the theory of knowledge carried within traditional
Marxism. One does not have to go to Derrida for that, one can go to Lenin'sphilosophical
notebooks, for example, in order to demystify metaphysical notions of truth. A lot of people
now think that they've cracked that for the firsttime. Indeed, this is one of the most com-
monplace emphases within the epistemology of Marxism, that a necessary struggle against
metaphysical and absolutist notions of truth was there from the outset. Deconstruction sim-
ply has not taken the pressure of that at all.
Of course, within the Marxisttradition,within the materialisttradition,there is that stress
upon the continually developing and open-ended process of knowledge. Indeed, as
Althusser rightly asserts, this open-endedness and development is constitutive, or at least
partlyconstitutive, of what counts as a process of knowledge, as opposed to the closure of an
ideology. Nonetheless, the claim that one reading is better than another is still being made;
there is a clear logical distinction between asserting, on the one hand, that all knowledge is
reading, is hermeneutical, and, on the other hand, in a despairing skeptical gesture, simply
equating every reading with every other. That step seems to me not at all a matter of logic. It
does not follow in the least from asserting that knowledge is hermeneutical to move directly
to a relativizationof discourse. It seems to me one could only find the roots of that move
politically; one would have to inquire what interests, what power, etc., was at stake in
making this move.
Putting it a different way, and putting it in a polemical way: it is certainly possible for a
Parisianpetit-bourgeois intelligentsia-or for an Oxford or Yale petit-bourgeois intelligent-
sia-to be pretty relativisticabout such matters. Itwas not possible for a nineteenth century
proletariatto be skeptical or agnostic about whether what was at stake in the capitalist mode
of production was labor or labor-power. They needed to know. They needed to know
because they had interests. In that case, there is no sense in which ideology and theory are
separate, because without that knowledge they could not fulfill certain interests-such as
physical survival, such as the prevention of their children becoming fodder in the capitalist
mode of production. So classical Marxism contains definite articulationsof knowledge and
interests.
LEWIS:How does your notion of a possible "science of the text"as objective construct
celate to phenomenological criticism'semphasis on the text as the interaction?
EAGLETON:That'sa difficult question. One thing, not necessarily the most important
thing, is that for Marxism there can be a science of the text because Marxism attempts to
develop a science of ideological formations in general. I said in Criticismand Ideology that a
science of the text is predicated on that science of ideological formations in general. But if
you are stuck at an idealist level of criticism, as I think phenomenology is, then indeed all
you can do to arrive at your text in itself is to distill it as an ideal type from a history of
readings. That of course is not what materialistcriticism is doing. Its establishment of the
materialconditions generating and constrainingthe text is what matters, and that is not just a
distillationfrom empirical readings. To that degree, of course, there is a distinction for Marx-
ism: on the one hand, one holds to the moment of theoretical analysis that studies how the
materialconditions which generate and constrain a text are, in some sense, inscribed within
the text itself; on the other hand, one then wants to go on to assert that it would indeed be
rationalist(in the way in which Hindess and Hirstuse the word against classical Althusser)to
think you could read off from that study the particulartextual construct one gets in any par-
ticular conjuncture.
What one can do, what a science of the text is doing-and in a way it is a much more
modest proposal than has often been ratherparanoiacally interpreted- is to delineate a field
of possibilities, a field of a play of textual elements. But it is not at all attempting to read off or

diacritics/ spring 1982 61

predict-to use the phenomenological language-the concretization or realization of those
in particularinstances. Again, obviously, it differs from phenomological criticism in that it
looks at the concretizations in a wholly differentcontext. One way of putting the difference
is that it looks at them in terms of ideological context, not conveniently depoliticized
lebenswelt.
KAVANAGH:In your last section of Criticismand Ideology you have a piece on the
evaluation of literaryworks, where you argue that Marxism must confront the question of
literaryvalue, the evaluation of literaryworks. Do you still hold to that position? Do you hold
to a modified version of it?
EAGLETON:I certainly hold, probably even more now than I did then, to the impor-
tance of evaluation. I said then that there was a kind of curious Marxistpuritanism,almost a
prudishness about the question of value. Given the way that Marxistcriticism has developed
since, towards talking about political effectivity, the question of value is even more central,
because we are talking about how people directly respond to, assess, and are involved in
cultural practices. There was an apparent contradiction in that final chapter in Criticismand
Ideology. I do not really think it was a contradiction, although I can understand why some
people did. On the one hand, I wanted to relate the question of value back to the condition
of the text's production. On the other hand, I tried to make the question of value transitive,
and asserted that value was value for somebody somewhere, and so on. I can see how that
can look like a contradiction. On the one hand value might seem somehow immanent in the
productive conditions of the text, and consumption neither here nor there. On the other
hand, one could be running a very consumptional argument.
I really meant that the question of the conditions of production of the text, as they are
inscribed within it, may be an importantconditioning factor in reception. Forexample, if, in
some sense of the phrase, a common history is shared between the moment of consumption
and the moment of production, if similarideological motifs are dominant, or similarmaterial
conditions, then one might say that one of the reasons, although not the only reason, why
some people find this text valuable, is because they can effect that kind of identification. Put-
ting it simply, the text still speaks to them because there are still issues that are alive. I did
not, however, want to say that that was the only condition, the only constituent, of recep-
tion; one can think of other kinds of texts where the productive moment is so remote and
alien from the consumptional moment that that certainly would not be the case.
Now I should want to be extremely conjunctural about value. I would want to say that
when we analyze the question of value we are analyzing the ideological, psycho-analytic,
and so on-questions of consumption. I would want however to add, in order to qualify
what might may be an excessive conjuncturalism, that one of the factors that may well be
dominant in that, is the moment of production - in the sense that it is because the text is pro-
duced as such, that it speaks to certain people in a certain situation, however dispersed the
two moments may be historically.So I was tryingvery inadequately to cling to both of those
poles, and, while making value transitive, avoid what now seems to me an increasingly
fashionable position that thinks it can wholly disregard the question of production when
looking at the value question.
KAVANAGH:What kind of work are you doing now?
EAGLETON:I'mwriting a book which started life as a study of Walter Benjamin, but is
ending up as a compendium of a great many topics, from Trotskyismto Feminism. That's
because I began to write on Benjaminas I thought there were ways in which his work could
be appropriated- and I use the word advisedly- for clarifyingwhat "culturalrevolution,"or
the political use and reading of texts might mean. Therefore, the best way to use Benjamin is
not to provide an ordered exegis of his work; given his own deep political hostility to such
ordered exegeses, it would be odd. The best way to use Benjaminis to try and insert him into
our context, to ask what can he give us in terms of questions of value, questions of the multi-
ple uses of texts, questions of the relation between cultural and political.
One thing I think he can give us dominantly is his anti-historicism.That is to say, his
rejection of any Lucasianteleology of value and of art;for Benjaminthe question of culture is
above all a question of use-value, and the question of use-value is above all a question of
historicallydefined circumstances. At the same time, Benjamin,while rejectingthose sorts of
historicistand teleological arguments about culture which have deformed much important

62
Marxistcriticism, with his other hand rejects what I would take to be ultra-leftistand indeed,
as it were, proletkultistarguments about culture, which essentially asserted that class history
is bunk and one can somehow startanew. Benjamin seems to me a man who, while being
deeply anti-historicist,is saturated in history and tradition, and Trotsky'sreminder that we
Marxistshave always lived in tradition is one that strikes a resonance in the work of Walter
Benjamin. Yet Benjamin is a quite uncompromising avant-gardist.
One reason it is importantto work on Benjamin now is that he strikinglyprefiguresa lot
of the contemporary contentions between various forms of psychoanalysis, linguistictheory,
deconstruction, avant-gardism,and Marxism. Benjamin is a figure deeply engaged in all the
movements I'vejust mentioned, but from a materialistposition. To go back to Benjamin and
look at how he interrelatesthese motifs, and uses these various themes, is to see in a quite
different kind of light the need to do this in an era of political crisis. One is not looking back
to Benjamin for any kind of neat theoretical synthesis, but to see how those different
theoretical positions shape up, interrelate,conflict, within the context of Benjamin'sconcern
for revolutionarypolitics. So in that sense his work can shed some light upon our contentions
today.
KAVANAGH:How do you think Marxistliterarytheory and criticismwill develop in the
future, or how do you think it should?
EAGLETON:I think one of its primary tasks, and a task that I've very schematically
attempted to begin in this latest book, is to look politicallyat its own history. Ithink that it has
not done that on the whole. There has been something presumed as a Marxistaesthetics,
which is often as not an imaginaryunity;the firsttask, the ground-clearingoperation, is for us
to look at that history and to look at the interconnections between various theoretical posi-
tions assumed from time to time by so-called Marxistaestheticians, and the political history
out of which those come.
I think one thing we shall find if we do is that Marxistaesthetics has largely been the
product of Stalinism,and on the whole the product of epochs of relative quiescence or sup-
pression of class struggle. It has continually been in danger; it has continually been affected
by various forms of bourgeois idealism -not by any means always for the worse, because
sometimes that was the only discourse that could fend off a mere vulgar materialism. I think
we have to understandthat before we can see how a revolutionaryculturaltheory and prac-
tice really could be constructed.
We shall also find perhaps that many of the received meanings of Marxistcriticism will
have to change. We'll see that many of the limits of traditional so-called Marxistaesthetics
have been its idealism and academicism. And rethinkingthat, and tryingto transcend it, may
mean, as it were, the death of Marxistaesthetics as we know it. Perhaps all we can do so far
is signal that transition in a change of language. If you like, the slogan will be "fromMarxist
aesthetics to revolutionary cultural theory and practice."
It is easy enough to say, but it is more difficultto do. And the reason it is more difficultto
do is not because we cannot develop revolutionarycultural theory now. It is important not
to underestimate the freedom given to us by still bourgeois liberal capitalist society as
opposed to fascistic capitalism- we still have institutionsin which to operate. Not only can
we develop that theory now, but we must at all costs develop it. On the other hand, we can
also increasingly see the reasons why that theory is bound at this historical moment to over-
shoot revolutionary cultural practice, since such practice is radically dependent upon a
political context which cannot be thought or wished into existence by any of us.
KAVANAGH:Is that the general context under which you wrote your paper entitled
"Why We Must Oppose Marxist LiteraryCriticism"?
EAGLETON:I think that is a reasonably provocative slogan. I wrote that paper very
much under the impetus of student comeback on what they regarded as a Marxistcritical
position. Students of mine who were variously politically engaged either in attempts at
politico-cultural practice-radical theatre, street theatre, feminist theatre, and so on-or
who were engaged in non-cultural kinds of political activity, were alarmingly capable of
understandingand endorsing quite complex developments in Marxistculturaltheory, at the
same time as they were prepared to say "Sowhat? What has this changed, and what will it?"
Confronted with that sort of questioning, which is by no means cynical, I am constrained to
try to address this in a different kind of way. One thing that meant was just backtrackingover
diacritics/ spring 1982 63
what people have called Marxistaesthetics and seeing what its limits were, but at the same
time seeing what it could still give to us, what concepts we could still disengage from it.
KAVANAGH:To politicize Marxist literarytheory.
EAGLETON:Indeed. The first task of any Marxistis always to try and give a historical,
political rundown of his or her own position, and Marxismtries to understand the material
conditions of its own birth, development, and hopeful future demise in a way quite different
from the self-universalizinggestures of ideologies. That task remains to be done within the
important but modest subset of Marxism known as Marxistcriticism.
KAVANACH:In your play, Brechtand Company, you have a nice fictional attributionto
Brecht of a quote on the desirability of being in a political and historicized atmosphere.
Perhaps you could end with that.
EAGLETON: Oh yes: "I'drathersuffocate under history in Berlinthan stifle for the lack of
it in Los Angeles."
-June, 1980

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