Page 104 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

The “crisis in English studies” had proceeded along roughly similar
lines. Easthope distinguishes two main currents in what he terms British
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“post-structuralist” literary theory: first, the kind of textual
“deconstruction”, pursued by Colin MacCabe and Catherine Belsey,
which sought to analyse the ways in which the text makes available to
the reader certain definable subject positions; and second, the kind of
“institutional” analysis, pursued by the later Eagleton and by Tony
Bennett, which sought to problematize the institutional conditions of
the production of textual meaning. The latter is what Easthope means
by “left deconstruction”. These are what Felperin refers to as “textualist”
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and “contextualist” versions of post-structuralism, which he associates,
respectively, with the work of Derrida and Foucault. Felperin’s
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formulation certainly seems appropriate to the American intellectual
context: textualist deconstruction such as that of the Yale School has
been by and large Derridean; contextualist deconstruction such as that
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of Frank Lentricchia by and large Foucauldian. But, as Easthope rightly
stresses, MacCabe and Belsey worked with a style of deconstruction
that derived as much from Althusser, by way of Screen, as from Derrida. 72
From 1971 onwards, Screen became the effective intellectual centre
initially for “cultural” Althusserianism, later for textualist post-
structuralism. Its influence extended well beyond the specialist area
of film studies and, through MacCabe and Stephen Heath, even into
Cambridge English. Both MacCabe and Heath were interested in the
ways in which different kinds of text differently position their readers.
Substantively, this led to a sustained assault on literary and cinematic
“realism”. Echoing Barthes’s distinction between readerly and writerly
texts, and invoking Brecht against Lukács, MacCabe and Heath insisted
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on the essential conservatism of such formal realisms. The texts of
mass culture and high culture alike were thus exposed as instances of
a single underlying structure that functioned to secure mass subservience
to the dominant ideological discourse. The original Althusserian Screen
position laid stress on the ways in which the text positions the reader.
But this was soon superseded by a more properly deconstructionist
sense of a multiplicity of possible readerly responses. Thus, both Barker’s
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The Tremulous Private Body and Belsey’s The Subject of Tragedy 75
each construct the literary-historical past as, to all intents and purposes,
a narrative effect of the present.
In retrospect, Easthope seems to me mistaken to link Eagleton and
Bennett as parallel instances of “left deconstruction”. For, where

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