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230 ENGLISH STUDIES

(Eagleton) that allows no space for movement, contestation, change. Only the
privileged (Marxist) critic somehow eludes the grim necessities of the system:
An attentive criticism of the work which defines the conditions of its
production, is altogether different from a reading. [Macherey]

The task of criticism, then, is not to situate itself within the same space as the
text, allowing it to speak or completing what it necessarily leaves unsaid. On the
contrary, its function is to install itself in the very incompleteness of the work in
order to theorize it. [Eagleton]
If the work is a ‘tissue of fictions’ exhibiting a ‘false conformity’, the critic’s
task must be to expose it, to denounce it, to reduce it to a guilty silence in the
awesome presence of ‘theory’. But why? For whom? Where, in what conditions,
and with what political effect? No one would expect political effects to flow
immediately under the pressure of a theoretical insistence; but the absence of
these questions from some recent work suggests that the voice of confident and
peremptory theory booms the louder for the resonant emptiness of the space
assigned to it by the intellectual division of labour of the dominant order—the
university.
The extent to which much Marxist criticism remains within not only the
institutions but also the conceptual terms of ‘bourgeois aesthetics’ may have
something to do, too, with the fact that such theories of literary production rarely
attempt any historical account of the ideological concept of ‘literature’ itself. By
contrast, Renée Balibar has argued that literature exists not as an absolute, ‘out
there’, but as a constructed element within a specific ideological apparatus—
education where it both legitimates and disguises the reproduction of linguistic
inequality. Thus ‘literature’ is both an agent and an effect of ideological class
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struggle within the dominant institution of the bourgeois state. More recently,
within a similar theoretical field, a case has been made for literature as itself an
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institution. As a concept, institution is perhaps preferable to apparatus, since it
enables the sense of ‘being instituted’, and thus the possibility of resistance and
transformation. In practice, though, the two have often been virtually
synonymous, with the emphasis on structure rather than on process, thus
reproducing the functionalism, as well as the inhibiting political inertia, of
Althusser’s ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’.
If, as this implies, both the production and institution of literature are too
monolithically and ‘objectively’ determined and determining, directly
reproducing the productive relations in ways that can be critically exposed in
postgraduate seminars (but never, seemingly, transformed by political activity),
the equally influential work of Michel Foucault raises a different problem: his
version of ‘superstructures’ gives no account of material determination at all.
Foucault has not written directly about literature, but it would not be difficult to
argue that literature and literary ideology constitute one of those relatively
discrete structures of knowledge that he calls discursive formations: sets of