ZEUGMA AND IDEOLOGY KIM IAN MICHASIW York University I. Political Criticism Roughly a decade ago in the polemic and programmatic concluding chap ter of Literary Theory: An Introduction, Terry Eagleton observed that his “book is less an introduction than an obituary” (204). The death of liter ary theory commemorated by the obituary coincides, unsurprisingly, with the canonical inclusion of courses on the recently deceased in undergraduate curricula, many of which employed Eagleton’s obsequies as a set text. A cu rious sort of living death, but one well in line with the conventional notion of academic culture as mausoleum. Save that, for Eagleton, the demise was of the adjective rather than the noun: theory is alive and well and prospering in the wider fields of “ ‘culture,’ ‘signifying practices’ or whatever” (205). That is, what Eagleton did not intend was to announce the death of theory but, in a psychoanalytically predictable fashion, his message arrived at its destination in inverted form, proclaiming that theory was a passing vibrancy from some other era. Before this claim elicits incredulity allow me to cite another prediction, this one from Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown’s introductory essay to their influential 1987 collection The New Eighteenth Century: “[t]he current articulation of material feminisms with versions of Marxism and new historicism makes possible, we think, a convergence of various diffuse versions of political and historical criticism in ideology critique” (21). This predic tion of convergence is notable for the absences from the converging terms. Despite passing references to deconstructionist, semiotic, and psychoana lytic approaches made earlier in the essay, such methods will be part of the emerging critical hegemony only when they are subsumed under the rubrics of politics and history. That is, in the three years between the publication of Literary Theory and that of The New Eighteenth Century, the bulk of theoretical material treated in Eagleton’s volume has been swallowed by the Political Criticism he champions, without detailing, in his final chapter. Without claiming too much for the evidentiary value of one example, I would diagnose this as an instance of a general institutional trajectory. Di rectly or indirectly, Eagleton’s work and other influential historicist texts 21 from the early 1980s, several of which were disseminated as textbooks (Cather ine Belsey’s Critical Practice, Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, among others) effected a reorientation of the assumed purposes of literary and related studies in our time. Jameson provides a concise phrasing of these purposes when he argues that ideology critique can no longer be content with its demystifying vocation to unmask and to demonstrate the ways in which a cultural artifact fulfills a specific ideolog ical mission, in legitimating a given power structure, in perpetuating and reproducing the latter, and in generating specific forms of false conscious ness (or ideology in the narrower sense). It must not cease to practice this essentially negative hermeneutic function . . . but must also seek, through and beyond this demonstration of the instrumental function of a given cultural object, to project its simultaneously Utopian power as the sym bolic affirmation of a specific historical and class form of collective unity. (291) The first phase of Jameson’s program has been followed far more rigorously than the second, which appears but fitfully in studies of any but the most marginalized writers and groups. In the first phase, however, the task of critics is to unveil and display the contestatory character of all texts, their implication in the power struggles of their ages. Moreover, as Nussbaum and Brown phrase it, critics “address the issues of their essays as an in tellectual and political imperative; they read the past in the ways they do because of their commitments in the present historical moment” (18). Writ ers, then, consciously and unconsciously speak for and against the structures and relations of production, and the imaginary representative codifications of these, circulating in their historical moments. Today’s critics, aware of this being-in-ideology, strive to illumine the writer’s discursive place, while intervening in the struggles of our own time. Ideological critics practise what they describe, with a saving self-conscious difference. To whatever determinants...