Terry Eagleton’s formulations re text and production can be less daunting when edited to their central premises. 1) Production is the key. 2) Text is a production of ideology. 3) Text and performance – a production of a production (such as a theatrical performance of a text, his example, or critical interpretation of a text, my example) – are “analogous to the relation between grammar and speech.” 


Speech is a product, not a reproduction, of grammar; grammar is the determining structure of discourse, but the character of discourse cannot be mechanically derived from it… In studying the relations between text and performance, then, we are studying a mode of determination which is precise and rigorous, yet which cannot be accounted for in terms of a ‘reflection’ or ‘reproduction’. We are examining, in short, the conditions of production. 
 




An empirical analyst accounts for the double performance of her enterprise.