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 are “analogous to the relation between grammar and speech” – a production of a production (such as a theatrical performance of a text, his example, or critical interpretation of a text, mine).


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 local color and relations between text and performance, then, we study modes of determination which are precise and rigorous, not accounted for in terms of ‘reflection’ or ‘reproduction’. We are examining, in short, conditions of production.