ABSTRACT
Theory has lost some of the glamour of success. All the radical intellectual iconoclasm of the last two decades seems finally to have come down to an unproductive choice of Althusserian and Lacanian hegemonic essentialism, or the endless play of indeterminacies celebrated by deconstructionists, or the irresistible and omnipresent power of discourse theory. For Marxists and feminists with an imperative to change the world as well as interpret it, this crisis of theory coincides with a crisis of praxis. Marxism has been proclaimed dead, post-feminism, apparently, has arrived. Meanwhile, in lived experience, the structural inequalities of class, gender and race grip lives as harshly as ever. If a theory of political change is to be revitalized a means needs to be found of reconnecting subjects and discourse to the material specificity of the historical moment. As Alan Sinfield has argued, ‘observing textual contradictions, fissures and split subjects does not go far enough’; to be effective as a materialist cultural practice, textual readings must be attentive to ‘the contests to which they have contributed and may contribute…through and beyond any particular text.’1
