Another major contribution of poststructuralist theory has been its revelation that texts need to be understood in their historical, political, and cultural specificity. There are no texts which are meant in the same way by readers because readers occupy different subjective positions of articulation. The rhetorical claims of the text are integrated or transformed through the parallel rhetorics of common sense and the everyday against which they are read.

Poststructuralism has provided a necessary shift from a critical focus on text alone to the dynamics of culture and consumption reflected in the reader. Bennett²⁴ cuts across the notion of the unitary experience of reading in suggesting how subjects approach a text with already coded perceptions of "reading formations." These consist of a set of discursive and textual determinations which organize and animate the practice of reading. Reading formations, says Bennett, may be shaped by social positionality (such as the role of class and gender relations in organizing reading practices), intertextual determinations (readers' experience of other texts), and culturally determined genre expectations (the dominant codes that govern the popular text, or subcultural codes such as feminism, trade unionism, Marxism, moral majority thinking, and so forth). Readers are thus placed in a position in which they can potentially refuse the subject position which the text "coaxes" them to adopt. In this theoretical move, which sees the determinant text supplanted by the recipient of the text, no text can be so penetrative and pervasive in its authority as to eliminate all grounds for contestation or resistance.

Eagleton, however, urges moderation here, rejecting a swing from the all-powerful authority of the text to a total decentering of text. He satirizes the Readers' Liberation Movement and its fetishistic concern with consumer rights in reading, and describes the dominant strategy of this movement as an "all-out putsch to topple the text altogether and install the victorious reading class in its place." He argues that reader power cannot answer the question of what one has power over. For this reason he ridicules the ascendancy of reader reception theory, which transforms the act of reading into "creative enclaves, equivalent in some sense to workers' cooperatives within capitalism [in which] readers may hallucinate that they are actually writers, reshaping government handouts on the legitimacy of nuclear war into symbolist poems."²⁵

There is much to commend this bold move to decenter the authorial discretion of the writer and the projection of the reader as a passive, actedupon object. Yet the very act of desituating and dehistoricizing the reader actually brings it into line with the humanist position. As Scully puts it, in each position "the work's specious authority will derive from the illusion that it is not value-bound, not historically conditioned, not responsible . . . its authoritativeness will depend not on the making of its particular human source but on the implicit denial that it comes from anywhere at all, or that it is class couched."²⁶

What gets lost unavoidably in preoccupation with the construction of meaning at the point of reception is sufficient acknowledgment of the ways in which privileged forms of representing experience come to serve as regimes of truth. Reception theory permits us to disattend the various forms of competing interpellations which are at play simultaneously within a given text or social formation.

Collins reveals the self-legitimating aspects of interpellations which compete for our identification and involvement within any text or cultural form. He argues that within the fragmentary cultures of the postmodern condition, "competing discourses must differentiate themselves according to style and function."²⁷ He points out how, for instance, literary style may serve as an aesthetic ideology which valorizes certain ideologies competing in a cultural text as a means of converting individuals into subjects. Even though we are not free to choose as independent autonomous readers which discourses we wish to identify with, we still participate in a process of selection. This is an important truth. Because of the vast array of competing discourses which offer themselves as a means of completing the subject, by giving it a temporarily fixed identity, it is necessary for the subject to hierarchize and arrange them.

The process of selecting the most politically transformative discourses in endless competition for "completing" the subject has never been more urgent, since we are presently in times when culture's unifying characteristics seem irrevocably decentered. Disparate discourses may be managed through multiple aesthetics and multiple styles: by a means of bricolage by which ideologies and representations may be selected and combined in new, transformative ways.²⁸ This has an important implication for developing a critical literacy, since it raises the following questions: To what extent do conventional literacy practices duplicate the ideologies embedded in literary texts and the already constructed reading formations of teachers and students? If reading formations are not always already fixed, how can educators help their students develop reading formations which will enable them to resist the authority of the dominative ideologies produced within required texts?

To reduce reading to the subjective act of the reader has dangerous consequences. It can blind us to the means by which power works on and through subjects and ignores the way in which textual authority is constructed as a form of production linked to larger economies of power and privilege in the wider social order. If the meaning of a text is reduced to individual interpretation, then the act of reading itself can be reduced to a textual palliative in which the material conditions of existence, the suffering of certain select groups in our society, can be turned into a fantasy of personal resolution. Furthermore, it enables us to engage in self-recuperation in a move that smoothly sidesteps collective participation in social transformation. It produces a mode of subjectivity that can participate gleefully in troubling the hegemony of social silence while avoiding the task of reconstructing the social practices which produce such silence. It can create an optimism that is strictly personal, removed from historical context. In this way the dominant culture can achieve both the individualism and poverty of theory necessary for it to escape the threat of resistance.

Left social and political theorists within the academy vary greatly in their opinion and appropriation of postmodern strategies of critique. Jameson warns against a simplistic, reductionistic view of the political,²⁹ and Merod regrets that much academic work falling into the category of "postmodernism" decidedly fails to move the reader "from the academic world of texts and interpretations to the vaster world of surveillance, technology, and material forces."³⁰ Harsher antagonists claim that the deconstructive enterprise often operates as a kind of left mandarin terrorism, displacing "political activism into a textual world where anarchy can become the establishment without threatening the actual seats of political and economic power," and sublimating political radicalism "into a textual radicalism that can happily theorize its own disconnection from unpleasant realities."³¹

Feminist theorists have identified a range of concerns associated with extreme versions of decentering text and/or subject. Mascia-Lees, Sharpe, and Cohen, for example, pose a crucial issue for social theory:

Once one articulates an epistemology of free play in which there is no inevitable relationship between signifier and signified, how is it possible to write an ethnography that has descriptive force? . . . Once one has no metanarratives into which the experience of difference can be translated, how is it possible to write any ethnography?³²

Feminists, among others, have also noted how in its assault on the classic figure of Western humanism—the rational, unified, noncontradictory, and self-determining individual—poststructuralist discourse has erased the suffering, bleeding, breathing subject of history. Poststructuralism's infatuation with the dancing signifier whose meaning is always ephemeral, elusive, disperse, and mutable, and the emphasis which it places on textualizing the reader as an intricate composition of an infinite number of codes or texts,³³ can be subversive of its potentially empowering and transformative agenda. Knowledge can be depotentiated and stripped of its emancipatory possibilities if it is acknowledged only as a form of textualization. Moreover, such a facile treatment of discourse can lead to the subject's encapsulation in the membranes of his or her rationalizations, leading to a soporific escape from the pain and sensations of living, breathing, human subjects. As Alan Megill warns:

All too easy is the neglect or even the dismissal of a natural and historical reality that ought not to be neglected or dismissed . . . For if one adopts, in a cavalier and single-minded fashion, the view that everything is discourse or text or fiction, the realia are trivialized. Real people who really died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz or Treblinka become so much discourse.³⁴

Clearly there is danger in assuming a literal interpretation of Derrida's "there is nothing outside of the text." We are faced with the postmodern "loss of affect" which occurs when language attempts to "capture the 'ineffable' experience of the Other."³⁵ We risk textualizing gender, denying sexual specificity, or treating difference as merely a formal category with no empirical and historical existence.³⁶