He says Marxist criticism is not a passage from text to reader, but an attempt to show the text as it cannot know itself. Consciousness is not the source of social forms and economic conditions, but their most important product. The philosopher Hegel's dialectics were seen as stages which would eventually lead to a new social and economic order which would produce new forms of consciousness and belief and art. Some, like Althusser, viewed literary works in relation to ideology, which is not a coherent, consistent force, but is full of contradictions that literature must expose. The critic's challenge is to supply what the text cannot say, thereby making sense of gaps and contradictions.
Works are products of ideologies that limit awareness, contain and repress desire.
Bruce Robbins shows how texts function in historical contexts, then how they change that context, and what their effects are. His analysis is of class consciousness and class distinctions, specifically how lower class servants are like ghosts and therefore unimportant. He asks whether James has written a counterargument to the hopes of upward mobility that must be misguided, doomed to failure and horribly destructive, but says this is not the whole truth of the novel. More importantly, it is the governess's relations with the ghosts, her confusion of herself with them, that is obsessive. Power and hierarchy even determine what can be seen.