Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages:
68. "for brecht and benjamin, the author is primarily a producer analogous to any other maker of a social product. they oppose...the romantic notion of the author as creator--as the god-like figure who mysteriously conjures his handiwork out of nothing. such an inspirational, individualist concept of artistic production makes it impossible to conceive of the artist as a worker rooted in a particular history with particular materials at his disposal."
69. for marx & engels "to divorce the literary work from the writer as 'living historical human subject' is to 'enthuse over the miracle-working power of the pen.' once the work is severed from the author's historical situation, it is bound to appear miraculous and unmotivated"; "pierre macherey is equally hostile to the idea of the author as 'creator.' for him, too, the author is essentially a producer who works up certain given materials into a new product. the author does not make the materials with which he works: forms, values, myths, symbols, ideologies come to him already worked-upon....macherey is indebted here to the work of althusser," whose definition of "practice" means "'any process of transformation of a determinate given raw material into a determinate product, a transformation effected by a determinate human labour, using a determinate means of "production").' [9] this applies, among other things, to the practice we know as art. the artist uses certain means of production...to transform the materials of language and experience into a determinate product. there is no reason why this particular transformation should be more miraculous than any other. [10]"
70. lukács: "ragards the literary work as a 'spontaneous whole' which reconciles the capitalist contradictions between essence and appearance, concrete and abstract, individual and social whole. in overcoming these alienations, art recreates wholeness and harmony. brecht, however, believes this to be a reactionary nostalgia. art for him should expose rather than remove those contradictions...the works should not be symmetrically complete in itself, but like any social product should be completed only in the act of being used."
74. in marxist criticism art, while it has been "converted into a commodity and warped by ideology...can still partially reach beyond those limits. it can still yield us a kind of truth--not, to be sure, a scientific of theoretical truth, but the truth of how men experience their conditions of life, and of how they protest against them. [16]"; "there is, however, an obvious danger inherent in a concern with art's technological basis. this is the trap of 'technologism'--the belief that technical forces in themselves, rather than the place they occupy within a whole mode of production, are the determining factor in history. brecht and benjamin sometimes fall into this trap; their work leaves open the question of how an analysis of art as a mode of production is to be systematically combined with an analysis of it as a mode of experience. what, in other words, is the relation between 'base' and 'superstructure' in art itself?"