Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
185. "for a very long time--probably for the entire classical capitalist period...the uncontested owners of the language--and they alone--were authors; if we excepted preachers and jurists...no one else spoke, and this 'monopoly' of the langauge produced, paradoxically, a rigid order....it was not the literary profession which was structured...but the very substance of this literary discourse, subjected to rules of use, genre, and composition, more or less immutable"
186. "when, in france, did the author cease being the only one to speak? doubtless at the time of the revolution, when there first appear men who appropriate the authors' language for political ends"; the authors maintained their positions as cultural creators, but were joined by another group he calls "a new custodian of the public language...the writers." most simply, "the author performs a function, the writer an activity"; the author is absorbed in "laboring" over his "utterances"
187. thus the author "is a man who radically absorbs the worlds why in a how to write"--"why the world? what is the meaning of things?"
188. ultimately, "by identifying himself with language, the author loses all claim to truth, for language is precisely that structure whose very goal...once it is no longer rigorously transitive, is to neutralize the true and the false. but what he obviously gains is the power to disturb the world"
189. the constituative power of the public nature of the authorial function is such that "every author is eventually digested by the literary institution...unless he ceases to identify his being with that of language: this is why so few authors renounce writing, for that is literally to kill themselves, to die to the being they have chosen"; "the writer, on the other hand, is a 'transitive' man, he posits a goal...of which language is merely a means; for him language supports a praxis, it does not constitute one. thus language is restored to the nature of an instrument of communication, a vehicle of 'thought.' even if the writer pays some attention to style, this concern is never ontological. the writer performs no essential tecnical action upon language....for what defines a writer is the fact that his project of communication is naïve: he does not admit that his message is reflexive"
190. "he [the writer] considers that his work resolves an ambiguity...whereas for the author, it is just the other way around: he knows that his language...inaugurates an ambiguity"; "the author participates in the priest's role, the writer in the clerk's; the author's language is an intransitive act...the writer's an activity. the paradox is that society consumes a transitive language with many more reservations than an intransitive one: the writer's status...is much more problematic than the author's. this is primarily the consequence of a material circumstance: the author's language is a merchandise offered through traditional channels...the writer's language, on the contrary, can be produced and consumed only in the shadow of institutions which have...an entirely different function than to focus on language....then, too, the writer's language is dependent...because it is (or considers itself) no more than a simple vehicle, its nature as merchandise is transferred to the project of which it is the instrument: we are presumed to sell 'thought' exclusive of any art"
191. "the writer's function is to say at once and on every occasion what he thinks, and this function suffices, he thinks, to justify him" whereas "the social function of literary language (that of the author) is precisely to transform thought (or consciousness, or protest) into merchandise." in actuality, this "contradiction...is rarely pure: everyone today moves more or less openly between the two postulations"
192. "today, each member of the intellegentsia harbours both roles in himself": "in short, our age produces a bastard type, the author-writer" who oscillates between occupying these positions, to varying degrees of success, freedom, & clout.