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RECENT DEVELOPMENTS AT THE CENTRE 229

concept of ‘forms of consciousness’, Marx had already suggested another way of
envisaging art—as a production:
Certain forms of art, e.g. the epic, can no longer be produced in their world
epochmaking, classical stature as soon as the production of art, as such,
begins…. Greek art presupposed Greek mythology, i.e. nature and the
social forms already reworked in an unconsciously artistic way by the
popular imagination.

Here art is seen not as a superstructure standing in a secondary relation to a
productive foundation, but as itself a form of production with its own materials
and means.
The concepts of art as production was developed in two pioneering essays by
Walter Benjamin; but outside his native Germany Benjamin’s writing seems to
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have had little impact on literary theory. More influentially, for us at least,
artistic production—as against consciousness, creativity, subjectivity—has been
strongly argued within an Althusserian critique of humanism. For Pierre
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Macherey literary criticism’s talk of ‘creation’, ‘genius’, ‘great literature’
belongs to a discredited tautological humanism whose ‘purest product’ is its
aesthetics, its ‘religion of art’. Against this he asserts the wholly objective
character of literary production:

Art is not man’s creation, it is a product (and the producer is not a subject
centred in his creation, he is an element in a situation or system)…all
considerations of genius, of the subjectivity of the artist, of his soul, are on
principle uninteresting.
In a similar vein, Terry Eagleton has offered an ambitious theorization of a
‘literary mode of production’ as a structure of forces and relations both
determined by the productive process in general and capable of considerable
autonomy of form and development:

The social relations of the LMP (literary mode of production) are in general
determined by the social relations of the GMP (general mode of
production). The literary producer stands in a certain social relation to his
consumers which is mediated by his social relations to the patrons,
publishers and distributors of his product. These social relations are
themselves materially embodied in the character of the product itself. 15
Of course, the insistence on determinate conditions and relations of production
must be central to any materialist analysis of writing and reading. But for
Eagleton, as for Macherey, it seems that the writer (and, implicitly, the reader)
can hardly be more than an element in a system (Macherey) or structure