Keywords in Literary Theory: “Literary Creation” and “Literary Production”

Since the New Era, the keywords of literary theory have undergone a dramatic shift, one important phenomenon being that "literary reflection" was replaced by "literary creation," which was in turn replaced by "literary production."

In a certain sense, at the beginning of the New Era the theory of literary creation was put forward as a strategy for changing mechanical reflection theory—for changing the rigidified literary conception caused by mechanical reflection theory's long-standing neglect of the human's subjective agency, and especially for changing the relation between literature and politics. Formerly, "literary reflection" was always closely entangled with ideology, unable to shake off its involvement with politics, even directly determined by politics; whereas "literary creation" stressed the independence and autonomy of literature, and this covertly suspended the relation of literature to class struggle and to politics. With the discussion and advocacy of "subjectivity" in the field of literary studies, the theory of literary creation was much favored. "Creation" is both the natural property of the human as subject and the confirmation of the human's subjectivity. It seemed that as long as one spoke of literary writing, one had to crown it with "creation"; otherwise it would be insufficient to manifest the subjectivity of the writer and the theorist, insufficient to express the passion and hope kindled in intellectuals under the New Era's slogan of ideological emancipation. Yet, stepping into the new century, the formulation "literary creation" gradually came to feel like impractical bombast and arrogance; and so, in an atmosphere without the smoke of polemic, another keyword, "literary production," unwittingly usurped its place. In fact, this change is far more than a change of keyword; it signifies a change in the theoretical paradigm of literary studies. Between them lies an enormous rift in literary conceptions.

"Creation" originally belonged to the quality of God or the gods. God creates the world; he can, relying on nothing, bring the world into being from nothing and fashion the myriad things. The human's creativity stems from God. According to Daniel J. Boorstin, the human's awareness of his own creative power begins with the "covenant" in the Bible. The "covenant" proclaims that people, through their faith in the "Creator—God" and in the "creation of the world," are joined into one people, and thereby share God's quality and confirm their own creative ability. (1) Only this creative power is closely linked with God and the gods, and is not yet the human's confidence in his own independent ability.

In the Renaissance, with social and cultural development, the human's self awakened; the human no longer cowered under God's wings but gradually escaped God's shadow and grew into an independent spiritual individual, and creative ability began to become a quality possessed by the self that has an independent spirit. In this process, the word "genius," denoting extraordinary creative power, also appeared and was applied to painters and writers such as Leonardo, Vasari, and Telesio. (2)

The most in-depth exposition of literary creation came in the Romantic period. Coleridge held that true poetry stems from the poet's own inner experience, the poet creating a natural style by virtue of his genius's power of discernment and clear intuition. He said: "Such is the privilege of poetic genius: by its maternal instinct it can distinguish its own lawful children, set in the cradle or substituted by impostors, from the changelings left by the vanity-loving sprite or the fashion-loving fairy. If the rule could be prescribed from outside, poetry would cease to be poetry and degenerate into a mechanical art." (3) Since poetry is the "lawful child" conceived by the "maternal instinct" of the genius-poet, it can only follow its own inner law, and no rule can be prescribed for it from outside. It is precisely for this reason that Shelley proclaimed: "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." (4) Young, contrasting originality with imitation, held that the original work is the most beautiful flower, while the work of imitation grows fast but with dull color, and went on to point out that "original authors are, and ought to be, great favorites, for they are great benefactors; they extend the republic of letters and add a new province to its domain… An original author's pen, like Armida's wand, can call a luxuriant spring out of the barren desert." In Young's eyes, the great work grows from the unfathomable depths of the genius's mind; "an original may be said to be of a vegetable nature: it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius; it grows, it is not made." (5) What deserves special note is that, in the eyes of the above writers, the literary work is a spiritual product naturally grown from the genius's mind, the independent creation of a genius writer with an irreplaceable, distinctive individuality, and not a product of imitation or the processing of external things according to knowledge or rules—that is, it stems from the poet's own individual self and is unrelated to any other external cause. Therefore, literary creation in fact takes the human's subjectivity as its foundation; it is the free creation of the creative subject, autonomous, and moreover impossible to explain.

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant raised the human's subject position and value to a new height. Kant greatly esteemed artistic genius. He held that fine art can only be the art of genius, and that genius "is a talent that gives no determinate rule for what it produces; it is not a talent that can be learned according to any rule; therefore originality must be its first property." (6) Since genius is an innate endowment of the mind, it itself belongs to nature, and nature, through genius, creates art and gives art its rule. Therefore nature, genius, and art are mutually connected and mutually interpenetrating. It is precisely genius that, by virtue of its own endowment of mind—that is, by its own independent creation—legislates for art and at the same time embodies the law of nature. The genius's artistic creation is not for any other purpose but, like all creative activity, is for the human himself. "The human is the end" is an important starting point of Kant's theory. Kant says: "The human is the final end of creation. For without the human the whole chain of mutually subordinated ends would have no complete ground; only in the human—and only in this human as the individual being to whom the moral law applies—do we meet with unconditioned legislation regarding ends; it is this unconditioned legislation alone, therefore, that qualifies the human to be the final end to which the whole of nature is teleologically subordinated." (7) Since artistic creation takes the human (genius) as both its starting point and its end, artistic creation must take the human's subjectivity as its foundation and can only be autonomous. So Kant says: "(Genius) as nature gives the rule; therefore it is the author of a work that depends on the author's genius, and the author himself does not know how the ideas for it come about in him, nor does he have it in his power to think them up at will or according to a plan and to communicate them to others in precepts enabling them to produce similar works." (6)

In summarizing Romantic literary criticism, Abrams points out that the beginning of a radical solution had already appeared in eighteenth-century criticism, a solution that completely severed the poetry that transcends nature from the principle of imitation and left it with no relation to the empirical world. He says: "A key event in the formation of this approach is that the metaphor of poetry as imitation, as 'the mirror of nature,' was replaced by the metaphor of poetry as a heterocosm, a 'second nature,' created by the poet in a manner emulating God's creation of the world." (8) So that, among English writers of the early nineteenth century, the word "creation" largely became critical "cant."

Clearly, the concept of "literary creation" is inseparable from Romantic literary criticism. It takes the human's subjectivity as its foundation and has an inner logical connection with genius, inspiration, free creation, literary autonomy, and so on. Because literary activity, as a distinctive spiritual phenomenon, harbors a mystery hard to unravel, the notion of "creation" and literary activity have long had an inseparable bond. By contrast, "literary production" precisely does not take the human's subjectivity as its starting point but views literary writing from the socio-historical perspective. In the horizon of the sociology of literature, "literary production" is not free and autonomous but heteronomous, influenced by various interacting powers, constrained by particular socio-historical conditions, and its laws can be revealed and its workings explained through concrete analysis of these powers and conditions. Marx, Benjamin, Macherey, Eagleton, Wolff, and others are all of this kind.

As early as in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx regarded art as a special form of human production, saying: "Religion, the family, the state, law, morality, science, art, etc., are only particular forms of production and fall under its general law." (9) In later works, Marx explicitly put forward the concepts of "material production" and "spiritual production" and expounded in depth the relation between the two, pointing out that there is an uneven relation between the development of artistic production and that of material production. Marx says: "As regards art, it is well known that certain periods of its flourishing are by no means in proportion to the general development of society, nor therefore to the development of the material base, which is, as it were, the skeleton of social organization… Once artistic production as such appears, certain significant art forms can no longer be created in the epoch-making, classical form they had in world history; therefore, within the domain of art itself, certain significant art forms are possible only at an undeveloped stage of artistic development." (10) Here, although Marx stresses that artistic production, as a special mode of spiritual production, is distinct from material production and has its own distinctiveness, he by no means holds that art can detach from social history; on the contrary, he precisely analyzes art within the process of socio-historical development and holds that artistic production can only correspond to a particular socio-historical period and is ultimately governed by the general law of production.

Inspired by Marx's view of "artistic production," Benjamin too examines literature and art from the angle of social production. He regards the writer as a "producer" and explores "what is the relation of a work to the social production relations of its time" and "what position the work occupies in the production relations" as "an important question, yet also a complex one," and expounds in depth the important role of technology, as an artistic productive force, in the production of literature and art. In his view, the development of "technology" can change the social production relations of literature and the relation between literature and the masses; therefore the question of literature's "technique" is an effective entry point for analyzing literary production in depth. "The concept of technique is the concept that makes literary works susceptible to a direct social, and therefore materialist, analysis. At the same time, the concept of technique is the dialectical starting point from which the fruitless opposition of content and form can be overcome." (11)

Pierre Macherey and Janet Wolff, each from the perspective of "literary production," made an in-depth critique of the theory of literary creation. Macherey held that the claim that regards the writer and artist as creators belongs to humanist ideology; on the surface it differs fundamentally from theology, but in essence this difference is only an illusion—it replaces the man-made god with the human, an "impoverished, inverted theology." "All sorts of 'theories' of creation neglect the production process of the work; they give no explanation of production whatever… All views that hold the human to be a creator lead to the extinction of a true knowledge, namely that the 'creative process' is precisely not a process but a labor. Such arguments are merely the religious cant commonly found at funerals and on monuments." "By the same token, all considerations about genius, about the artist's subjectivity, about the artist's soul, are in principle tedious." (12) Macherey asserts that literary activity is not a creation, that the author is not a subject absorbed in the creative process, still less any genius; on the contrary, literary activity can only be production, the author only an element in the unified process of production, and the work a finished product processed by the author's labor. Unlike Benjamin's emphasis on the analysis of artistic productive forces and production relations, Macherey gives more weight to the complex relation between literature and ideology. In his view, literary production cannot detach from ideology, which it takes as its principal material of production; but when ideology enters literary production, it falls into an unfamiliar fictional situation, and its legitimacy is stripped away. Literary production endows ideology with a certain definite form, thereby changing our unconscious relation to ideology; by revealing the deceptiveness of fiction itself, it uncovers the larger deceptiveness inherent in ideology and helps us escape it. The literary work is both constrained by ideology and keeps a distance from it. Eagleton quite agrees with Macherey's view, saying: "The artist uses certain means of production—specialized artistic techniques—to turn the materials of language and experience into a determinate product. This making is no more mysterious than any other kind of making." (13)

Wolff, from another angle, dissected so-called creative behavior. She says: "All behavior, including creative behavior and reformative behavior, is produced within the complex connections of a great number of structural determinants and conditions." (14) Likewise, artistic creativity too "is no different from other forms of creative behavior." (14) On the basis of critiquing the theory of creation's distortion of artistic activity, she goes on to analyze the cause of this distortion: "For historical reasons, when general labor gradually lost the characteristics it ought to have as free, creative labor, and when artists lost their former position of blending intimately with society and were forced to become solitary and irresolute, artistic labor came to be seen as having a distinctive nature and as truly creative labor." (14) And she points out bluntly: "The humanist criticism of the sociology of literature and art has in fact often tried to rescue the concept of 'creativity,' because this concept allows for the special transcendence that art performs over all contingency, especially social and ideological contingency." (14)

Clearly, the theory of literary production gained its systematization and theoretical depth on the basis of critiquing the theory of literary creation, and it has a theoretical background utterly different from that of the latter. The theory of literary creation belongs to the humanist discourse of subjectivity; it takes the human's individual uniqueness as its starting point, extols subjectivity, advocates an unbridled, free creation, stresses literary autonomy, resists the bondage of reality with the absolute priority of the subject's position, and transcends established socio-historical conditions. The theory of literary production, by contrast, is society-centered; it places literary activity within the overall social process of production, dissemination, consumption, and reproduction, and within the whole socio-historical backdrop, and strives to reveal the close connection between literary production and ideology, artistic productive forces, production relations, and the system and mechanism of production, stressing the heteronomy of literary production. They respectively represent two research paradigms and two sets of theoretical discourse, and whether in intellectual background, logical starting point, or mode of thinking, there is a mutually contradictory incompatibility between them.

As the theorists of literary production indeed point out, the humanist subjectivity discourse on which the theory of literary creation stands still retains a theological residue and carries a mystical color. The humanist thesis that "all is created by the human, all creation is for the human," because it falls into self-circularity, in fact can no longer explain "literary creation" itself, unless it again has recourse to Plato and lets the creator receive the inspiration of the gods. The theory of literary production powerfully breaks down the mystery of the theory of literary creation and analyzes literary activity from the macro socio-historical perspective, yet to a certain extent it neglects the uniqueness and transcendence of the creative subject and obscures the extremely complex and subtle mental process of literary activity. Both theoretical paradigms inevitably have their respective limitations.

In our country, the times when the notion of "literary creation" was most popular were the 1920s and the 1980s.

Hu Shi, speaking of the May Fourth New Culture Movement, said: "The group of friends at New Youth advocated, in those years, this plain and unadorned 'individualist human-centeredness,' and were quite able to arouse the upward-striving passion of a group of young men and women, creating an era that may be called 'individual emancipation.'" (15) It was precisely in this era of "individual emancipation" that a group of youths, full of the excitement of discovering "the human" and the desire to destroy the old world and sweep away outworn conventions, called for genius and for free, autonomous creation. Taking the "Creation Society" as their banner, they solemnly proclaimed: "Now our project of creation begins. We intend to receive creators on a par with the heavenly emperor to carry on our work." (16) And with the momentum of Sturm und Drang they cried out: "Wield, wield, my pen-tip! I know the god has arrived; I will strive to create!" "I extol this first-born infant; I extol this great Self that opens up the primordial chaos." (17) "Without creation, there is no world." (18) It seemed that only "creation" could vent the feelings pent up in their hearts and fit their burning, urgent demands, and only by raising the banner of "creation" could they manifest their transcendent, world-forsaking, independent posture of the "great Self" and reveal to the world the inner spirit of their movement.

With the intensification of class conflict and the approach of national crisis, the tasks of "revolution" and "national salvation" overwhelmed "enlightenment," and "collectivism" at last replaced "individualism"; "literary creation" too became an untimely slogan and soon faded. Its revival came in the 1980s, after having been forgotten for more than half a century.

This was a "new enlightenment." When the New Era's ideological-emancipation movement unfolded vigorously, literati and scholars keenly felt that they had turned from objects of reform into subjects of reform, recognizing that the human is not a tool of class struggle, nor any longer a screw on the great machine of society, but an independent subject, a distinctive individual, the human being himself an end; and they further saw the opportunity for free speech and the display of talent. In such a spiritual atmosphere, "literary creation" became both the grand declaration by which literati and scholars expressed their own keen feelings and extolled the self, and at the same time a strategy by which they sought to establish their own independent discursive field, and it thereby became an overwhelmingly dominant discourse in the field of literary studies.

The notion of "literary creation" spread along with the New Era's discussion of the problem of "literary subjectivity." In the essay "On the Subjectivity of Literature," Liu Zaifu expounded literary subjectivity, saying: "The subject is a concept established in practice. The human is both subject and object: as an existence the human is object, while in practice and in action the human is subject… The principle of subjectivity in literature requires that, in literary activity, the human (including the writer, the depicted object, and the reader) not be regarded merely as object, but, still more, that the human's subject-value be respected, the human's subject-force be exerted, and the human's subject-position be restored at every link of literary activity, taking the human as center and as end. Specifically, this means: the writer's creation should fully exert his own subject-force and realize his subject-value, rather than set out from some externally imposed concept—this is the conceptual connotation of the creative subject." (19) In the relation of subject and object, of the active and the passive, the subject theorists give more emphasis to the former—to the human's subjectivity, to the subject's agency, and especially to the transcendence possessed by the writer as a spiritual subject. When the human becomes a subject, becomes an end, the human cannot but discover that his inner world is extremely splendid, that the human himself possesses such enormous creative potential. Since literary activity centers on the human himself and takes the human as starting point and end, it should strive to remove all external bondage and discard imposed concepts, letting literature become an autonomous kingdom free of external interference and letting the human return to the realm of free creation. Therefore "creation" naturally becomes the path by which the human casts off given historical limits, breaks through constraints, and achieves spiritual transcendence, and at the same time becomes the clear proof of the human's regaining subjectivity and the essential definition of the human. "When the writer transcends all the various inner and outer bondages and constraints, the result is the attainment of a great inner freedom—what Lu Xun called a great spirit of galloping across the heavens; at this point the writer's subject-force is fully liberated, and this forms the best inner environment for literary creation. Therefore, only through transcendence can there be freedom. This freedom is the profound connotation of the writer's spiritual subjectivity." (19) And because literary creation is the unfathomable "externalization of the writer's deep spiritual-subject structure," the "peak experience of emotion," this creation cannot but carry a mystery.

Although the problem of "literary subjectivity" provoked controversy, and although Liu Zaifu's article fell short in the pursuit of rigorous "academic" quality and did not lack "emotional" wording, yet, because it expressed the New Era's common inner demand to emancipate thought and break free of conceptual bondage, it had an enormous influence in the field of literary studies. Viewed from a broader social background, the economic-system reform then being brewed also objectively provided soil for "subject theory," because the market economy is itself built on the basis of individual-centeredness: it affirms the rights and interests of the individual, and only when each individual becomes an independent, sound subject can the market economy truly develop healthily—it needs a "new enlightenment." "Literary subject theory" precisely intervened in the politics of the day in a manner that superficially distanced itself from politics. And so, as the discussion unfolded, the human's subjectivity, the independence of literature, and the writer's free creation gradually spread among literati and scholars and to a certain extent almost became a consensus.

However, for reasons everyone knows, the theory of literary subjectivity suffered severe criticism and died prematurely; it was pushed onto the defendant's bench and bore a collective verdict: that Liu Zaifu's so-called "such a subject, or literary subject, simply does not exist in reality; it is entirely a subjective-idealist philosophical fiction. To advocate that such a subject decides everything in literature must deny that social life is the sole source of literature and art, thereby deny the reflection theory of literature, and must also deny the constraint of the era, society, and class upon the writer, thereby deny the class character, social character, and era character of literature and art. This not only fundamentally and in principle diverges from the subject or literary subjectivity as understood by Marxism but also entirely fails to accord with the objective reality of literature and art." (20) Yet the concept of "literary creation" did not vanish with the premature death of literary subject theory; it detached from the context of subjectivity discourse and remained, all the same, a habitual term.

In 1989, He Guorui's Principles of Artistic Production, setting out from the three great human productive activities—population production, material production, and spiritual production—expounded in depth art as a distinctive "inventive spiritual production" and held: Marx's "theory of artistic production overcomes and corrects the one-sidedness of humanity's past views of art. The theory of artistic production absorbs the reasonable factors of the theories of representation, expression, and form, constituting a brand-new, ordered theoretical system. It is, to date, the theory that most fits artistic practice." (21) Thereafter, although some scholars continued to expound the theory of literary production, the "principles" He Guorui proposed did not at the time arouse a great response and did not become a generally acknowledged set of principles. Only in the early twenty-first century did the concept of "literary production" begin to spread widely.

The marketized operation established at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries no longer relies merely on the independent individual; it relies more on modern science and technology and modern large-scale production to build its commercial kingdom. In this kingdom, the individual again falls into being a screw on the giant economic machine; he loses his autonomy and cannot but follow closely the turning of the machine. If the market economy is built on the basis of individual-centeredness and, at the outset of launching the economic-system transformation, needed a matching enlightenment, with a culture advocating individual independence and subjectivity as its auxiliary wing, then, once it entered modernized operation, it effortlessly crushed the dream of individual independence and the myth of subjectivity. Facing the joint assault of commodification and technologization, the human's independence and subjectivity proved so vulnerable. On the other hand, consumer ideology and the postmodern current of thought, with their powerful force, erode and deconstruct the humanistic spirit and reconstruct the subject; that ideal subject—independent, free, keen on spiritual creation—is by now gradually moving toward death, replaced by a worldly subject that drifts with the tide and bustles after profit, a "subject" lacking spiritual subjectivity. In fact, it was not the severe criticism that finally suffocated the theory of subjectivity, but the economic-system reform under contemporary conditions that doomed this enlightenment to be short-lived; it could only advance to the theory of literary subjectivity, at the moment of social transformation, a brief span of survival. The human is determined; all the human's activities, including literary activity, are determined—determined by the cultural market, by the reading masses, by ideology, by modern publishing and media, and even by various modern cultural systems and institutions—and "literary creation" thereby lost its foundation and became a kind of individual self-delirium.

In "A Review of Studies on Contemporary Mass Media and Literary Production," Guan Ning points out: "The change in the nature of the media adapts to the historical transformation of commodity production in consumer society—that is, the transformation from emphasizing the use-value of the commodity to emphasizing its sign-value. In this process, the social function of literature has undergone a profound change: literature, from a position lording it over life, has gradually generalized and even diffused into many aspects of socio-cultural life. The modes of literary production, dissemination, and reception too have changed their old face and undergone an unprecedented, enormous change. Besides changes in its own aesthetic style and taste, literature has also widely penetrated many links of economic and cultural production, becoming a cultural element and flavoring in the symbolization of material commodities." (22) The important influence of the rapid development of modern mass media and the culture industry upon literary activity has also deepened this impression: that literature is not an independent, free kingdom, and that writing is not the writer's unfettered creation; it can never escape the concrete socio-historical context, never escape the constraint of various powers and external conditions, including technological conditions such as the internet. Literature has indeed become a kind of social production rather than creation; it has lost its autonomy and fallen into the vortex of heteronomy. This necessarily leads people to turn their gaze anew toward the exterior of literature, to attend to and analyze the various factors that influence and even determine literary production, and at the same time it opens up for researchers an extremely broad new research horizon. It is precisely for this reason that people have rediscovered the important value of Marx's theory of artistic production: "Domestically, people have rather valued the concept of artistic 'reflection' and discussed it much, but have not much valued the concept of 'artistic production,' which has been little researched; although in recent years there have been some articles discussing this question, they seem not to have hit the point—that is, the significance of the concept of 'artistic production' has not been fully revealed. It is, rather, in Western Marxism that this concept is greatly valued: Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Macherey, Althusser, Eagleton, and others all have original and full expositions of it. In fact, the concept of 'artistic production' is a concept peculiar to the literary theory of Marx and Engels, a salient mark of their transcending the old literary theory; and the richness of its connotation and the magnitude of its significance are unrivaled in their time." (23) This is a re-recognition of "artistic production" built on the basis of real feeling, and it finally prompted this notion to take root gradually in researchers' minds. And so "literary production" became not only a keyword in the specialized studies of market economy and literature, the culture industry and literature, printing-publishing and literature, mass media or electronic media and literature, ideology and literature, the literary institution, and the literary system, but also a concept that scholars frequently use subconsciously. "Literary production" has very much the momentum to unify all under one rule.

That "literary production" has replaced "literary creation" is, for literati and scholars, indeed a dispiriting fact.

Since the New Era, literary theory has gone from "reflection theory" to "creation theory" and then to "production theory," and in this course the discourse of subjectivity survived only for an extremely brief span—this is not only the sorrow of literary theory but also the sorrow of Chinese intellectuals. This is not to hold that "creation theory" is more scientific than "production theory," but to say that in China intellectuals lack genuine independence and subjectivity; they have all along been merely a tuft of hair attached to another's body and skin. In modern times, only at two extremely brief historical moments—the May Fourth period and the 1980s—was "literary creation" extolled. If during the May Fourth period the independent literary field was still in its first beginnings, still quite fragile and shattering at a touch, then in the 1980s the independent literary field had in fact not truly appeared, and a relatively autonomous, independent literary field and intellectual field had not truly formed. In particular, the deepening of economic and cultural system reform and the rapid development of the culture industry broke the original configuration of cultural power, leveled the attempt to build an independent literary field, and destroyed its demand for autonomy. Literature itself involuntarily fell into being a commodity, a heteronomous product. Intellectuals too were swept up by the economic whirlwind, forced to bear the strong suppression of economic power, and ruthlessly marginalized. Even within the intellectual field, the marketized system of talent management and the quick-success-and-instant-benefit system of assessment and evaluation severely bound the free spirit and creativity of intellectuals, directly tying them, through strict gradations of price and rank, to actual interests such as money, status, and honor. The loss of autonomy and free spirit became the keen feeling of intellectuals. So that the theory of literary production's replacing the theory of literary creation is in fact the result of intellectuals' realizing their actual predicament of gradually losing cultural power and independence, and helplessly accepting manipulation.

Lacking the spiritual space to nurture subjectivity, and with spiritual individuality suffocated, the independence of intellectuals ceases to exist, and their criticality is extinguished. This is also why, under the current economic and cultural system, intellectuals are rapidly co-opted and then degenerate. Intellectuals lacking independence and subjectivity cannot possibly become the backbone and conscience of society. Creation that has lost the foundation of subjectivity likewise cannot endure; it is doomed not to bring forth splendid flowers and to wither quickly, even degenerating into batch-produced mechanical making and simple labor. From this angle, the shift of literary theory's keyword from "literary creation" to "literary production" is not merely a token of the degeneration of literary activity but also a token of social transformation and the change of social psychology.

The theory of literary creation, detached from the concrete socio-historical context, is tainted with the air of theology. The theory of literary production overcomes the malady of the creation theory and strives to give a historical, scientific explanation of literary activity; yet at the same time it obscures the complexity of literary creation itself and neglects the importance and transcendent power of the writer's emotion, inspiration, intuition, and unconscious activity as the creative subject. In dispelling the theological residue, it dispatches, along with it, the human's due independence and the human's dignity.

Someone once tried to bridge the gulf between the theory of literary creation and the theory of literary production, dividing literary-production activity into aesthetic creation and social production and subsuming both under literary production. They hold that aesthetic creation is a free, autonomous creative activity: "In the palace of art, the writer is the god of his own world; he can let his talent and feeling gallop freely, pursue the mysterious sounds and wondrous fancies of art, and enjoy the pleasure of uniquely creating a world." And literature as social production produces commodities, and therefore must follow the logic of the commodity, "holding to the profit motive and pursuing economic benefit." Therefore literary-production activity is "simultaneously constrained by the laws of art and the laws of the commodity economy." (24) This practice of regarding literary production as a higher category than aesthetic creation (literary creation) is clever: it dislocates the two originally opposed sides and lets literary production contain aesthetic creation, which on the surface seems to resolve the contradiction between production theory and creation theory. However, the matter is not so simple. First, the theorist separately proposes literature as a social-production activity opposed to aesthetic creation, which in fact again manufactures a logical contradiction, unable to coordinate the relation between autonomous aesthetic creation and heteronomous social production; second, since literary production is the higher category that encompasses aesthetic creation, it also determines aesthetic creation—that is, aesthetic creation is not a fully autonomous, free "unique creation," and the writer is by no means the "god" in the palace of art.

To find the path for coordinating the contradiction between autonomy and heteronomy, two points are key at the theoretical level: one is to introduce the mediation of what Bourdieu calls the literary field; the other is to attend to the writer as an individual, and especially to the writer's mind.

Taking the literary field as the mediation connecting literary activity with the socio-historical context can both create a relatively independent domain of activity for literature and never detach from the concrete socio-historical context. That is to say, although the various political, economic, and religious powers of a particular historical period exert influence on literary activity, they do not play a directly determining role; the various powers must first act upon the literary field and then, through the literary field, exert influence on literary activity. Because the literary field is always a field within a particular socio-historical context, it cannot escape the constraint of concrete historical conditions and can only be a field with historical concreteness, constructed under the interaction of various powers. Within the literary field, literary activity does have autonomy and creative freedom, but this freedom is relative, limited, and possessed of concrete historical content. Literature is independent and autonomous, but the independence and autonomy of literature are possessed only within a certain range and to a certain degree; it is constrained by the literary field and ultimately influenced by the interaction of the various powers within a particular social history.

To attend to the writer as an individual and to his mind is to regard the writer as a living whole—first of all a human being who lives and practices, and at the same time engages in literary activity. The writer's creation is the product not only of his literary activity but also of the whole history of all his life-activity and practical activity. The writer's life-activity and practical activity shape his mind, endow it with rich socio-historical content, and also leave an imprint upon his emotion, inspiration, intuition, and unconscious. But once situated within the relatively independent literary field, immersed in literary writing, the writer no longer has a direct connection with the various powers; his emotion, inspiration, intuition, and unconscious are all in an extremely active state, and his mind is thereby liberated and becomes the wellspring of the power of aesthetic transcendence. Therefore, only by grasping the mediation of the literary field together with the writer as an individual and his mind is it possible to avoid the one-sidedness of both "production theory" and "creation theory."

The relative independence of the literary field is not innate but has always been the product of the historical construction of a particular period. In the New Era, when politics lifted its direct interference in literature, this promoted the construction of a relatively independent literary field, and literary creation thereby enjoyed a relatively good ecological environment. Regrettably, the literary field, which had not yet truly found its footing, was again savagely invaded by economic power, and its independence was stripped away anew. The economy manipulates literature with its invisible hand and uses it as a tool for reaping profit. Therefore, at present we must not only analyze concretely, in theoretical research, the features of the literary field—analyze to just what degree the literary field maintains relative independence, the relation between the literary field and the various powers, the relation between the literary field and literary creation, and so on—but, still more importantly, we should strive in concrete practice to cultivate a relatively independent literary field. Through establishing an unmanipulated system of literary evaluation, a mechanism for funding writing, new channels for writers' association and exchange, and the like, a relatively independent literary field may gradually take shape.

Yet, facing the postmodern cultural context of the age of globalization and the enormous pressure of an encroaching consumer society, at the moment that has been called "the twilight of the subject," will the vision of building a relatively independent literary field, and the efforts made toward it, become a Don Quixote-like battle against windmills?