Uncanny connections

For me, as I hopefully articulate in my position paper, one of the take-aways from the Raymond Williams article Base and Superstructure is his focus on the base. One of the ways in which Williams makes this claim that I find striking is to shift literary criticism from consumption, the "way that [literature] can profitably or correctly be consumed" (46), to creation. But to study literature, or any cultural artifact, as isolated from consumption would seem to ignore the very obvious fact, which Williams has in fact outlined on pages 44-45, that literature (etc) come from a tradition which has, at some point, been consumed by the creator.

I'm not as well-versed on theories of consumption as I'd like to be, but I'm sure this idea is out there. What I wonder is how Williams might address the issue of creator-as-consumer, and how that might affect the claim that we need to focus on the "components" of art and their production, not just on the cultural meanings. Is it a reflection of a postmodern perspective (and therefore after Williams's article) to understand creation as consumption, to never be able to fully separate the acts that work in partnership? While consumption and creation may not be dichotomous opposites, this idea reminds me a little of a not so new idea, Freud's idea of the unheimlich (which we discussed in Peggy Knapp's course on allegory yesterday hence my immediate reference), where the idea of a thing is always also within its opposite.

I'm currently looking at comic book artists and reading some of their stories on how they came to create comic art, the field of comics, etc. and each one of them has started as a consumer, and a fairly young one. I imagine that for other arts, and even many other productive processes, this holds true. One does not become an engineer simply by reading books, but by tinkering with toys and projects that involve actual engineering practices. Perhaps those who are "cogs" in a factory, putting on nuts or bolts without larger context, might offer an alternative. Are the men and women who ensure that a machine is, for example, putting together a funky lampshade consumers of the thing (the lampshade) they are producing? Probably not. But are they really producing it? What is it that they in fact are producing?

Have we, in an even more mechanized time than the time of Marx, entered a realm of production where some professions create nothing but the continuation of the system in which they work? And how do we view academia, which some argue produces only other academics, but which I hope most of us see as different?