And If You Know Where You Stand, Then You Know Where To Land...

Where I stand on the issue between humanism and materialism in reference to authorship is a bit complicated. First of all, my understanding of the definition of these terms goes as follows: humanism embodying the possibility that there can be original ideas and that authors have varying degrees of creative license, but nonetheless, their works are their own, created for their own purposes and from their own intentions (as postulated by those like Buscombe and ; and on the other hand, materialism, which holds that works of authors are simply just products of labor, produced for mass culture, and excludes the possibility of original ideas, stating that ideas are merely social constructions (as put forth by those such as Macherey and Benjamin). That being said, I seem to lean a bit more toward humanism. I can understand how materialism may have some merit in its arguments. It is difficult to say if there are any "true" original ideas, since all that we learn is a result of social interaction, and it can be argued that all works are merely manipulations of old works, or otherwise their antithesis. Yet, what I am tempted to argue here is that there has to be a conscious decision made to create, whether it is considered an original idea, or a rehashing or reworking of an old idea, and this is what makes works more than mere products for consumption, but the product of an author's mind, a portait of their ideas.