humanisim and materialism / author and subject

Personally, on the scale of humanisim and materialism, where the former posits a single creative genius and the latter the death of the author, I am more interested in the materialist aspect. However, I can see where both perspectives can be useful in gaining some kind of understanding of the world we live in.

I can understand the humanist/author position because I am a product of my own culture. As Glass Points out in his introduction to his book Authors Inc., Focult and Barthes who declared the death of the author were themselves elevated to that position of solitary creative genius. In my own work, I have over the past few years been very taken with the writings of Walter Ong. And, by writings, I am not limiting it to just his published works but also include materials from the Walter J. Ong archive recently made available online. For my, I find a great deal of inspiration for my own thinking from both Ong's published and unpublished works. That is, works on a particular topic of interest to me for my interests do not encapsulate the entirity of his writings.

Of course, it could be that my interest in Ong's work is a result of the fact that his ideas on orality and literacy have opened a new discurisive space, although not I think on the same level as Marx or Freud. Thus, despite my interest in the humanist viewpoint, I find myslef leaning more towards the materialist end of the specturm. In reading Focult's "What is an Author?," I found myslef argreeing with many of his view points. I believe that authoriship is, by and large, a product of the discourse communities that it appears in. I find it very interesting that authorship in the literary community became a big deal only with the invention of printing and its subsequent entanglement with property rights.

Focult's more materialistic or author as subject viewpoint, I believe, has potential to help us understand the complexities of modern media authorship, which, as Kompare notes, can be difficult to pintpoint by literary standards and often seems to be awarded based on the need for an author-brand. At the same time, it appears that out current society still feels the need to atribute some kind of authorship to mutlimedia productions. I think that this need underscores the essential discursive nature of authorship for, even when in television authoriship is so obviously shared, there is still this cultural need to limit it to a few individuals.

Relating back to last week's discussion on authroship and structionalism, I believe that Focult's discursively created author fits in with Becker, and to an extent, Benjamin view of the author as a product of his or her times and culture. It is even possible for an individual to momentarily escape the current system, such as in the case brought up earlier with Marx and Freud.

If I understand Fouclt correctly in a broader sense thought, he states that all knowledge is situatied. In other words, we can only know something in realtion to other things and institutions. Likewise, our concept of aithorship is an ideological creation situated in our current discursive practices.