Sunday, September 9, 2012

Macherey- Maura Imel


 I found Pierre Macherey, from “A Theory of Literary Production (1987)” to be extremely challenging to read. One of the first things I highlighted comes at the very beginning of the text, when Macherey writes, “The recognition of the area of shadow in or around the work is the initial moment of criticism”(pg. 15). I find this quote to be extremely complex and thought provoking. I interpreted the shadow being the gaps, which Barthes talked about in our last reading. I am however a little confused about what exactly the criticism means. One thought I had was that as we read a text the gaps that we will fill allows us to see how successful the writer is in communicating his message.
What leads up to this quote implies that no text is complete, that there can always be something else said. Macherey writes, “For there to be a critical discourse which is more than a superficial and futile reprise of the work, the speech stored in the book must be incomplete; because it has not said everything, there remains the possibility of saying something else, after another fashion”(pg. 15). I love the idea that no work is finished. There is always a response to language and something else can always be said.
This concept began to make sense until I read further and got to the part about silence. Macherey write, “Silence reveals speech- unless it is speech that reveals the silence” (pg. 17). He is making the point that we are trying to unravel the silence because the silence is what produces more dialogue but I feel as if this idea is then contradicting what he says in the beginning about the possibility about there always being something more to be said.
One song that automatically comes to my mind when talking about silence and the idea of revealing the silence is “The Sound of Silence” by Simon & Garfunkel.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zLfCnGVeL4 

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