27Percent, Macherey

          The major concepts from Macherey were at first and are still not completely clear to me. Though, I do find some relation and understanding from his view of the spoken and unspoken so I will attempt to unpack it. Macherey states, "By speech, silence becomes the centre and principle of expression, its vanishing point. Speech eventually has nothing more to tell us: we investigate the silence, for it is the silence that is doing the speaking" (17). This quote immediately stood out to me as I was reading, but it took me a few repetitions to understand its meaning and make connections. We experience speech and silence daily through normal conversations with others and the actions they perform. Like the common saying, “actions speak louder than words” I connect Macherey’s concept of speech and silence to the actions that people make every day. At times I can observe someone’s silent actions and be able to investigate the silence and be able to know more about the person than through an actual conversation. My friends and I have all different types of conversations, some serious and some completely comical. They tell me all of the time that I tend to bottle up things inside of me and it never completely all comes out. But they also tell me that they can see more of my emotions from my facial expressions and body language than what I tell them. They can always sense when something is wrong and attempt to drag it out of me. I recall a specific conversation I had with my roommate when by the end she said, “I’m glad I sensed something was wrong with you all day because you would have never told me that on your own.” They always know when something is on my mind. I guess more of my emotions come about when I am unspoken.