Silence>Words- fang 9.15

            Macherey’s thoughts on subtly, implicit thoughts, and silence, while confusing at first, accurately explain a huge aspect of human interaction. Think of how often you stayed silent during a time when you agreed with someone in an argument but didn’t want to say that. Or when you have been asked if you have done something and you just stayed silent because you didn’t want to say no. Regardless of one’s experience in silence versus words, it is obvious that it plays an instrumental role in the way people interact.

            Macherey says “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. Silence reveals speech-unless it is speech that reveals the silence.” (17) The picture below somewhat summarizes this passage. Ignore the watermark.

Macherey likes to emphasize the non-emphasizable aspects of interaction. The silence after a sentence is just as vital as the words in the sentence as if there was no silence; the brain could not absorb and comprehend the words of the sentence uttered. In middle school, when the whole class would misbehave, my teacher would give a long and impassioned speech about how immature we were and how disappointed he is and during the speech we just heard his words but when silence permits you to analyze what you heard and the pauses people take signify their feelings, language becomes much more powerful.  

He states, “what is important in the work is what it does not say” (18) meaning that there is an underlying message in words. Saying “I’m fine” is often a subtle way of saying “things are not okay but I don’t want to be a burden,” or “I’m not fine figure out why.” These nuances of language drive home Macherey’s point (and the points of the last readings) that language and signs are much more profound than we think.