Andrew Wells, Macherey

In beginning the reading I was in utter confusion. I had to reread it the following day to understand what I have read. In Pierre Macherey's chapter: From a Theory of Literary Production, he begins by explaining the idea of criticism and it being divided in to the two forms: implicit and explicit. "Explicit is to implicit as explanation is to implication" (C, 15). I hate to piggy back on what Pagie said before but the explicit is described as a message that is deliberately sent through the explanation of a critique. Implicit is the exact opposite from explicit because its the way a message is sent through a critique with no intention to do so. In agreeing with Paige, the first thing that came to mind was Stuart Hall's structure of encoding and decoding of media.

Further down the chapter we are explained the idea and use of spoken and unspoken word. "...silence becomes the centre and principle of expression, its vanishing point" (C, 17). After reading that it got me thinking about how we use everyday communication. Even though we use words to describe expressions, I feel that the use of silence is sometimes used stronger. We can understand if the speaker is happy, sad, confused or even shocked. With both the expression of spoken/unspoken word and implicit/explicit we as a whole can understand how to interpret criticism the way it is presented.