Paige Ehart, Macherey

The first couple paragraphs of the Macherey article are focused on the concept of criticism by ways of implicit and explicit forms. While much of the article made sense there was a sentence that just baffled me. "It might be said that the aim of criticism is to speak the truth, a truth not unrelated to the book, but not as the content of its expression" (C, 15). Whenever I see a criticism or a review of a book, movie, etc. I read it with the hopes that the critique will help me decide whether or not I want to watch the movie or read the book. I rely on these criticisms because in a sense, they represent the truth that I want to know. In CMC 100 we talked about the concept of implicit and explicit forms and in terms of content. The implicit form of critique is the way something can be criticized without directly reflecting the content of the thing being critiqued. The explicit can be viewed as a way of sending a message directly through the content of the thing being critiqued. I feel that this can be related to Stuart Hall’s structure of encoding and decoding media. Encoding is to convert a message into code, which I think is how many of the critiques are viewed. Decoding is the translation of data or a message from a code back to the original languages or forms. This relates back to the sentence from the Macherey reading that I did not understand at first glance because encoding and decoding are ways of getting around the message but by also using the truth to describe it. One must look into criticisms of works as a representation of the truth whether it is or isn’t in the context of the message that was initially laid out.