BubbaNub : Pierre Macherey

This reading provided me with an excellent follow up to my last post on the arbitrary nature of language and sound. The signifiers and signified of semiotics can simply be described as the implicit and explicit meanings. Explicitly what we say has little bearing on the outcome of interpretation. However, implicitly somewhere in the realm of the subconscious and that certain absence of language we pull a more complex narrative aside. "This moment of absence founds the speech of work. Silences shape all speech" (C, 17). The original latent meaning is a mere structure, or framework, from which we derive numerous sights and sounds amidst its absence. It is this search for the implicit, the question we should ask ourselves daily "What is the unspoken saying?" that gives birth to the more critical tools to understand and analyze our culture.
Certainly the explicit plays an integral role in our assessments however. True meaning is derived from not one or the other, but the relation played out between them (C, 18). This is especially shown in insidious or biased questions. In order to understand the questions true nature we must recognize the relationship shared implicit and explicitly. This helps us to critically reveal the intentions behind what we are seeing and, in practice, what it may be meant to "draw our attention away from" (C, 18). For all the superfluous and abstract theorizing Pierre Macherey gives, his concepts are drawn from the very techniques we subconsciously perform everyday.