Starfish Pierre Macherey

Pieree Macherey’s from A Theory of Literary Production made me think about silence. The first thing that came to my mind was silent movies. In my Russian Film class we are watching The Battleship Potemkin, which is a film from the 1920’s and is a silent picture. While watching the film, I was distracted by the lack of dialogue at first, but then something interesting happened. I began to pay close attention to the actor’s expressions and body language. They were speaking to me without saying a word. You don’t need language or words to express emotion of feeling. Macherey says, “Silence reveals speech…” (17.) “Silence becomes the centre and principle of expression” (17). As strange as it seems sometimes you can say more in silence that you can with verbal communication. It’s just like that country song that says, “You say it best when you say nothing at all,” or that famous phrase “silence is golden.”

Commenting on Bubble’s post about withholding the truth when one speaks; I believe this is something that is unavoidable. It is natural to filter our words when communicating. In some cases if one does not do this, they are considered blunt or rude. Also, In Bubble’s post he or she discusses that when describing our morning to someone, we don’t tell someone every little detail. They asked the question if this was lying. I don’t think this can be considered lying, because again it is just our brains naturally filtering certain information we find to be irrelevant or important enough to reveal. If we told someone every little detail of a story or of your day, the story would become boring and drawn out and our listener would probably lose attention quickly. Therefore with language, it is sometimes necessary to withhold certain things from being spoken.