July 1-29

After we went over the readings from Barthes and Macherey it opened up my mind to see their point of view of how discourse is interpreted. Barthes believes that readers should read text intensively and Macherey compliments Barthes but he thinks readers use previous knowledge to interpret text. Barthes states that “From one reading to the next, we never skip the same passage,” which suggest readers will fill in the gaps of the unknown every time they read discourse over and over. For example, most people are familiar with the bible, but there are so many ways it can be interpret by different religions or people. There was one common belief before numerous were formed, which shows the steps of understanding and misunderstanding discourse. The question that needs to be asked is, “Which version is the truth, since one’s truth is another’s belief?” Macherey ideology starts to come into play once we make it to this stage because one of his definitions is intertextuality. Intertextuality means all or some text are related in some way or prior knowledge is used to read a text. The difference in one religions interpretation of the bible defines their religion, while these religion’s beliefs have derived from the same source. There is a quote from Macherey that supports this notion, “Are there books which say what they mean… without depending directly on the other books?” Although this quote is a question it obviously states that there is a reliance on prior knowledge, whether it is the media, books, or an experience. Readers normally use “filling in the gaps” when the discourse is not understood correctly, but readers will never know the actual ideas behind discourse unless they ask the writer. There isn’t a definite way to measure ones comprehension, so how do we figure out the gaps that we as readers are filling in?