Ron Burgundy, Macherey

While reading the passage from Pierre Macharey I felt intrigued by a particular sentence that dealt with the silence in speech and the importance of investigating not what is said but what is not said. Macharey writes, “ speech eventually has nothing more to tell us; we investigate the silence, for it is the silence that is doing the speaking” emphasizing the unsaid, in this case with writing. If I am understanding this concept correctly it reminds me much of what my English classes dealt with throughout my entire high school career. With every single book that I read in high school I was made to explain the “themes” or important “underlying ideas” that were within the text. In order to find these themes I had to draw myself back from what was literally being said in the book to look at the whole picture and the types of metaphors that were being played with in the text. In a sense, I was doing exactly what Macharey says we must do in all the speech, “investigate the silence”, as I was looking for things that were not explicitly stated in the text but still existed within the work. This idea of the silence of the text being a major contributor to the speech is extremely curious to me. For our younger years of education we are taught to read what is set before us and take the story for literal meaning. Then once we grow in our education we our told to investigate further than what is there and can only truly understand speech when it is appreciated for both what is said and what is not said. In my interpersonal communications class we are also looking at a comparable idea to the concept of the unsaid by Macharey as we are looking at the different between context meaning and relational meaning. When we look at context meaning we are looking at the literal meaning of what is said with no underlying message, in a sense taking the message for face value. When we discuss relational meaning we examine the relationship within which the message was communicated and examine to see if there could be an underlying idea implicated in addition to the message. In my interpersonal class we discussed how different genders often lean towards applying one of the two meanings and so therefore there is often miscommunication of ideas because one can only recognize either the said or unsaid. Looking at these two ideas with one another I can only wonder since dialogue is often misunderstood because of the said and unsaid, are books are often misread because of the failure to appreciate both the said and unsaid?