Venus: A Proxy or a Portrait? | Brian Justie

Information Studies—nebulous as it may be topically and methodologically—is centered around the production and organization, classification and contestation, maintenance and preservation of representations. These representations might take the form of artifacts, texts, images, or data, and these forms might be gathered together under the material auspices of a museum, library, archive, or database. In each case, political implications abound and a mandate for critique follows in step. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Saidiya Hartman both trace the contours of the politics of representation in their work, offering overlapping but ultimately divergent tactics for those invested in the critical inquiry of information.

Spivak begins by distancing herself from the reigning poststructuralism of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, both of whom, in their own ways, sought to overcome the philosophical burden of representation altogether. As a deconstructionist, Spivak’s mode of postcolonial critique is premised on piercing the veil of language in order to reveal its complicity, its non-neutrality. To this end, she excavates the uncertain etymology of the word “representation” in order to show that what Deleuze, and to a lesser extent Foucault, had declared dead, is anything but. Rather, Spivak shows how representation simultaneously functions as a “speaking for” and a “re-presentation of,” wherein the former is typically understood politically and the latter aesthetically—the “contrast, say, between a proxy and a portrait” (29). A portrait represents its referent through the ascription of likeness in a different medium—perhaps pigments, pixels, or prose. A proxy, on the other hand, represents its referent through substitution or surrogacy, standing in for that which is absent—a parent for a minor, an elected for the electorate, or a rogue server sidestepping network restrictions. In both modalities, Spivak discovers a latent violence. Portraits reduce, distort, and caricature; proxies control, manipulate, and betray. 

The liberal west, on its self-appointed rescue mission to “save brown women from brown men,” participates in the ongoing production and reification of both. A menacing portrait of “brown men” necessitates intervention by proxy: “white men” called to stand in for hapless, helpless “brown women.” And if the “brown women” are to reject this heroic benevolence, the only sensible conclusion to draw is that “the women wanted to die” (33). Spivak thus reveals the alienating, colonial, and often gendered logic undergirding “development” discourse, a model which centers the west as savior and the rest as in need of saving. Accordingly, Spivak’s provocative title—“Can the subaltern speak?”—is one carefully constructed to foreclose the possibility of answering it in the affirmative. The subaltern cannot speak, lest they forgo all autonomy. Or, put differently, the subaltern might attempt to speak, but what they have to say will only be understood as coherent if it accords with the imposed frameworks of representation supplied by the west. To speak and to be understood, in other words, is to render oneself legible to those in power. 

But Spivak’s framing of this issue borders on tautology. She argues that the subaltern is a group “whose identity is its difference,” a group who can only be understood in relation to what it is not. The subaltern, then, is only useful as a descriptive category if the primacy of an other—in this case, the west—has been presupposed. As such, the subaltern definitionally cannot speak, for to “speak” would be to abandon the differences and particularities of subaltern subjectivity. And since the subaltern’s identity is fully coincident with these differences, were the subaltern to “speak,” in Spivak’s terms, they would no longer be subaltern. Speech, according to Spivak, and echoing Derrida, is always already a fraught enterprise, always already caught up in the structures and strictures of domination. Speech, therefore, presumes a commensurability otherwise at odds with the colonial impulse to reify difference. The ongoing project to give the subaltern a voice—“the left intellectual’s stock-in-trade”—is subsequently denied its emancipatory weight (28). We might productively reframe Spivak’s question, displacing the onus on the colonized to make themselves heard, instead demanding that the colonizer redress its violent aspirations of universalism: Can the west listen… understand… ignore?

Spivak’s polemical account of representation appears in a monograph bearing the subtitle Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. In “Venus in Two Acts,” Saidiya Hartman likewise writes against the grain of representational politics, however she takes as her starting point not a “vanishing present,” but a long-since vanished past. Where Spivak’s project pivots on the prospect of being able to hear that which might be said differently, Hartman’s is predicated on the impossible task of “listening for the unsaid” (3). To my mind, this distinction is critical, insofar as Hartman finds a “productive tension” in the dialectical mismatch of impossibility and necessity, while this same juncture proves stultifying for Spivak. The proxy and the portrait, for Spivak, undoubtedly traffic in those same impossibilities and necessities, but exclusively at the expense of those whom they purport to represent. Spivak’s deconstructive exercise, therefore, reveals the faulty foundations upon which these representations are able to manifest and take on meaning, but then promptly leaves the reader, the critic, the activist, left to wonder about what more might be done. “If it is no longer sufficient to expose the scandal,” writes Hartman of this all-too-common paralysis of critique, “then how might it be possible to generate a different set of descriptors from this archive?” (7)

Importantly, Hartman’s suggestion is to fabulate, to narrativize, and to conjure something altogether new from the archive, not to impose something on, or produce something for, or apply something to the archive. Each of these latter approaches run the risk of reproducing the savior mentality Spivak critiques by imposing a system of commensurability onto archive's contents—forcing it to “speak” a language that “we” already understand. Hartman’s project is exemplary inasmuch as it rejects this premise outright, seeking instead to inhabit the immanent gaps, silences, and omissions of an archive, rather than erase them or paper over them. Whereas Spivak’s critique of representation amounts to an unveiling of its futility, Hartman understands the power of cultivating new representations in spite of this fact. “The necessity of trying to represent what we cannot, rather than leading to pessimism or despair”—sentiments which emanate from the pages of Spivak—“must be embraced as the impossibility that conditions our knowledge of the past and animates our desire for a liberated future” (13). Spivak’s critical deconstruction, therefore, begins and ends by underscoring what representations cannot do—proxies and portraits are only ever approximations or degradations of something more real, something more originary. Hartman’s critical fabulation, on the other hand, acknowledges this insight to be not only banal but a foreclosure of futurity, while she nevertheless remains invested in what representations can do, if and when we embrace the generative tools of prognostication and projection.

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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” As reprinted in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, Bill Ashcroft et al, eds. New York: Routledge, 1995, 28-37. 

Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” small axe 26 (June 2008): 1-14.