Between proxy and portrait

Spivak writes that Western scholars tend to assume that they know and understand the situation the “Others” are in, and thus can speak for them. She uses Marx to discuss two types of representation by Western intellectuals: 1) representation as “speaking for” as a proxy (vertreten), and; representation as “re-presentation”or portrait  (darstellen). She critiques Foucault and Deleuze for their simplistic compression of these two different terms, which they do “in order to say that beyond both [kinds of representations] is where oppressed subjects speak, act and know for themselves”. In dealing with the question of whether the subaltern can speak or not, Spivak's  argument seems to be that historians should attend to this “double practice of representations rather than reintroduce the individual subject through totalizing concepts of power and desire”. To my mind the question of can the subaltern speak is, then, rooted in a problem of language and articulation which arises from “differences in same words”.  For Spivak it is problematic that Deleuze collapses the double meaning when he says “there is no more representation, there’s nothing but action”. She brings this play of representation and difference in words and language itself to the problem of subject formation and subaltern speech. It is between the two processes of representation that the subaltern comes into view. Her examination of sati and the construction of the woman as subaltern, I believe is also embedded in this vertreten-darstellen mode of representation and it problematizes the notion of authenticity and subject agency. The close reading of sati exposes the construction of free will in two patriarchal discourses: the nativist discourse which regarded widow immolation as a sacred ritual and the colonialist discourse which saw this as a crime, interpreting its own task to be that of saving the brown woman from the brown man. Both ways engage themselves in a construction of the female free will and subjectivity except that these are representations posited before us as from the subjects point of view- as his voice.  Spivak on the contrary says that these representations only silence the voice of the woman. This takes us back to the question of retrieval and recovering the subject. The problem with Subaltern studies is that it too, in recovering the voice of the subaltern ‘represents’ in terms of speaking for/ proxy and ‘re-presents’ in terms of  portrait. It also then re-creates the silences that are already there.