ABSTRACT
A central problematic that has emerged from postmodernist debates is, of course, that of representation. From one side of the argument, Baudrillard’s denial of the possibility of representation deeply challenges many of cultural studies’ assumptions, theoretical and commonsensical, about the task of speaking; of who speaks for whom, and why. As Baudrillard bluntly puts it, the death of a representable social field is, or should be, the death of sociological theory. It is a death contained within social theory, one that is closer to suicide than anything else: “The hypothesis of the death of the social is also that of its own death” (1982, pp. 9–10). In Gayatri Spivak’s (1988) reformulation of representation as the doubled project of Vertretung and Darstellung, there is also a rather bleak outlook for the social theorist. The critic as “proxy” is dislodged; his position undermined by the absence, or the indifference, of any constituency: in Spivak’s words, “the choice of and the need for “heroes,” paternal proxies, agents of power—Vertretung” (p. 279) can no longer sustain a radical practice of interpretation.
