Here is an abridged (and minus citations) version of a subject I presented in class. Las Meninas according to Foucault's analysis presents a fascinating conception of the act representation representing itself (I think) and that is why I've included my analysis here.
"We have pictures not simply of what things looked like, but how things were made visible, how things were given to be seen, how things were shown to knowledge and power."
Jonathan Rajchman, Foucault's Art of Seeing.
In The History of Sexuality Volume 1 Foucault declares that bio-power is everywhere, operating as a network of force relations that order, transform, confront and strengthen according to the calculated formation of society. If Foucault’s comprehension of visuality is equal to his intellectual concepts we can understand Las Meninas as a depiction of power in the court of King Philip IV. The very title of the painting, Las Meninas translates as “Maids of Honour” and refers to subservience, class distinction and the attendants in the picture, but the perspective of Foucault's Las Meninas is not organized according to a presentation of sovereign power, but through an understanding of bio-power.
It is the body of the painting that controls the gaze and in turn gazes back out at us to form what Foucault refers to, “a sort of vast cage projected backwards by the surface,” trapping us in our own subjectivity and locking the observer into the interplay of elements that construct the seen and unseen, the interior and exterior, and the fluctuating boundaries between the observer and the observed. If the soul is the cage of the body, as Foucault contends, our souls (or subjectivities) are captured by the force relations at play in Las Meninas that render our bodies static for the purpose of viewing.
To Foucault this painting activates a “complex network of uncertainties, exchanges and feints,” but what are some of the elements in Las Meninas that show the reflexive representation of representation representing itself?
The Painter
The painter (Velázquez) meets our gaze with his own gaze. This instance of constant exchange, of looking at the painting and the painting looking back at us, transfigures the outside space, into a subject for the canvas that Velázquez is painting. Foucault confirms the fluctuating roles at play in the painting when stating, “subject and object, the spectator and the model reverse their roles to infinity.” Here also is the first example of the conflict between what is seen and unseen – the painter looks into the space outside the painting but cannot see it, just as we are looking into the painting and cannot see the contents of the canvas in Las Meninas, which is transposed from the object of his attention.
Unseen Canvas
This unseen canvas also exemplifies the bifurcation of the seen and the unseen, as do the darkened canvases on the walls partially blackened out in the depths of the painting, for the function of a canvas is to reproduce the unseen into something to be seen. Although, in Las Meninas the contents of the canvases are either obscured or turned away from our view. As Foucault discloses, “the canvas within the picture reconstitutes in the form of the surface the invisibility in depth of what we are observing.”
Figures
The majority of the figures depicted in the painting also gaze out towards the outside space of the painting. Amy Schmitter submits in Picturing Power that the figures turn outwards and, “observe the space from which they are observed” so that, “gaze encounters gaze.”
The Window
The window on the right of the painting is invisible, but made visible by the illuminated frame from which the light streams through to make the figures visible. Like the canvases in the painting this presentation addresses the oscillating interchanges that occur between what is seen and unseen, and additionally the division between the interiors and the exteriors. The window is invisible but creates visibility; and the unseen exterior through which the illuminating light comes from corresponds to the unseen exterior subject position, which we reside in.
The Mirror
The mirror is the central component to Las Meninas. For a painting that confronts reflecting, refracting and reciprocal images this “ironic canvas,” which shines brighter than all the others, reveals what is not in the painting and what the figures are turned towards, the exterior reference point outside of the painting. However, for all that the mirror shows it also conceals, for it does not represent anything in the painting, nor is the mirror acknowledged by the figures in the painting, it is wholly indifferent. Furthermore, the exterior that the mirror reveals compliments the depiction of the adjacent exterior of the doorway, but opposes the exterior suggested by the window, by showing something it does not. In this exterior resides King Philip IV, the scene within a scene and the absent image that is being observed.
The Subject Position
The subject position is the invisible exterior space outside of the painting made visible by the mirror. It is where we as the observers are placed, where that original painter of Las Meninas was located as he painted, the position where Velázquez’s model would sit, and the sovereign space occupied by King Philip IV. It is the position being observed, the image that is painted by Velázquez in the painting, which is never seen and the empty void, “the additional factor” waiting to be represented.
Las Meninas is a painting that is organized by that which is outside of it. The exchanges of “pure reciprocity” occur because it is visible depiction that refers to something, which is ostensibly invisible. The artifice of the picture is the gap being observed, as we the observers placed in that gap also observe. It is, as Foucault explains, "representation, freed finally from the relation that was impeding it.” This reciprocity, from the constant exchanges of the observer to the observed, the interior to the exterior and the visible and the invisible deliver an optical model of force relations. Force relations that compensate like the bio-political method, which create a prison, in this case, the exterior reference/subject position by which we are bound.
