Véronique M. Fóti

The Pennsylvania State University

 

In The Order of Things, René Descartes–the early Descartes of the Regulae ad Direcetionem Ingenii (1628/29)–is, for Michel Foucault, the privileged exponent of the Classical episteme of representation, as it initially defines itself over against the Renaissance episteme of similitude.¹ The exemplary position accorded to Descartes (a position that is problematic from the “archaeological” standpoint, since exemplars belong themselves to the order of representation) is complemented as well as contested by the prominence Foucault gives to a visual work: Diego Velázquez de Silva’s late painting Las Meniñas, completed some eight or nine years after Descartes’s death. Foucault understands this painting as the self-representation and self-problematization of representation, revealing both its inner law and the fatal absence at its core. Specifically, Las Meniñas demarcates the empty place of the sovereign, the place that will, in the epistêmê of modernity, be occupied by the figure of man. Since the place of man, his announced and imminent disappearance, and the character of a thought that can situate itself in the space of this disappearance (the space of language or écriture) are the crucial concerns of The Order of Things, the discussion of Las Meniñas is both inaugural and recurrent; the painting is not placed on a par with the two works of literature, Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Sade’s Justine, which problematize, respectively, the Renaissance and Modern epistemic orders.

 

Foucault maintains a puzzling silence as to why he finds it necessary to turn to a painting (rather than perhaps a work of literature) to find the epistêmê of representation both revealed and subverted. The question concerning the relationship between painting and representation gains further urgency since Foucault, who rejects phenomenology, does not concur with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s privileging of painting as an antidote to Cartesian and post-Cartesian representation.² Does he then treat painting as simply a special type of “the visible” which, as Gilles Deleuze points out, is for him irreducible to the articulable without, however, contesting the latter’s primacy?³ Does painting simply belong to the non-discursive milieu or form part of the visual archive without having any power to challenge discursive configurations?

 

In order to address these questions and to carry forward the dialogue between classical representation and painting that Foucault initiates, I will first discuss the role of Descartes in Foucault’s epistêmê of representation, then interrogate his analysis of the structure of representation in Las Meniñas, arguing that he is not fully attentive to the materiality of painting and to its resistance to discursive appropriation but remains, strangely, bound to a Cartesian understanding of vision and painting. I will, in conclusion, consider the implications of renewed attention to the materiality of painting for theories of representation, and the importance, for genuinely pictorial thought, of the irreducibility of painting to a theoretical exploration of vision.

 

Descartes and the Epistêmê of Representation

 

Foucault perceives clearly that, in Classical representation, as inaugurated by Descartes, universal mathêsis as a relational science of order and measure takes precedence over the mathematization of nature (which is emphasized by Husserl and Heidegger).⁴ Descartes notes, in the Regulae, that mathematics is merely the “outer covering” (integumentum) of the pure mathêsis that is the hidden source of all scientific disciplines.⁵

 

For Descartes, the cognitive order of the mathêsis is not a representation of any pre-given, ontological order, but a free construction of the human intellect or ingenium (which, in the Regulae, is not subordinated to divine creation). Representation does not function here as a replication, in the order of knowledge, of a reality that is independent of and withdrawn from the apprehending mind (a replication that typically seeks to disguise its own secondariness or shortfall). Rather, if mathêsis can be regarded as a prototype of representation, it is one that boldly re-invents reality in the autonomous order of thought. The intellect reflects and contemplates only itself in the order of nature.

 

Given his constructivism, Descartes insists that the limits of human knowledge must be scrupulously demarcated and respected. He notes, for instance, the futility of postulating occult qualities and new types of entities to account for the phenomena of magnetism. If one can explain the phenomena entirely in terms of “simple natures” that are “known in themselves” (because their simplicity is not absolute but relative to the apprehending intellect), and of their necessary interconnections (which is to say, by intuitus and deductio), one can confidently claim to have discovered the magnet’s true nature, insofar as it is accessible to human knowledge.⁶ Even in his classical works, where the epistemology of simple natures is superseded by that of innate ideas, which are not necessarily comprehensible to the finite mind (the idea of God is a notable example), Descartes continues to emphasize that the limitation of human knowledge is the price of its certainty.

 

Although Foucault does not explicitly discuss Descartes’s strategies of limitation, he indicates the “archaeological” configuration in terms of which they can be understood. He points out that the indefinite profusion of resemblances characteristic of the Renaissance epistêmê of similitude becomes finitized once similarity and difference are articulated in the order of mathêsis. Infinity becomes the fundamental problem for Classical thought, and finitude is understood privatively as shortfall or limitation. Infinity escapes representation. By contrast, modernity relinquishes the unattainable standard of the infinite and thinks finitude “in an interminable cross-reference with itself.”⁷ In his exchange with Derrida, Foucault brilliantly analyzes the problem of finitude in Descartes’s Meditationes with reference to madness and dream as afflictions of the finite mind.⁸ In the Regulae, however, the intellect or ingenium is not situated in relation to the infinite but is granted autonomy, so long as it can conceal its own usurpation of the position of origin. It translates its experience of finitude into the parameters of scientific construction.⁹

 

Foucault does not pay heed to the anomaly of the Regulae in relation to the Classical epistêmê; but he discusses two orders within which an effacement of the position of origin (and therefore also of its usurpation) can be accomplished: signification and language. He observes that “binary signification” (which conjoins signifier and signified without benefit of a mediating relation, such as resemblance) is so essential to the structure of representation as to remain generally unthematized with the Classical epistêmê.¹⁰ The sign must, however, represent its own representative power within itself, so that the binary relationship immediately becomes unbalanced, giving primacy to the signifier over the signified or the phenomenon. This concentration of representative power in the signifier tends also to obscure the role of the subject as the originator or representation, which is precisely the obscuration or ambiguity that the early Descartes needs.

 

Language, in the context of the Classical epistêmê, abets this obscuration, in that it takes on an appearance of transparent neutrality, becoming the diaphanous medium of representation. Discourse interlinks thought (the “I think”) with being (the “I am”) in a manner which effaces the speaker’s finite singularity. For this reason, Foucault finds that language as it functions in Classical representation precludes the possibility of a science of man.¹¹

 

The function of Classical discourse is to create a representational table or picture which is schematic and pays no heed to phenomena in their experienced concreteness. In the case of the visible, which is at issue here, phenomenal features that resist schematization, such as color, or perceived motion and depth, are ascribed to a confused apprehension of intelligible relationships and are therefore denied any intrinsic importance. The Classical epistêmê recognizes no significant differences between thought and a vision purged of its adventitious confusions (those that accrue to it due to its immersion in sentience). Purified vision is understood in terms of geometry and mechanics.

 

Representation Self-Represented: Foucault’s Las Meniñas

 

Foucault analyzes Las Meniñas as a referential system that organizes mutually exclusive visibilities with respect to a subjectivity or power of representation which remains incapable of representing itself, so that its absence interrupts the cycle of representation. As John Rajchman observes, Foucault, in the 1960s, was practicing a form of nouvelle critique which views the work of art as abysmally self-referential:

 

In each work, he uncovered a reference to the particular artistic tradition in which the work figured, and thus presented it as the self-referring instance of that tradition. Las Meniñas is a painting about painting in the tradition of "illusionistic space"...¹²

 

In Las Meniñas, the attentive gaze of the represented painter reaches out beyond the confines of the picture space to a point at which it converges with the sight lines of the Infanta, the menina Doña Isabel de Velasco, the courtier in the middle ground (thought to be Don Diego Ruiz de Azcona), and the dwarf Maribárbola.¹³ Foucault takes this point to be the standpoint of the implied spectator, converging with that of the implied actual painter gazing at and painting the represented scene, and with that of the model being painted by the represented artist. The hand of this represented painter is poised in mid-air, holding a brush that he may have, a moment ago, touched to the palette. It will presently resume its work on a surface invisible to the spectator to whom the monumental stretched and mounted canvas reveals only its dull, indifferent back. His eyes and hands conjoin spatialities that are normally disjunct: the space of the model, excluded de facto from the composition, the space of the spectator excluded de jure, the represented space, and finally the invisible space of representation, the surface of the canvas being painted. In the allegorical dimension, an unstilled oscillation is set up between signifier and signified, representative and represented, leaving the one who has the power of representation (the painter who, as represented, has momentarily stepped out from behind the canvas and who, in his actuality, remains invisible) both inscribed andconcealed in the referential system.

 

Foucault observes that the source of all the visibility in the painting, the window opposite the painter’s eyes, through which pours “the pure volume of light that renders all representation possible,”¹⁴ remains similarly invisible, both by its near-exclusion from the composition, and by being, in itself, a pure aperture, an unrepresentable empty space. The light which it releases streams across the entire foreground, casting into relief or dissolving the contours of the figures, kindling pale fires in the Infanta’s hair, and sharply illumining the jutting vertical edge of the represented canvas. Since it must also illuminate this canvas’s unseen surface, as well as the place of the model, it functions as the common locus of the representation and, in its interaction with the painter’s vision, as the former’s enabling source. Similarly, the Cartesian “natural light” is the unitary but hidden origin of representation. It remains hidden in that “to make manifest” is understood as meaning “to represent;” for, as already indicated, it cannot itself be represented. It is not, to begin with, a positive value in the economy of presence and absence.

 

At the far back wall of the interior that Las Meniñas (re)presents, the focally placed yet disregarded mirror startingly reveals what the represented painter is looking at and what so fascinates the gaze of the various figures (including that of Don Nieto who, standing in the open back door, both reflects the spectator and opposes his dynamic corporeity to the spectral mirror reflection). The image in the mirror shows the royal couple, King Philip IV and his queen Mariana, seemingly posing for a double portrait (such as Velázquez is not known to have executed), but also gazing incongruously at their unseen real selves with the same rapt attention shown by the various figures. In their invisible and withdrawn reality, they function as the center of attention and reference; but their reflection is the most “compromised” and ephemeral aspect of the represented scene. Were the menina on the left, Doña Maria Agustina de Sarmiento, to rise from her kneeling position, the ghostly sovereigns would at once be eclipsed; and the mirror would show only her carefully coifed wig with its gossamer butterflies. The mirror’s superimposition of seer and seen, and of inside and outside, is emphatically unstable, accidental, and transitory. As if to emphasize this point, the superimposition which the mirror allows one to extend to the entire picture (insofar as it is “looking out at a scene for which it is itself a scene”) is, as Foucault observes, uncoupled at its two lower corners: at the left by the recalcitrant canvas that will not show its face, and at the right by the dog, content to look at nothing, and peacefully relinquishing itself to just being seen.¹⁵

 

Whereas the mirror reflection functions as the painting’s effective yet disregarded center, the visual focus is on the head of the young Infanta, situated at the intersection of the main compositional axes, bathed in a flood of golden light, and emphasized through the positioning of the flanking meniñas. The lines of her gaze and the gaze of the royal couple converge at the point of the model/spectator and form the painting’s sharpest angle. The superimposition marked by this point of convergence is, however, dissolved within the represented scene into its three components: the painter, the model (in reflection), and the spectator (in the guise of Don Nieto). Natural vision seems to be as inept in holding together the schema of representation as is the mirror image.

 

Within the cycle of the “spiral shell” of representation, which Foucault traces from the window to the attentive gaze and the tools of the painter, to the implied spectacle, to its reflection, to the paintings (hung above the mirror), to the spectator’s gaze, and finally, back to the enabling and dissolving light, the sovereign place of the author as well as of the one who is to recognize him/herself in the representation is inscribed as a place of absence. In marking this place, Las Meniñas indicates the necessary disappearance, within representation, of its own foundation.

 

For Foucault, the absence inscribed is essentially that of man, so that the interruption of the cycle of representation reveals the impossibility of developing, in the disclosive space of the Classical epistêmê, a science of man. Only with the eclipse or mutation of this epistêmê and the ascendancy of analogy and succession over representation can man show himself as both knowing subject and object of knowledge, as “enslaved sovereign” and “observed spectator.” He then appears, as Foucault points out, “in the place belonging to the king, which was assigned to him in advance by Las Meniñas.”¹⁶

 

Las Meniñas in Question

 

Foucault’s analysis of Las Meniñas is compelling because it attests equally to theoretical originality and sophistication and to an acute visual sensitivity. Subsequent discussion, however, has called some of the underlying assumptions of Foucault’s analysis into question. Moreover, one can ask whether his analysis exhausts the extraordinary visual and symbolic complexity of the painting. Before returning to the questions raised at the outset, I propose, therefore, to engage in another reflection on Las Meniñas, one that is mindful of these issues without being subservient to a pre-conceived agenda.

 

In response to John R. Searle’s construal of the painting as a paradox (and, implicitly, a cryptogram) of visual representation, Joel Snyder and Ted Cohen have shown the incorrectness of both Searle’s and Foucault’s guiding assumption that the (re)presented scene is viewed from the perspective of the model who is reflected in the represented mirror.¹⁷ Since the painting’s perspectival vanishing point is at the elbow of the figure of Don Nieto, the point of view must, theoretically, be directly opposite it; but whoever stands along this axis or at this (not entirely specific) point could not possibly be reflected in the mirror. Snyder and Cohen establish that what the mirror reflects is not the hypothetical model, but rather a centrally located portion of the face of the represented canvas.¹⁸ As Jonathan Brown notes, Antonio Palomino’s well-informed discussion of the painting in El museo pictorio y escala óptica of 1724 “is confident that the mirror image reflects the large canvas on which the artist is working.”¹⁹ Palomino’s testimony (important, in part, because he was able to consult most of the represented persons) thus corroborates Snyder’s and Cohen’s analysis.

 

The painted mirror image is strangely ambiguous. Its frame assimilates it to the paintings shown on the back wall, but the line of light around its edges and the sheen on its surface mark it off from these and indicate its purely optical status. The image it shows is quite obviously not a glimpse of life, but rather an artful composition which gives every indication of being shown in reverse. The red curtain, for instance, looks incongruous when placed, as shown, in the upper right corner but would be visually effective if placed in the upper left, as it is, for example, in other paintings by Velázquez, such as The Rokeby Venus, Prince Baltasar Carlos, or Las Hilanderas. The relative heights of the king and queen as well as the customary practice of reading the graphic articulation from left to right (with its implicit hierarchization) suggest an artistic composition shown in reverse, which would then be superior both to the real-life scene that it represents and to any mere optical artifices of representation, such as the mirror.

 

Art-historical consensus has, as Svetlana Alpers points out, come to view Las Meniñas as a visual statement concerning the status of painting in 17th century Spain.²⁰ Spanish painting was striving at the time to emulate the prestige of the Venetian school, and Philip IV, a noted connoisseur and patron of the art, significantly advanced its standing. Madlyn Millner Kahr concurs with this interpretation. She points out that Velázquez places his own head higher than those of the other foreground figures and that the represented paintings (which depict the contests between Apollo and Marsyas and, as in Las Hilanderas, between Athena and Arachne) extol human creativity and thus symbolically place painting on a par with music.²¹ Palomino suggests that Velázquez immortalized his own image by associating it intimately with that of the Infanta.²² Jonathan Brown, in contrast, thematizes the painting’s relationship to the figure of the king who, as Kahr points out, could not have been directly shown in an informal setting. Given that Philip IV had the painting installed in the personal space of his summer office and was its sole intended spectator, he could, when he faced it, see his own reflection and the effect of his presence on the courtly gathering. If, however, he withdrew from it, the painting could again be construed as focused on the figure of the Infanta, with the mirror reflecting the painted canvas.²³

 

A key difficulty in both Foucault’s analysis and that of Snyder and Cohen is that they construe the painting as perspectivally univocal and systematic, so that their analyses resort unquestioningly to an Albertian understanding of perspective for which, as Norman Bryson points out, “the eye of the viewer is taking up a position in relation to the scene that is identical to the position originally occupied by the painter,” as though they both looked “on to a world unified spatially around the centric ray.”²⁴ Bryson notes the ineluctable frustration of this ideal system (and of the more encompassing ideal of compositio in which it functioned) by its inability to allocate to the viewer not just an axis, but a precise standpoint. In consequence, he remarks, the perspectival vanishing point becomes “the anchor of a system which incarnates the viewer” and renders her visible “in a world of absolute visibility.”²⁵ Bryson’s analysis here is essentially congruent with Foucault’s in conjoining the articulation of a system with its immanent subversion. He does not, however, take the full measure of what it means to incarnate the viewer–not only to give her a precise standpoint or the body of labor and desire, but also to inscribe her into a radically differential articulation, to inscribe her into indecidability. The secret privilege of painting, acknowledged somewhat obscurely by Velázquez and Foucault, and more lucidly perhaps by the late Merleau-Ponty, is its power not only to represent a certain epistêmê together with its intrinsic difficulty, but also to deploy the resources of representation (traditionally assigned to it) so as to disintegrate the representational schema in favor of an articulation that is non-systematic and not subservient to any dominant epistêmê.

 

To return to Las Meniñas, it is clear that the painting addresses itself to the discontinuity of what Bryson terms the “glance,” rather than to the syncretic and durationless “gaze.”²⁶ If this discontinuity is disregarded, one comes up against difficulties such as the one Snyder and Cohen confront in realizing that, since mirrors reverse, the represented mirror image cannot reflect its implied counterpart on the unseen face of the represented canvas, even though their positions correspond. A double reversal, that is, would simply restore the aspect of the original.

 

It is not enough to note, as Brown does, that in creating numerous focal points, Velázquez followed “the restless movement of the eye,” leaving perspectival relationships deliberately ambiguous.²⁷ Velázquez not only allows for ambiguities and undecidability as if these were surds of natural vision, but he also actively stages them and does so in multiple pictorial registers. To begin with the compositional and perspectival staging: in Albertian perspective, the viewer is invited to take up the standpoint of the painter so that her vantage point is anticipated and acknowledged by the represented figures and scene. The viewer’s situation in Las Meniñas, however, is rendered problematic and undecidable. Yes, the viewer is seen by the figures of the composition (and even curtsied to by Doña Isabel), but only because her position coincides with that of the implied model, not the represented painter. Moreover, the “model” functions as such only for the mirror reflection (given that the canvas being painted by the represented painter is not of suitable size for a double portrait); yet, the reflection is ambiguously mediated by an unseen painting. The viewer confronts the unseen painter and does not merge with him, so that the positions of seer and seen are marked out in an inter-encroachment that both anticipates and radicalizes the analyses of Merleau-Ponty.²⁸

 

It is interesting to consider that in Jan Vermeer’s The Painter in His Studio which Bryson foregrounds as breaking with “the privileged focus of the spectacular moment,” the spectator stumbles, as it were, inadvertently upon a scene in which the represented painter is shown from the back, and the model with downcast eyes is retreating into a condition approaching that of the Sartrean In-itself–no doubt in “bad faith.”²⁹ The disruption of the “spectacular moment” enacted here is straightforward; it virtually advertises itself. Las Meniñas is more subtle, for it consummately employs the resources of representation to render its seemingly lucid relationships aporetic. In short–and therefore with a certain element of exaggeration–I want to suggest that Las Meniñas problematizes representation in a more complex and “postmodern” way than Foucault’s analysis suggests.

 

Whereas, as Bryson points out, the “realist” tradition of painting, subservient to the gaze, strives to fuse the three-dimensionality of the “founding perception” with the flatness of the canvas and the duration of viewing (reduced to the pure moment), and to cover its traces, Las Meniñas frustrates this telos in both its spatial and temporal registers, highlighting the insuperable incongruities that subvert it.

 

Leo Steinberg notes that sight lines sustain the painting’s compositional structure, and that the diaphaneity emphasized through eyes, aperture, and mirror serves to open up opaque matter to vision and light.³⁰ The light in the painting seems to ascend from below, from the material plane on which daily life deploys itself, to the hall’s lofty spaces. On the lighted foreground plane, the billowing forms of the ladies’ extravagant crinolines create a massive and soothing undulation, a wave that folds in on itself with the sleeping dog and retreats along the axis of the figures in the middle ground, contrasting throughout with the austere geometry of the pictorial space. Throughout this silvery wave pattern one can follow a procession of reds–from the red curtain in the mirror reflection or the cross of Santiago to Doña Maria’s cheek and proffered búcaro, to the adornments of the Infanta, washing over the shoulder and front of her dress in a crimson glaze, then on to the bows and shimmer of Doña Isabel’s costume, finally coming to rest in the muted red of the outfit of Nicolasito Pertusato. The relationships of form and color lack univocal meaning; they are not ancillary to subverting the epistêmê of representation, yet they are no less crucial to the painting’s articulation than the geometric relationships that Foucault emphasizes.

 

One needs, finally, to attend not only to ideal and geometric relationships, but to the painting’s materiality and inscription of process. As Yve-Alain Bois points out in the title essay of Painting as Model (the essay being a review of Hubert Damisch’s Fenêtre jaune cadmium, ou les dessous de la peinture), there is a “technical” model of painting that remains irreducible to the “perceptive” model; and the “image” beloved by existentialist (and much of post-existentialist) thought is, after all, only a surface effect.³¹ A theory of representation that is informed strictly by geometry does not give due weight to the materiality of painting. Indeed, achieving a weightless ideality is part and parcel of its still metaphysical agenda.

 

In Las Meniñas, quasi-material form is given visual existence by means of the sketchiest touches of the brush, so that under closer scrutiny manifest identities dissolve into pigment and trace. Even the beige ground is hardly a ground, for it is applied with such translucency as to allow the canvas to assert its grain. Velázquez’s brushwork is particularly sketchy and thin at the painting’s visual focus, the head and torso of the Infanta. Such freedom of the brush, momentarily evoking light, form, and the similitude of life out of accident, requires the spectator’s participation and is therefore not univocal. Moreover, as Joel Snyder has described, there was a sophisticated tradition, consonant with an exaltation of painting, of visually interpreting the seemingly accidental mark:

 

In addition to seeing a borrón [stain or mark] from the proper distance and in the correct light, the viewer needed learning, experience, and sensitivity to decipher the painted code. To the initiate, the successfully decoded message carried a sense of heightened reality, a revelation . . . of profound and near-divine truth.³²

 

Here also, however, Las Meniñas deploys the resources of a certain “code” so as to problematize it and to place it, so to speak, en abîme. It offers no univocal message to be disengaged but brings the viewer up against the ineluctably differential and an-archic character of perceptual and interpretive coherence. Illusionary form and materiality are equally compelling, so that which commands primacy is indecidable. One cannot acquiesce in the idea that one’s sophisticated perception unveils the painting’s “truth,” for one’s perception may be part and parcel of a procession of illusions and simulacra.

 

The Autonomy of Painting

 

Foucault’s selection of a painting to problematize the epistêmê of representation reflects his characterization of that epistêmê in terms of order, simultaneity, tabulation, and taxonomy, which is to say, Foucault characterizes the epistêmê of representation as an essentially spatial conception. By contrast, he characterizes the epistemic order that begins to assert itself at the close of the 18th century as informed by an awareness of time, genesis, and destruction. When things begin to escape from the order of representation, they reveal “the force that brought them into being and that remains in them,” and the static schema of representation is robbed of its power to unite knowledge with things.³³ The way is opened for the Hegelian system and for the philosophies of finitude that subvert it.

 

Whereas the arts of language are suited to reveal epistemic orders that are fundamentally dynamic and temporal, for instance, through allusion, irony, or narrative structure, traditional Western painting seems, for Foucault, to be privileged in thematizing the schematic and spatial order of representation, due to being an essentially spatial art. As soon as this point is acknowledged, however, the advantage gained (that Foucault’s analysis of Las Meniñas reveals its logic) is offset by a serious difficulty: painting, made into an art of spatial projection, is inherently and from the outset conformed to the procrustean bed of Classical representation, modeled on geometric projection. In consequence, it is deprived of autonomy, becoming simply, as it were, a shadow-writing in the wake of philosophy. Its history, moreover, becomes obscure and problematic. If, for instance, one accepts Yve-Alain Bois’s apt characterization of abstract expressionism as “an effort to bring forth the pure parousia of [painting’s] own essence,”³⁴ this essence sought for (however questionable the notion) can clearly not be the long exhausted schema of representation. Or, to use a similar example, Bois suggests that Mondrian sought to accomplish an abstract deconstruction of painting (in response to the “economic abstraction” of capitalism) by analyzing “the elements that (historically) ground its symbolic order,” and which are not limited to formal relationships, color, luminosity, or the figure/ground opposition.³⁵ Yet, the full extent of Mondrian’s desconstructive effort cannot be grasped if classical Western painting is reduced to representation.

 

In his study of René Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe, Foucault addresses the history of Western painting. He characterizes it as being governed, from the 15th to the 20th centuries, by two principles, the first of which mandates a dissociation of depiction from linguistic reference together with the establishment of a hierarchical relation of designation between them, while the second makes “resemblance” the criterion of representation.³⁶ He then traces the subversion of these principles, respectively, to Klee and Kandinsky. It needs to be noted that “resemblance” is conceived here in terms of the logic of representation and is contrasted with sheer likeness, with the mimetic order which Foucault terms “similitude.” As Magritte notes in a letter to Foucault (and as the latter acknowledges), ordinary language does not distinguish between resemblance and similitude. On Foucault’s distinction, however, “resemblance” is instituted by thought, whereas “likeness” is encountered spontaneously in experience.³⁷

 

Foucault’s characterization of the history of Western painting in terms of his two principles is strangely Cartesian; for Descartes strives to eliminate natural and spontaneous likeness (which he calls ressemblance) from representation. In the Optics, for instance, Descartes argues that likeness is neither necessary nor even useful for representation:

 

...the perfection [of images] often depends on their not resembling their objects as much as they might. You can see this in the case of engravings, consisting of only a little ink placed here and there on the paper. . . . It is only in relationship to shape that there is any real likeness. And even this likeness is very imperfect, since engravings represent to us bodies varying in relief on a surface that is entirely flat... ³⁸

 

For Descartes, painting is essentially drawing, conceived as the creation of representations that elide likeness. It functions, for him, as an extension of vision which is itself a masked form of mathematical thought. In virtue of this assimilation of painting to drawing to vision, the codes of recognition that govern representation are taken to be universal and timeless, rather than intrinsically historicized. Although Foucault provides precisely what Cartesian thought rules out, namely a historical interpretation of representation, his interpretation remains bound to a Cartesian understanding of vision and painting as well as to their Cartesian assimilation.

 

Curiously enough, this assimilation continues to be accepted by theorists as diverse as Snyder and Merleau-Ponty. For Merleau-Ponty, painting is the self-interrogation of vision (a self-interrogation that, ab initio, distances itself from Cartesian representation), throughout its history. In contrast, Snyder points to the inseparability of the perspectival construction of space from the rationalization and schematization of vision.³⁹ In his view, the perspectival system of depiction offered a mirror in which vision could almost miraculously contemplate itself, so long as it accepted its own schematization.

 

Foucault rejects the schematization of vision since he subjects both visibilities and discursive practices to “archaeological” analysis. As Deleuze notes, Foucault upholds the specificity of seeing, denying a schematic isomorphism between the visible and the articulable.⁴⁰ At the same time, however, he resists Merleau-Ponty’s effort “to make the visible the basis of the articulable,” and thus to give vision a quasi-transcendental primacy. In Foucault’s analysis of Las Meniñas, his commitment to the “specificity” of vision is, at best, imperfectly realized–of the major registers of visibility, such as color, form, depth, or light, he devotes almost exclusive attention to the last two; and even one of these, namely light, becomes for him, as Deleuze puts it, “a system of light that opens up the space of classical representation.”⁴¹

 

To avoid this impasse and to accord to painting an autonomous (though always historically contextualized) power of invention or differential genesis, what is needed is a theorization of what Bois calls “the mode of thought for which painting is the stake”–a genuinely pictorial thought that is irreducible to “visual thinking” or to a visual exegesis of vision and visibility in the manner of Merleau-Ponty.⁴² Although Merleau-Ponty’s study of vision, carried on in part through the resources of painting, is insightful and important, his commitment to the primacy of perception, and particularly of vision, leaves him unable to address abstract painting, which is importantly concerned with “disturbing the permanent structures of perception, and above all the figure/ground relationship” (as to which Merleau-Ponty still notes in his late work that it is insurpassable).⁴³ To theorize the “mode of thought for which painting is the stake” will allow one not only to do painting more justice, but also to relate it meaningfully to developments in postmodern thought.

 

One thing that is requisite for developing a theoretical understanding of genuinely pictorial thought is, as already noted, a painstaking attentiveness to the materiality and hence also the technicality of painting. Philosophical analysis–even of a contemporary and postmodern orientation–has tended to pass over the materiality of painting, unaware that such a move bespeaks an enduring bond to the oppositional and hierarchical mode of thinking that, in the wake of Heidegger and Derrida, has been termed “metaphysics,” a mode of thinking that privileges, in particular, the supersensible over the sensible. As concerns painting, such a move generally takes the form of attending to the pure image and of being oblivious of marks, pigment, or support. These, nevertheless, are thematized not only in contemporary painting, but also by classical painters such as Velázquez or Goya. One cannot approach a contemporary painter like Mondrian without understanding that he strove to “neutralize” painting’s proper elements, being aware that a bare rectangle of canvas is already “tragic,” in the sense of having in its sheer materiality a symbolic and expressive charge.⁴⁴ This charge, however, is neither straightforwardly transposable into discourse nor into what Bois calls the “perceptive model,” as contrasted with the technical and other models of painting.

 

Whereas Foucault’s study of Las Meniñas bypasses the painting’s materiality in favor of its quasi-mathematical (perspectival) intelligibility (affirming here philosophy’s own mathematical model, from which the schematization of vision derives), the painting, by contrast, calls attention to its own materiality: it presents itself as other than the geometrically analyzable mirror reflection; its own perspective is illegible; the represented canvas, which is given monumental proportions, presents to the viewer only its bare backside and the labor of its stretching; and both the light and the gestures of the brush are allowed to deliteralize form and to unsettle the hierarchies and protocol of court life, the political emblem of the order of representation. Over all of this, the represented painter presides, brush and palette in hand, his searching gaze indissociable from the inventive engagement of his hands.

 

If the painter elevates his art, as discussed earlier, to the recognized status of music or poetry, he does so without passing over its materiality; rather, he makes evident that its materiality and technicality are of another order than those of the skills and crafts to which it had traditionally been assimilated. They function in the context of an autonomous order of poiêsis. For, as Damisch writes in a searching analysis of Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece, literature can say the indescribable and declare it to be such; painting “can only produce it, by the means that are proper to it.⁴⁵ With respect to Balzac’s figure of Frenhofer, this opacity of painting renders it necessary

 

to choose between seeing the woman and seeing the picture, at the risk of both of these disappearing, as happens here, in favor of sheer painting . . . [which] brings with it no information that could be translated into the terms of language, that could be declared, nothing that could be understood, apart from noise.⁴⁶

 

As soon as this opacity of painting, refractory to sheer perception as well as to intellectual and linguistic constructs, is grasped one not only can begin to understand the exigency that drives it, in its historical course, toward abstraction, but one can also draw on its specific order of poiêsis for addressing the issue of difference that remains in focus in postmodern thought.

 

Notes

Editor’s note: To see an electronic reproduction of Las Meniñas, go to http://www.gti.ssr.upm.es/~prado_web/villanueva/27_eng.html.

 

1. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (translation of Les mots et les choses), Alan Sheridan, trans. (New York: Pantheon, 1970), referred to hereafter at OT. Descartes’s works are referred to in the standard edition, Charles Adam and P. Tannery, eds., Oeuvres de Descartes, rev. ed., 13 vols. (Paris: Vrin, 1964-1976), and in the English translation by J. Cottingham, B. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985-1991). These sources are referred to as AT and CSM, respectively. Translations from the Latin or French are mine throughout, unless otherwise indicated.

 

2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’oeil et l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). English translation by Carleton Dallery, “Eye and Mind,” in James Edie, ed., Merleau-Ponty: The Primacy of Perception (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964). My references are to the French edition, cited ad OE.

 

3. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault trans. Seán Hand, (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988). See pp. 48-69.

 

4. See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1980) part II; and Martin Heidegger, Die Frage nach dem Ding (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1975 [1962]).

 

5. AT X, 373-378; CSM I, 17-19.

 

6. AT X, 427; CSM I, 49f.

 

7. OT, 318.

 

8. M. Foucault, “Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu;” Appendix to Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 582-603. There is no English translation of this appendix which is a response to Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978) 31-63.

 

9. See here Jean-Luc Marion, Sur l’ontologie grise de Descartes, 2nd ed. (Paris: Vrin, 1981).

10. OT, 65.

 

11. OT, 311.

 

12. John Rajchman, Michael Fouault: The Freedom of Philosphy. (New York: Columbia UP, 1985) 15.

 

13. Foucault argues that, when talking about painting, one needs to erase proper names, so as to keep open the relationship of language to vision (OT 9f). I do not agree that proper names foreclose this relationship; therefore I continue to use them.

 

14. OT, 6.

 

15. OT, 14.

 

16. OT, 312.

 

17. Joel Snyder and Ted Cohen, “Las Meniñas and the Paradoxes of Visual Representation,” Critical Inquiry 7:2 (Winter, 1980) 429-447.

 

18. “Reflections on Las Meniñas,” 441.

 

19. Jonathan Brown, Velázquez (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1986) 257.

 

20. Svetlana Alpers, “Interpretation Without Representation; or the Viewing of Las Meniñas,” Representations, I:1 (February, 1983) 31-57.

 

21. Madlyn Millner Kahr, Velázquez: The Art of Painting (New York: Harper & Row, 1976) 172-185. Compare also Elizabeth de Gué Trapier, Velázquez (New York: The Hispanic Society of America, 1948).

 

22. As quoted by Brown, Velázquez 259.

 

23. Brown, Velázquez 260.

 

24. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale UP, 1983) 104.

 

25. Bryson, op. cit. 106.

 

26. See the chapter “The Gaze and the Glance,” in Vision and Painting, 87-131.

 

27. Brown, Velázquez 259.

 

28. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’oeil et l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), and the new translation by Michael B. Smith, “Eye and Mind,” in Galen A. Johnson, ed., The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1993) 121-149.

 

29. On Vermeer’s painting, see Bryson, Vision and Painting, 111-117.

 

30. Leo Steinberg, “Velázquez’s Las Meniñas,” 19 (Oct., 1981), 45-54.

 

31. See the title essay of Bois’s Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1993) 245-257. Damisch’s collection of esssays is published by Editions du Seuil, 1984.

 

32. G. McKim Smith, G. Andersen-Bergdoll, and R. Newman, Examining Velázquez (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1988) 23.

 

33. OT, 312.

 

34. Bois, Painting as Model, 230.

 

35. Painting as Model, 240. On Mondrian, see also the chapter “Piet Mondrian: New York City.”

 

36. M. Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1973), ch. iii.

 

37. Magritte to Foucault, 23 May 1966, in Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 83-85.

 

38. Descartes, Optics, Discourse IV, AT VI, 113; CSM I, 165.

 

39. Joel Snyder, “Picturing Vision,” Critical Inquiry, 6:3 (Spring/Summer, 1980), 499-526.

 

40. Deleuze, Foucault 61.

 

41. Foucault, 57.

 

42. Painting as Model, 245.

 

43. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Alphonso Lingis, trans. (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964), 197.

 

44. Damisch, “L’éveil du regard,” Fenêtre jaune cadmium, 54-72.

 

45. Fenêtre jaune cadmium, 45.

 

46. Fenêtre jaune cadmium, 25.