Representation Represented: Foucault, Velazquez, Descartes

by

Veronique M. Foti

The Pennsylvania State University

Postmodern Culture v.7 n.1 (September, 1996)
Copyright (c) 1996 by Veronique Foti, all rights reserved.
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[1] In The Order of Things, Rene 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 Velazquez de Silva's late painting Las Meninas, 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 Meninas demarcates the empty place of the
sovereign, the place that will, in the episteme 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
“ecriture”) are the crucial concerns of The Order of Things, the discussion of Las Meninas 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.

[2] 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 episteme 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?

[3] 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 episteme of representation, then interrogate his analysis of the structure of
representation in Las Meninas, 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 “Episteme” of Representation

[4] Foucault perceives clearly that, in Classical representation, as inaugurated by Descartes,

universal mathesis 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 mathesis that is the hidden source of all scientific disciplines.(5)

[5] For Descartes, the cognitive order of the mathesis 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 mathesis 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.

[6] 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 deduction),
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.

[7] 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
“episteme” of similitude becomes finitized once similarity and difference are articulated in the
order of mathesis. 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)

[8] Foucault does not pay heed to the anomaly of the Regulae in relation to the Classical
episteme; 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 episteme.(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.

[9] Language, in the context of the Classical episteme, 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)

[10] 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 episteme
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 Meninas

[11] Foucault analyzes Las Meninas 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 Meninas is a painting about painting in the tradition of
"illusionistic space"...(12)

[12] In Las Meninas, 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 Dona Isabel de Velasco, the courtier in the middle ground (thought to be
Don Diego Ruiz de Azcona), and the dwarf Maribarbola.(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 and concealed in the referential system.
[13] 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.

[14] At the far back wall of the interior that Las Meninas (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 Velazquez is not known to
have executed), but also gazing incongruously at their unseen real selves with the s ame 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, Dona 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)

[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 meninas. 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.

[16] 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 Meninas indicates the necessary disappearance, within representation, of its
own foundation.
[17] 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 episteme, a science of man. Only with the eclipse or mutation of this “episteme”
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 Meninas".(16)

Las Meninas in Question

[18] Foucault's analysis of Las Meninas 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 Meninas, one that is mindful of these issues
without being subservient to a pre-conceived agenda.

[19] 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 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.

[20] 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 Velazquez, 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.

[21] Art-historical consensus has, as Svetlana Alpers points out, come to view Las Meninas
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 Velazquez 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 Velazquez 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)

[22] 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 thatr 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 composition 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
Velazquez and Foucault, and more lucidly perhaps by the late Merleau-Ponty, is its power not
only to *represent* a certain episteme 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 episteme.

[23] To return to Las Meninas, 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.

[24] It is not enough to note, as Brown does, that in creating numerous focal points, Velazquez
followed "the restless movement of the eye", leaving perspectival relationships deliberately
ambiguous.(27) Velazquez 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 Meninas, however, is rendered problematic and undecidable. Yes, the viewer
is seen by the figures of the composition (and even curtsied to by Dona 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)

[25] 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
Meninas 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 Meninas problematizes representation
in a more complex and "postmodern" way than Foucault's analysis suggests.

[26] 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
Meninas frustrates this telos in both its spatial and temporal registers, highlighting the
insuperable incongruities that subvert it.

[27] 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 Dona Maria's
cheek and proffered bucaro, 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 Dona 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
episteme of representation, yet they are no less crucial to the painting's articulation than the
geometric relationships that Foucault emphasizes.

[28] 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 Fenetre 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.

[29] In Las Meninas, 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. Velazquez'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 boron [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)

[30] Here also, however, Las Meninas deploys the resources of a certain "code" so as to
problematize it and to place it, so to speak, en abime. It offers no univocal message to be
disengaged but brings the viewer up against the ineluctably differential and an-archic
character of perceptua 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

[31] Foucault's selection of a painting to problematize the episteme of representation reflects

his characterization of that episteme in terms of order, simultaneity, tabulation, and taxonomy,
which is to say, Foucault characterizes the episteme 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.

[32] 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 Meninas
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.

[33] In his study of Rene 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)

[34] 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)

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.

[35] 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.

[36] 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 Meninas, 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)

[37] 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.

[38] 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 Velazquez 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* 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.

[39] Whereas Foucault's study of Las Meninas 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.

[40] 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
“poiesis”. 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)

[41] 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 “poiesis” for addressing the issue of difference that remains in focus in
postmodern thought.

NOTES:

^1^ Michel Foucault, _The Order of Things_

(translation of _Les mots et les choses_), Alan
Sheridan, trans. (New York: Pantheon, 1970), referred to
hereafter as 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 as OE.

^3^ Gilles Deleuze, _Foucault_ trans. Sean 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_ (Tubingen: 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 a l'age 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^ 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.

^13^ OT, 6.

^14^ OT, 14.

^15^ OT, 312.

^16^ Joel Snyder and Ted Cohen, "_Las Meninas_

and the Paradoxes of Visual Representation," _Critical
Inquiry_ 7:2 (Winter, 1980) 429-447.

^17^ "Reflections on _Las Meninas_," 441.

^18^ Jonathan Brown, _Velazquez_ (New Haven and

London: Yale UP, 1986) 257.

^19^ Svetlana Alpers, "Interpretation Without

Representation; or the Viewing of _Las Meninas_,"
_Representations_, I:1 (February, 1983) 31-57.

^20^ Madlyn Millner Kahr, _Velazquez: The Art of

Painting_ (New York: Harper & Row, 1976) 172-185.
Compare also Elizabeth de Gue Trapier, _Velazquez_
(New York: The Hispanic Society of America, 1948).

^21^ As quoted by Brown, _Velazquez_ 259.

^22^ Brown, _Velazquez_ 260.

^23^ Norman Bryson, _Vision and Painting: The

Logic of the Gaze_ (New Haven: Yale UP, 1983) 104.

^24^ Bryson, %op. cit.% 106.

^25^ See the chapter "The Gaze and the Glance,"

in _Vision and Painting_, 87-131.

^26^ Brown, _Velazquez_ 259.

^27^ 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.

^28^ On Vermeer's painting, see Bryson, _Vision

and Painting_, 111-117.

^29^ Leo Steinberg, "Velazquez's _Las Meninas_,"

19 (Oct., 1981), 45-54.

^30^ 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.

^31^ G. McKim Smith, G. Andersen-Bergdoll, and R.

Newman, _Examining Velazquez_ (New Haven and London:
Yale UP, 1988) 23.

^32^ OT, 312.

^33^ Bois, _Painting as Model_, 230.

^34^ _Painting as Model_, 240. On Mondrian, see

also the chapter "Piet Mondrian: _New York City_."

^35^ M. Foucault, _Ceci n'est pas une pipe_ (Paris:

Fata Morgana, 1973), ch. iii.

^36^ Magritte to Foucault, 23 May 1966, in _Ceci

n'est pas une pipe_, 83-85.

^37^ Descartes, _Optics_, Discourse IV, AT VI, 113;

CSM I, 165.

^38^ Joel Snyder, "Picturing Vision," _Critical

Inquiry_, 6:3 (Spring/Summer, 1980), 499-526.

^39^ Deleuze, _Foucault_ 61.

^40^ _Foucault_, 57.

^41^ _Painting as Model_, 245.

^42^ Merleau-Ponty, _The Visible and the Invisible_, Alphonso

Lingis, trans. (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964), 197.

^43^ Damisch, "L'eveil du regard," _Fenetre jaune cadmium_,

54-72.

^44^ _Fenetre jaune cadmium_, 45.

^45^ _Fenetre jaune cadmium_, 25.