60 pages • 2 hours read
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
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Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1
Chapter 1 Summary: “Las Meninas”
Chapter 1: “Las Meninas” is a close reading of the 1656 painting Las Meninas (Spanish for “The Ladies-in-Waiting”) by Spanish painter Diego Velázquez. Foucault explores the painting as a paradigmatic example of the Classical Age’s ideas about representation and what it means to represent something abstractly. The painting depicts Velázquez painting the king of Spain, Philip IV, and the queen. Their heir, Margaret Theresa, stands in the foreground next to Velázquez, surrounded by her attendants. Velázquez’s canvas is turned away from the viewer’s perspective, so viewers cannot see what he is painting within the painting.
Before Velázquez’s time, European paintings dealt with relatively simple subject matters: Things were usually depicted in their entirety with simple arrangements and presentations of the things that were represented. Velázquez erases the sitting subjects from the painting yet retains their perspective as the point of view from which Las Meninas is painted. The point of view of the missing subjects becomes the point of view of the audience. Foucault says that this unique perspective makes “the spectacle” that the painted Velázquez observes “doubly invisible” because the regents are not present and exist behind the perspective of the audience (9); turning around and viewing the regents is impossible, since the painting only exists in front of us.
Foucault believes that the historical information about the figures within the painting does not matter. The “proper name” that is used to identify Margaret Theresa, or her maidservant, is an “artifice” to Foucault because it lets us fool ourselves into believing that what we say can perfectly represent what we see (10). Instead, Foucault turns to the “grey, anonymous language” of granular analysis of the painting to tease out the “illuminations” of the painting and know it “on its own terms” (10). Foucault moves through the painting methodically, interrogating the absence left by the painting’s true subjects (the king and queen) and how it affects every aspect of the painting, from Velázquez, who gazes at the viewer, to an anonymous man in the background. Foucault stresses that the subject is only representable in a blurry reflection at the back of the room. Velázquez relies on a mirror to show his subject, suggesting a disconnect between the subject and the thing that represents it: The painting cannot really portray its subject and trusts a mirror to more faithfully reflect the regents. Instead, the painting can only accurately represent what the sovereign is observing.
Foucault believes this relationship to the subject matter and representation displayed in Las Meninas is the heart of the Classical Age’s episteme. He calls the disappearance of the painting’s subject a “necessary” one and that the painting offers up representation as a pure ideal (18).
Chapter 1 Analysis
Chapter 1 uses Las Meninas as a case study for the Classical Age’s episteme. The absence of the king, the painting’s missing subject, is referenced later by the subchapter “The Place of the King” in Chapter 9. Foucault’s writing is often dense and self-referential, which makes his close-reading of Las Meninas more illuminated when reflected back on after reading “The Place of the King.” The painting’s perspective is that of the king—the missing subject of Velázquez’s painting within Las Meninas. This perspective puts the viewer in the place of the sovereigns watching the scene in front of them while Velázquez attempts to capture the likeness of the sovereigns.
Foucault believes that the Classical episteme “excluded any possibility of a Classical science of man” (336). Humans were outside of scientific inquiry because they were positioned as outside observers to whom all of nature presented itself as a thing to be observed. Velázquez’s painting conveys this episteme by placing the sovereign outside of the bounds of the painting, right where an observer might stand to look at the painting. In the Classical episteme, things are meant to be offered up as visual representation to human consciousness. The “necessary disappearance” (18) of the sovereign in the painting is, in the Classical episteme, the disappearance of humans from the natural world to become its observers.
The Classical episteme conceives the world as a series of surface-level representations offered up to the eye that clearly represent the actual things underneath. In Las Meninas, this is evidenced by the figures posing explicitly for the viewer as things to be offered up for observation. This is the “transparence” (87) of representation that Foucault often references and compares to a transparent grid. The relationship that Las Meninas displays between representation and the viewing subject is therefore the core of the Classical Age episteme.
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By Michel Foucault
