About the dog

Velásquez's painting Las Meninas, reproduced doubly in the frontispiece to Foucault's The Order of Things and in the introductory chapter of its same name, is demonstrated as a transition point, a barrier object, between what he terms the "two great discontinuities in the episteme of Western culture:" the advents of the Classical and the modern ages. Interestingly enough, the painting dates from precisely the same period of time as Foucault cites as the inauguration of the classical age--which is "roughly half-way through the seventeenth century" (Las Meninas has been dated as created in 1656). What explanation is there then for this strange anachronism? Perhaps Velásquez was simply a visionary, as underlined by the fact that notable artists and critics have described this same painting as the "theology of painting," and "the philosophy of art." Foucault may seem to agree, for in this particular choice of art he sees the act of representation unbounded, "freed finally from the relation that was impeding it... representation in its pure form." It is "observation-as-spectacle."

This term, "observation-as-spectacle," is intriguing for its use here since it robs what should be the proper spectacle in a painting by a artist in the employ of a royal court, which are the sovereigns themselves. This optics of sovereignty that is subverted places the burden or locus of its effects instead on the painting's audience, or rather on the act of vision performed by said audience. When Foucault asks us to "pretend to not know who is to be reflected in the depths of that mirror," he is asking us to remember that the mirror exists only as an object or actor in one of the potential networks that can be drawn in the painting. The mirror, as much as it appears to reflect the position of the invisible audience, is simply revealing what is or will soon become the side of the canvas we, at first glance, "cannot see." In this way, the painting inhabits this seminal position in Foucault's thought: the painting allows its viewer to be implicated in a new position in regards to her or himself: a blending of subject and object, of the mundane viewer with the sovereign.

Yet when Foucault says that the "pure reciprocity" of the image is uncoupled by the canvas' back and the dog in the lower-right corner, I do not agree. The canvas, acting itself as a boundary object, for all intents and purposes is the image we see on the mirror (a mirror which sits strangely among a wall flush with paintings)--it does not break the continuity of the two scenes constructed for each other. What interests me the most is the dog in the lower right corner, what Foucault claims is solely an "object to be seen." The dog, its head bowed in deference to the invisible they on the other side of the painting it inhabits, and its eyes cast respectfully to the side, acknowledges the non-presence of the viewer as sovereign. It lays out at our feet, at the feet of also the figures in the painting itself. It reinforces the importance of the viewer by interacting with us fully, giving the human as subject of inquiry the respect deserved.