Foucault's Mirror (Reflexivity in Visuality)

Foucault's "Las Meninas" was a welcome new twist on the ideas of reflexivity that has been traced thus far in the course through N. Catherine Hayles' How We Became Posthuman, as well as in Norbert Weiner's The Human Use of Human Beings. In particular, I found myself coming back to a quote of Hayles',

"Reflexivity entered cybernetics primarily through discussions about the observer... The objectivist view sees information flowing from the system to the observers, but feedback, can also loop through the observers drawing them into become part of the system being observed (Hayles 9)."

"Drawing" becomes an interesting verbal choice when this statement is considered through Foucault's writing on Las Meninas. Indeed, it seems that Foucault is utterly fixated on this idea of the Velaquez painting as an articulation of reflexivity, and what's more, Foucault's approach, like that of Velazquez smiling within his own painting, seems to be that of the reflexive author, cybernetically unable of distancing himself from his observations. To return to Hayles, "It is only a slight exaggeration to say that contemporary critical theory is produced by the reflexivity that it also produces (an observation that is, of course, also reflexive)" (Hayles 9).










From the Western schema of perspective (shown above in a Durer etching), with unifying vanishing points located at the eye of the observer and in the background of the painting, Foucault points out the inherent reflexivity of "Las Meninas."

From the eyes of the painter to what he is observing there runs a compelling line that we, the onlookers, have no power of evading, it runs through the real picture and emerges from its surface to join the place from which we see the painter observing us... in appearance, this locus is a simple one; a matter of pure reciprocity (Foucault 4).

In this visuality, the gaze of "the painter" as well as the perspectival orienation of the painting, situates the observer has not outside the painting, but within it, which is not to say that a material situating takes place, but rather than the construction of the visuality of "Las Meninas" can only take when the viewer enters the necessarily reflexive point of observation. And in that moment, with the connecting line uniting painted subjects and the observing eye (recast from objective external perspective to subjective vision of reciprocal construction), one can understand why "the painter" stands poised with his paint brush and palette eying the observer. His gaze as drawn the observer into the painting. His drawing draws.

So we assess the mirror. A mirror which situates not as what we think we are, but what the painting casts us as, sovereign in perspective, from whom the painting (and its field of vision) is oriented. But it is a paradoxical sense of reflexivity, for though we recognize our engagement (and necessary intrusion) into the visual field of the painting, we recognize that our engagement with it seems to yield no effective way of looking at ourselves. Of establishing who we are to the painting, "Because we can only see that reverse side, we do not know who we are, or what we are doing. Seeing or seen?" (Foucault 5).

And indeed we can never know this other reality. Because to know would really be to nullify our intrusion by quantifying our change to the system. Which is why we endeavor towards contained reflexivities, and why the cybernetics of Norbert Weiner wanted to only allow reflexivity to happen at a quantified depth. Because the mirrors are too many, and the reflections to dynamic, to allow us a empirical look at a world, that does not (perhaps cannot) be measured without remembering to measure ourselves, the eyes that produce the painting but are not the painting themselves.