Picturing power : Representation and Las Meninas

Representation is often taken as a kind of picturing-at least insofar as to "picture" something is to stand proxy for that thing, and to stand proxy on the basis of some sort of shared resemblance. Given the diversity of fields in which a notion of representation has gained a foothold, the sort of resemblance assumed may vary depending on the function of the proxy: resemblance might be perceptual, or structural, or in respect of interest, or with respect to informativeness. Even so, resemblance remains a vague notion, and "picturing" scarcely less so. This compound vagueness may be part of the charm of the notion of representation, and part of what makes it useful for fields ranging from political theory to the philosophy of art to cognitive science. But the vagueness of such a version of representation does not prevent it being suspect, nor should it prevent us from developing alternatives. Of course, there may well be contemporary notions of representation that (when properly understood) do not involve a picture-theory or any close relative thereof. But my object here is not so much to identify any central component of contemporary uses of representation as it is to diagnose a certain diagnosis of modernity-that is, a diagnosis of modernity, or at least of modern philosophy, that sees it as caught under the spell of a picture-theory of representation, and that thereby sees us as in need of disenchantment.1 On this view, modernity is born in the coming-to-dominance of such a picture-theory in the early modern works of Descartes, the Port-Royal logicians, and Leibniz, to name just a few of the favored candidates within philosophy. Its dominance might be explained by the acceptance by many an early modern philosopher, whether of a "rationalist" or an "empiricist" bent, of a split between the inner and the outer, such that the outer, public world is forced to reenact itself upon the stage of the private theater of the mind. I intend all due respect to theatrical notions of representation, but explanation of the dominance of some version of "representation" needs to take account of the early modern interest in the public realm of signs and symbols (written, drawn, or spoken) as much as of the importance of seemingly private ideas. So on the one hand, it may well be true that some notion of representation was an implicit underpinning of much that is characteristic of seventeenth-century thought. On the other hand, it is doubtful that the earliest of early modern notions of representation is appropriately described as a picture-theory. Indeed, I think that at least some early modern conceptions of representation are completely alien both to what we might think of today as representation and to what is often diagnosed as the origins of that thought. And that is just the reason why those early modern conceptions deserve our attention. For if we truly do find ourselves in the grip of suspect notions of representation, and if they supposedly are part of the philosophical patrimony of modernity, then one way to free ourselves might be to practice a kind of historical "deconstruction" of that inheritance-one that finds resources in the tradition itself with which to challenge the problematic picture-theory. It is with the aim of challenging the picturetheory of representation that I propose to examine a concrete example of "picturing": namely, the painting Las Meninas with respect to what and how it represents. I make this proposal because the picture-theory cuts both ways: not only is representation often conceived as a sort of picturing,2 but pictures are taken to offer par-