Las Meninas, Representation, and Saussure's Necessary Absence

"The painter is looking, his face turned slightly and his head leaning towards one shoulder. He is staring at a point to which, even though it is invisible, we, the spectators, can easily assign an object, since it is we, ourselves, who are that point: our bodies, our faces, our eyes," (Foucault 4).

Giving "Las Meninas" another look over in light of Professor Doane's lecture today brings to mind questions about our current epistemic situation and the media that comprise and reinforce it.

Foucault's re-presentation of Velazquez's re-presentation of representation says a lot to me about language, especially having just read Saussure. The systems of language and representation/epistemology (or whatever we can call what Foucault is outlining, in part, in "Las Meninas") have an interesting, necessary, and familiar relationship with presence and absence. I gather this is because both systems are dependent on semiology, and symbols with fixed meanings can't be universal.

Anyway, the invisible point mentioned in my opening quote is something I see used in contemporary advertising, both in print and on television. The invisible point traverses the internal space of the ad, and thus the advertiser's or product's subjective space, with the external space of the solicited observer. Advertising iconography and rhetoric is tailored to include certain "mirrors" just like in "Las Meninas" which serve to call us (I hesitate to say "interpellate us"--I don't know enough about Althusser or Lacan to go there) as subjects in the ads.

It's easy for this mirroring to sound manipulative, especially with respect to advertising, but it is also essential to communication in general. With no other around, I could not communicate (that is, "I" could not communicate with any "not-I" were there none in existence).