Foucault's The Order Of Things

Las Meninas, the first chapter of Foucault’s The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, conveyed to me the idea of Neo-Historicism through an extended analogy. Although the initial introduction of the situation in the analogy seems simple enough, there were numerous angles taken to view the situation that incorporated perspective, political stance, the idea of interpretation, and the approach that we may take to understand works. Neo-Historicism is based on the understanding that a writer and their works are a product of the time in which they live, and Foucault deals with that idea while simultaneously dispelling the idea that we are able to truly interpret an author’s or artist’s work without knowledge of their history. I

The first analysis he offers is that while the painter is standing in front of the painting, the spectator is not able to view it without moving to the side. This illustrates his first point that we are unable to understand works without altering ourselves in favor of perspective. Foucault goes on to show that if the painter moves his gaze, we, the spectator, are only able to guess at what he is looking at. Without asking the artist intentions, we are unable to truly interpret what the work means. The spectator is however, able to look around them and glean from the surroundings what it is the artist is looking at, just as we are able to look for historical context clues as to what an artist intended. But, Foucault goes on to explain, “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...this line reaches out to us ineluctably, and links us to the representation of the picture” (Foucault 4). Foucault shows through this line that a third method is possible and that is the method that functions on seeing what the author intended through the work itself, or “seeing what they want us to see.” Foucault condemns this process due to its lack of close interpretation, but