to explain and justify why artists and authors–unlike ordinary craftsmen in
the industrial and domestic arts–deserve a uniquely high price for their
products. As Martha Woodmansee sums up this line of argument,“The
‘author’in the modern sense is a relatively recent invention, a product
of...the emergence in the eighteenth century of writers who sought to earn
their livelihood from the sale of their writings to the new and rapidly
expanding public.”^54
Similarly, Michel Foucault argues that in Velasquez’sLas Meninas(1656)representation undertakes to represent itself here in all its elements, with its
images, the eyes to which it is offered, the faces it makes visible, the gestures
that call it into being...Perhaps there exists, in this painting by Velasquez,
the representation, as it were, of Classical [i.e. seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century] representation, and the definition of the space it opens up to us.^55What Foucault means by this is that during this period a new social forma-
tion of modern subjects–who understand themselves as masters of their
own gaze, as potential owners of property, as bearers of rights under the law,
as able to make enforceable contracts, and so forth–comes into being. This
new social formation is quite different from the medieval world of fixed
social roles that were taken to reflect a larger cosmological order. Instead, in
the modern world individuals emerge as sovereign over their experience and
commitments, a political sovereign in the form of a monarch is installed (and
then later held accountable to the individuals governed: political individual-
ism and absolute monarchy develop together), and artists and authors per-
force come to make their ways in the world through sales. Velasquez’s
painting both illustrates and participates in these developments. It is not so
much that Velasquez is himself an inspired, original painter as that in his
work the emerging order of individualist representation “undertakes to
represent itself.” Foucault himself looks forward, together with Roland
Barthes, to a new social formation mysteriously emerging, to the cessation
of the cultivation and cult of individuality, and to the death of man.“It is
comforting...and a source of profound relief,”Foucault writes,(^54) Martha Woodmansee,The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 36.
(^55) Michel Foucault,The Order of Things, trans. not named (New York: Random House, 1970),
p. 16.
130 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art