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For Foucault, Las Meninas is much more than a simple representation of the infantas and court attendants of Velázquez’s royal patron, the king of Spain, Philip IV. It expresses the rise of European Man as a sovereign subject at the height of imperial and colonial power. Its famous trompe l’oeil presents Europe’s monarchical and aesthetic regimes simultaneously. Politics and art become overlapping and interchangeable expressions of absolute power. In this conception, Las Meninas isn’t merely an impressive painting of a powerful subject by a masterful painter; it is also symptomatic evidence of a historical process then unfolding. And that process was the arms race among Europe’s royal houses in their bid to plunder the Americas, initially via campaigns of extermination and the enslavement of indigenous peoples, and subsequently through the enslavement and deportation of Africans to the New World. Velázquez took a selfie of the entire idea of European mastery as it clicked into place. In his masterpiece, we see the rulers discovering how to make their own project legible to themselves. This is the nature of my power, the painting says, I am the natural subject of history, the center and master of the universe.
There is a common misconception that Foucauldian critique is a reductive reading of a work of art to show how it is merely a product of its time. It’s just the opposite: the idea is to show how time itself, historical epochs, or epistemes, are produced and organized by (and through) the language of art, science, and culture. Las Meninas is not simply a representation of sovereignty—it is a moment in the construction of the sovereign, of the entire Spanish empire. Consider this: a billionaire stamping his name on the outside wall of a museum doesn’t merely represent a philanthropic donation but expresses and justifies (one might even say launders) the sovereignty of the unregulated accumulation of private wealth. The contemporary art museum, with its wings and rotundas named for robber barons, is itself a keystone in our own aesthetic regime, one that mandates, reproduces, and further consolidates the nature of sovereignty, the order of things in our society.
I’m not simply interested in reminding the world of Pareja’s existence, or in complicating our reception of Velázquez, although those might be excellent ancillary benefits. Nor am I suggesting that Pareja’s painting is necessarily a neglected masterwork that secretly rivals the image of the Old Master. My question is this: Even if we wanted to, do we know how to read a slave’s “masterpiece”? I’m not asking whether a slave is capable of producing one, but rather what kinds of rhetorical and aesthetic claims such a work can make. What does it mean to apply the word “masterpiece,” originally referring to the culmination of a journeyman’s apprenticeship and acceptance into a commercial guild, to a black journeyman who knew the guild he was seeking admittance to existed in the first place by profiting from the fungibility of his own humanity, from the enslavement of his people? What did Juan de Pareja imagine he was doing when he painstakingly contributed his own entry to the history of European oil painting? Can we make sense of him in that moment? And further down the corridor of time, what can he tell us about our own?
Suppose I were to read Juan de Pareja’s Saint Matthew as carefully as Foucault does Velázquez’s Las Meninas. What can I say? Where will my discourse fit, or fail to fit? Foucault recognizes that a tour de force requires its analogue in writing, and dutifully obliges. What would be my mirroring gesture given the failed reception of my subject? Certainly, I’m not able to emulate an art historical discourse of hagiographic adulation. Such a move would already be understood as belated and therefore derivative. Moreover, it would be slotted neatly into a contemporary notion of redress or reparation. It would risk the whiff of appealing to white liberal guilt. Such readers would concede to my claims as a matter of tacit etiquette, a small price to pay for a relieved conscience. To put it another way, even if I were able to muster the rhetorical force of a T. S. Eliot rescuing a John Donne whose talent he believed had been unfairly discarded by his tradition, my claims would be suspect. Donne was never a slave, except to his appetites. The negligence Eliot had to overcome was essentially evaluative; it presented no fundamental epistemological or ontological difficulty. Pareja, by contrast, spent the greater portion of his life an African slave in Spain, owned by an ambitious artist who in life and in death overshadows him. Pareja presents complications before his brush even touches the canvas.
Only when we have raked the image over in this way can we allow ourselves to focus on the most obvious feature, one of undeniable interest: the presence of the slave in his own work. For Juan de Pareja (in a move from the master’s repertoire familiar in figures as distant as Giotto and as recent as Hitchcock) inserts a self-portrait in his work. We know this is an image of Pareja because of its obvious resemblance to the portrait of him that Velázquez originally produced in 1650, the one that now resides at The Met. On one level, in Saint Matthew, Pareja records for posterity his own impression of his likeness in the otherwise imagined biblical scene, a practice Renaissance painters indulged in typically on behalf of wealthy patrons who were duly inserted into the works they had commissioned the way stadiums and sporting events are “brought to you by” such and such corporate conglomerate.
THE TOOLS BELONGING TO what Audre Lorde called “the white fathers” are master frameworks that continue to shape the world we live in. But those same tools are always being picked up by others, by people who have stories to tell that their masters never suspected and audiences the masters don’t know how to reach. Lorde may be right that those tools will never be sufficient to accomplish a total revolution or completely dismantle the order of things. But the hand of the slave who wields the master’s tools inevitably transforms them. New keys can unlock new doors that open onto unsuspected basements. Something always changes even if it’s not always obvious at first sight. Juan de Pareja’s painting of Saint Matthew of Ethiopia may not be a masterpiece in the way that Las Meninas is. But these two artists thought about mastery in different ways, learned different lessons, sought out different conceptions of the truth in painting. Pareja, I am convinced, was attuned to some very subtle questions about the relationship between freedom, art, and the divine. He was driving at questions that Velázquez never even contemplated. Brilliant though he was, Velázquez was nonetheless limited by his position as master. There were some things very near to him, things in fact essential to his own success, and indeed to that of his royal patron, that he could not see. Velázquez had the tools of a master. He didn’t have the vision of the slave.
this is stellar
[...] The power of great fiction to challenge that common sense lies only partially in reflecting our lives back to us like a mirror; a great deal more resides in its capacity to dispossess us of our preferred assumptions, plunging us into knowledge like photographic paper into its chemical bath, revealing, even against our will, all the gray areas we find inconvenient, unpleasant, even impossible to acknowledge.
In essays like “The Foreigner’s Home,” one almost hears echoes of Jean Baudrillard’s theories of simulated life under late capitalism and Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle as she examines the disorienting loss of distinction between private and public space and its effect on our interior lives. The politicization of the “migrant” and the “illegal alien,” Morrison argues, is not merely a circling of the wagons in the face of “the transglobal tread of peoples.” It is also an act of bad faith, a warped projection of our own fears of homelessness and “our own rapidly disintegrating sense of belonging,” which reflects back to us the anxieties produced by the privatization of public goods and commons and the erosion of face-to-face association. Our lives, Morrison tells us, have now become refracted through a “looking-glass” that has compressed our public and private lives “into a ubiquitous blur” and created a pressure that “can make us deny the foreigner in ourselves.”
For Benjamin, the horror of our historical trajectory lies in the Angel’s inability to close his wings. What prevents that closure is the insistent storm of “progress,” the stubborn belief of liberals, fascists, and communists alike that technology and rational control are positive forces that merely have to be harnessed to their respective utopian projects. The political ideology of the modern world—the storm pushing to reach the “Paradise” of modernity’s impossible utopias—is in fact violent, Benjamin thinks, precisely because it cannot or will not make that which is truly valuable in the past whole and tangible to the present. The powerful may monumentalize historical icons in order to glorify the state in the present, but this is merely in order to further cement the belief that they are legitimately carrying us all forward into a better future. What they will not permit is any chance for the wretched, for those suffering at the base of the social pyramid, to come to know the past that is really relevant to them.
Benjamin’s usefulness for the writing of “critiques” in the contemporary academy has muted, even eclipsed, the theo-political intensity of this revolutionary anarchism. He has become a kind of Che Guevara for a portion of the intelligentsia that feels it must talk the talk but cannot begin to imagine how to walk the walk. Some are embarrassed by his ardency, by his conviction that Art and Politics and History are One, and that getting them right is about saving the world by ending the one we know. Some grumble that his work is too cryptic. But the truth is that his writing is not hard to understand; it is hard to look at directly. His aphoristic fragments singe like solar flares: “The only way of knowing a person is to love that person without hope.” Who can survive that test? Who today would dare to read Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal or Blanqui’s prison writings on astronomy as serious reports on the state of damnation of the modern world? Who is prepared to say that social media, AI, and robotic automation are not just the products of neoliberalism, “the society of control,” and lack of oversight—but visions of Hell? I’m not saying that Benjamin doesn’t see any redemptive opportunities in culture and technology or that our own speculations on such are not worthwhile—he does and they are. But it is undeniable that the intellectual culture of the present has come to relish that part of Benjamin’s work without committing to, or taking seriously, his anarchist and messianic call for a revolutionary politics. To continue in Benjamin’s terms, if the intellectual classes can stroll up to the precipice, look over, and decide it’s not yet time to leap, then they will not be the ones to bring the light of redemption to the people.