How Representations are Imposed on Western Culture.

The philosopher Michel Foucault gives an excellent analysis of "Las Meninas" at the beginning of his text, The Order of Things (Les Mots et les choses). Foucault read Diego Velazquez’s painting Las Meninas¹ as portraying a paradoxical relationship between reality and representation


 In Foucault’s analysis, what is outside the painting gives meaning to what is inside. Therefore, the King and Queen are the centre of the scene


"Las Meninas" is self-aware in the sense that:

 The painter paints himself;

He paints his own act of painting. 

The object of the represented painter's gaze (the subject of his painting) is the invisible authority that makes his painting possible, indeed, that authorizes all activity, including representation, in Spain: the king and queen of Spain who can be seen in the mirror behind the painter.  

The self-awareness in "Las Meninas" reinforces the code of signs that grounds representation in 17th C. Spain.  It does not put this code of representation into question.

 More rigorously, however, one must say that the painting in fact constructs the fiction of a hidden king who stands behind all representations and authorizes them.


How representations are imposed on Western culture. 

Descartes conception of knowing rests on having representation in an internal space, the mind.

So what drives us towards such thinking? 
Richard Rorty argues that this desire for a theory of knowledge is desire for constraint,  a desire to find foundations to which one might cling, frameworks beyond which one must not stray.


Historical note on representation
The study of epistemology as the study of mental representations arose in a particular historical period  (17^th century Germany) then developed in a specific society - that of Europe, and was then institutionalised in 19th century German universities. (Note the inherent universal claim in the word 'University').