'And just as the same town when seen from different sides will seem quite different, and as it were multiplied perspectivally, the same thing happens here: because of the infinite multitudes of simple substances it is as if there were many different universes, but they are all perspectives on the same one, according to the different point of view of each monad.'

A 16th century viewer, living in the age of a global analysis working towards 'establishing a mathematics of quantifiable order' for all of its many things matches the pattern described in The Monadology, the pattern of 'all' looking round at the all-knowing middle, by making vision always a dependency on being one of a simultaneous many- no-one looks alone, no object waits in isolation for one single monad's eyes, and a total mass of viewers occupies the stage. This is the 'public' that Foucault envisions, a virtual gallery full of a new way of looking, constituting a body that is not looked upon from the panopticon which will form a later centrepiece of history in Discipline and Punish, but which looks and finds by a process of replacing what it sees with itself, the painting's lines become the essence of man, the discarded skein of prior epistemes shed like curious but obsolete artworks- an infinite and willing state of substitutability.

The points of the dispersal of vision around Las Meninas are fourfold, and the first one is us:

'The painter is looking ... 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.'

The first substitution is of us for the painting's subject, the spectators become the king and queen, 'King Philip IV and his wife, Mariana' . The traditional fantasy of art is thus confirmed: in the act of watching we can share in that which the powerful have easiest access to, Experience, as it gets recorded and venerated. But in the line of sight that shares democratically amongst all possible viewers, is also inscribed their atomisation into other views upon the picture. And so the implication that we are being watched when we stand and look from the position of royalty cannot be sustained when the other positions come in.

When Foucault starts to speak of the lines of light that cross the surface of Las Meninas, something drastic starts to take place, a micro-battle waged against the tradition of constraints being placed upon the relation of the artwork to man. And, like the conjurors and magicians whose work and place in cultural tradition is scattered across the pages of The Order of Things, Foucault begins the ordaining of a new dimensionality to us who view and the painting which is viewed.

In the world of Las Meninas, things cannot be both represented and representing at the same time- the two states pertain to a mutual exclusivity that is the sign of displacement, keeping apart that which is irreconcilable to the painting's main thrust, which is to bring light and the virtual portrait of the royal couple who are contained in the mirror at the rear of the picture, but yet also us in our 'sort of vast cage' of spectatorship and becoming out of the front of the picture.

We are caught up in a system of doubles that proliferates beyond all attempts to contain it. Doubles are not just resemblances and paired differences, from the Manichean to Mason and Dixon, but also different types of hand around the throat of existence. Las Meninas presents, famously, 'the representation, as it were, of classical representation' , and it cannot function without the mirroring, the doubling of the light that connects what is represented within the picture and the scene which it looks upon that we become the obedient participants in. The royal couple's aperspectival portrait sits at the back of the picture, fixing the supposed direction of vision. We are subjugated to being its false double, because we cannot neutralise perspective as they do, or clarify the role of light. Light and royalty are together, holding us in a 'common locus' of representation that leaves us floundering.

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