Foucault take one-- reflections

I have a confession to make.  I looked long and hard for Foucault sparknotes, enotes, Foucault for Dummies--- anything to help make my scrambled notes from the book and Dusty's lecture make sense.  I took four/five pages of notes from Dusty's talk, and I felt super smart at the end of the class, but at the end of the day, combining those to the few pages I read of the book, I was chilling in chaos. 

I did find some lecture notes online, which proved to be a little helpful. They are still confusing-- a bit-- but they are helping me decipher some of my notes, giving me a light bulb moment with the Las Meninas chapter.  I underlined these three lines on page 7: "it is a mirror. . . the painter is unable to see this looking glass shining so softly behind him. . .It is reflecting nothing."  The guy's lecture (his name is John Protevi from LSU-- I posted the links below) says,  "The Classical Age, based on representation, cannot represent representation to itself. It cannot see the light by which it sees; the fish cannot know it lives in water. Only historical difference can highlight the pre-suppositions of an age."  He talks about a mirror in room taking in painter, the painted and the painting,  the mirror (mimesis) can't reflect the situation.  James talked about the mirrored image in the Velasquez painting in his blog.  The "objective" observers (us) can see the images of the king and queen in the mirror, but those images are totally ignored by the spectators in the painting.  He suggests that the people milling around are the true focus of the painting.  I guess I'd agree in that they are in the focal spot of the piece.  They are the brightest objects of the darker room, and their action draws the eye.  But what I like about the mirror is that it wasn't the first thing I saw.  The subjects of the mirror are nowhere to be seen, but I think it's possible that you can't see them, because they are not there.  The mirror is the reflection of the painting the painter is working on.  The objective viewer is not really us, it is the king and queen looking onto their subjects, looking at the mirror, which reflects the painting, which is a representation of them.  Thus, the viewer is not really objective.  That lack of objectivity goes back to the structure and language, but I can't explain.  

But thinking of James' comment on the periphery, I like the guy hanging in the stairwell.  He's such a creeper, hanging in the stairwell, but I like how the doorway frame mimics the frames of all the other paintings in the room.  It's like the man in the doorway is also a painting, and that painting must be significant, because like the focal point of the room, it is also lit.   

The links to the lecture notes:

http://www.protevi.com/john/Foucault/PDF/OT_I.pdf 
http://www.protevi.com/john/Foucault/PDF/OT_II.pdf