Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

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Knowledge Gathering
CURIOUS STARING
An observer sees within a prescribed set of possibilities.
—Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (1990, 6)
We have inherited an uneasy tension between seeing and knowing. Philosophy
is in part a conversation about the relations between appearances
and reality. Plato, for example, warned that truth lies not in the visible,
that appearances in fact obfuscate truth. Our insistence that we see things
with our own eyes has alternately been punished and rewarded. This chapter
addresses the rewards of curiosity, while the next examines its dangers.
Curio sity is the itch to know; it shifts desire of the eye to desire of the mind.
Like staring, curiosity seeks. Both are acquisitive, grasping, appetitive. Staring
is an ocular inquiry; curiosity is an intellectual inquiry. The eye leads;
the mind follows.
Human curiosity animates our modern world, revealing the tacit, taming
the novel, and undertaking the unknown. 1 Despite traditional misgivings,
the pursuit of curiosity—even more than the Jeffersonian pursuit of
happiness—characterizes modern individuals. Curiosity is interest headed
toward possession. Vision may ignite curiosity, but mobility and acquisition
enact it. Curiosity begets inquiry, which challenges established authority
and propels the development of modernity according to Hans Blumenberg
(1983). The Copernican dismantling of a geocentric understanding
established curiosity as a virtue rather than the vice it had been when the
world was thought to be limited under strict authority. This revolution in
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