Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

48 WHAT IS STARING?
the way we imagine our place in the cosmos licensed us to observe and seek
our own proof. Pursuit of the novel takes on fresh value beginning in the
early modern era and continuing into the Enlightenment. 2 Indeed, modernity
validates the eye’s hunger for new and strange sights. An interest in the
unusual, remote, and unexamined burgeoned, exemplified by Leonardo
da Vinci in the fifteenth century. Curiosity prompted explorations, commencing
the mobility that is a defining feature of modern era (Zacher 1976). The
curiosity of a Columbus, Newton, or Franklin makes them heroic rather
than presumptuous to the modern sensibility. As bold journeys into the
unknown, inquiry conforms to modernity’s orientation toward the future
rather than the past. By the beginning of eighteenth century, Montesquieu
asserts that curiosity is inherent in all men, naturalizing and authorizing the
movement to expand limits of the known universe.
Not all were as sanguine about curiosity being a positive force for all
people at all times. For some, it became a secular pleasure, distrusted as
indulgence. Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary of English defined curiosity
as an addiction to inquiry. 3 Associated with callow and reckless youth,
“naive curiosity” was unproductive. A mature and proper “reflected
curiosity,” however, drove the rational, scientific inquiry that initiated
modernity. Naive, natural curiosity matured, then, into the methods of
scientific inquiry and rational analysis, which was an urge to go beyond
mere visibility into “theoretical curiosity” (Blumenberg 1993, 226, 233–34).
Modernity emancipated human curiosity from the constriction of external
authority, legitimating and institutionalizing it as medical-scientific
observation. Enlightenment rationality severed such decorous theoretical
curiosity from a curiosity closely associated with the senses and passions
(Daston and Park 1998). Yet, both a base and elite form of curiosity persist.
Gossip and gawking get the bad name, while scientific observation
remains untainted.
The goal of observation—of staring for the sake of knowing—is to
make the unknown intelligible, to incorporate the unusual into our understandings
of the usual. This process has a strong visual component.
Accumulating knowledge has two visual aspects: observation and display.
As the collection of knowledge, science relies on a spatial metaphor
about proximity, about center and margin, about here and there. We can
know that which is close because we experience it repeatedly; as it becomes
familiar, we knit it into our explanatory schema. The unknown is
unintelligible because it is far away from the quotidian. We must encounter
something foreign regularly to make it native. The aim of science is
to act from a distance, reaching out toward the strange to, in the words
of Bruno Latour, collect it in “cycles of accumulation” and return it to the
center, where we domesticate it into the ordinary (1987, 219). Knowledge