Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

KNOWLEDGE GATHERING 49
is, then, “familiarity with events, places, and people seen many times
over” (220).
The search for knowledge involves intense and sustained looking at unfamiliar
objects—whether microbes, stars, or aboriginals—in order to corral
them into the observer’s arena of understanding. This domestication of the
unknown takes the form of display, of visual reorganization into categories
coherent to viewers. The tamed and transmuted objects of knowledge are
displayed in collections such as early curiosity cabinets, museums, or encyclopedias,
all of which proliferated between 1550–1750. 4 The collection
stages a scene of staring that arrests time, erases particularity, and mutes
origin in order to incorporate strange objects into familiar narratives of the
world. Staring that leads to knowing thus requires the arduous visual work
of reconciling the curious with the common.
Such staring is more than idle curiosity. It is theoretical curiosity aimed at
mastering the unknown by making it known. This kind of looking is intense,
focused, and asymmetrical. As what Michel Foucault calls the “clinical gaze,”
observation has been used to lasso the outlaw aspects of human variation
into constricting categories and to diagnose differences as pathology. 5 According
to this view, medical-scientific observation as diagnosis brings home
the alien in chains, converting the unusual into the monstrous, sick, polluted,
contagious, mad, queer, and deviant. Not only does it survey our exteriors to
establish boundaries, but clinical observation invades our interiors to reckon
the true relationship between inside and outside, between visible and invisible.
Such practices as contemporary genetic testing, surgical procedures, and
medical imaging technologies all rely on a Weberian rationalizing vision. 6
Despite these sharp critiques brought against the abuses of medical- scientific
observation, the application of this knowledge collection has nonetheless
profoundly sheltered those of us in modern, developed societies from suffering,
pain, death, and hardship even while it has mastered us.
So while staring begins as an impulse, curiosity sustains it. The prolonged
look becomes an expedition into unknown territory. What Michael
T. Gilmore (2003) calls the “quest for legibility” that characterizes
Western, in particular North American, culture is one of the shared conventions
of possibility that determines how we see one another. To navigate
the egalitarian, mobile, anonymous social landscape of modern life,
we need to read others, to properly respond or ignore them. The intricate
hierarchy of medical-scientific classification is just one axis of legibility
that we depend upon to perceive each other. We enlist intense visual scrutiny
to gather knowledge, answer questions, shape narratives, and explain
dissonance. This visual voracity can transform our world-views. By the
time stareable sights release their grip on us, the order of things may have
changed for us.