Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

KNOWLEDGE GATHERING 51
out as alien, a staree is at once cornered and empowered. After all, the sight
of a staree has brought a starer to his or her cognitive knees. Baroque staring
thus exposes both its participants.
The Enlightenment turn toward the decorous and the staid banished
wonder into the realm of vulgarity. Art, as well, trivialized the baroque by
transforming it into rococo and eviscerated it with neo-classicism. Baroque
staring at wonders became itself an oddity. Wonder evolved into proper
looking. 10 Nonetheless, baroque staring can serve as a useful way to understand
responses to startling sights in any period. Because baroque staring
indicates wonder rather than mastery, it can lead to new insights. Mastery
closes down knowledge; wonder opens up toward new knowledge. Mastery
dominates starees; wonder places starer and staree in dynamic relation. As
both verb and noun, wonder names the object and act of staring. To wonder
means to want to know. A wonder is a source of knowledge. Baroque stares
exceed, then, interested looking. A literally gripping sight provokes baroque
stares even in our contemporary moment. In other words, we still wonder
at wonders.
STARING AT OURSELVES
We stare to know, and often we stare to know ourselves. Perhaps, as Jacques
Lacan (1977) suggests, our first baroque stares are at ourselves. 11 Being caught
off guard by a surprising version of ourselves in some reflective surface is one
of the primal scenes of staring. Visual self-regard is strange because of the
limits of human perception. Our faces are the seat of the senses, the place
from which we recognize the world, and also the location of recognition,
differentiation, and affirmation from others. Our own faces are intimately
familiar to us through the senses of smell, touch, hearing, taste, but never directly
through sight. Paradoxically, we are denied the sight of our own faces,
that most human, intimate sight of our particular self. We cannot directly
recognize ourselves in a way that others know us. We experience ourselves as
a body moving through the world that touches and is touched by our environment,
as the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) points out. But
we can only see the very particular self that we are through the mediation of
images or reflections, which reverse our appearance so that what we see is a
slightly distorted mirror image of how we look to others. The person in the
mirror or the photograph is not the person we experience ourselves to be;
rather, that person is the one others see. This disjuncture between seeing and
being ourselves encourages self-scrutiny. We learn to monitor ourselves and
calculate our appearance through intently looking at these images, through