Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

74 DON’T STARE
1, 4–7). 13 Staring is the rogue poet’s conduit to the reckless vitality at the
American core. Repudiating the fastidious and proper, Whitman seizes the
blunt rudeness of staring as the perfect instrument of fervid connection.
Putting staring to similar use, the American writer Walker Evans recalls unlearning
not to stare:
I remember my first experience as a café center in Europe. There is staring that
startles the American. I tried to analyze it and came out with the realization that
the European is really interested in just ordinary people and makes a study of
man with his eyes in public. What pleasure and an art it is to study back, and a
relief to me as a young more or less educated American, with still echoing in the
mind his mother’s “Don’t stare!” . . . but I stare and stare at people, shamelessly.
I got my license at the Deux Magots . . . where one escaped one’s mother in
several other senses, all good, too. (Rathbone 1995, 29; italics in original)
Both Whitman and Evans must counter psychological shame and fussy
motherly nagging in order to assert staring as an expansive right of the
manly citizen loosed in a world of compelling curiosities. Evans, especially,
captures the tension between his innate desire to stare and the command
“Don’t stare” that echoes “in his mind.” For the American-bred Evans, the
“license” to stare he finds in Paris café culture is a “relief ” from the rule
bound ways of looking, enforced by the now far-off mother, all of which he
has “escaped.” Like our American hero, Huckleberry Finn, Evans flees the
socializing matron by lighting out for the territories in search of adventure.
Out of the suffocating domestic trap of the familiar, these boys head out in
search of manhood into a thrilling world of unfamiliar sights. The particular
quest for Evans is the dopamine-drenched “pleasure” of staring “shamelessly”
at his fellow humans, of “mak[ing] a study of man with his eyes in
public.” Whitman and Evans both need to work themselves up with visual
ardor to overcome the barriers of social etiquette. Staring flings them into
a space of face-to-face interpersonal possibility where they might come to
know something meaningful about those strangers who surround them.
Staring encounters stir up anxiety and call for rules because they make
public several cultural contradictions. The first is the paradox at the heart of
the civil inattention that staring violates. As we have seen, to both cultivate
visual anonymity for ourselves and grant it to others is a rite of American
culture. Yet, this ethic of inconspicuousness contradicts claims to the value
of the unique individual as a model for citizenship. Our understanding of
ourselves as autonomous, distinct individuals is a fundamental political
principle of democracy (Arieli 1964). At the same time, democracy premises
that each individual is equal to any other. The need to have our individuality
validated through civic recognition of our uniqueness is in conflict with our