Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

PART II
What Is Staring?
. . . staring, in its pure and simple essence, is the time required by
the brain to make sense of the unexpected.
—Jeanne McDermott, mother of Nathaniel,
who was born with Apert’s syndrome
A stare has, essentially, the character of a compulsion;
it is steady, unmodulated, “fixed.”
—Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence” (1969)
Staring is both simple and complex, both natural and cultural. It has four
elemental qualities. First, as the quotes above suggest, staring is a physiological
response. Disturbances in the visual status quo literally catch our eye,
drawing us into a staring relationship with a startling sight. Staring is a more
forceful form of looking than glancing, glimpsing, scanning, and other forms
of casual looking. Staring is profligate interest, stunned wonder, obsessive
ocularity. The daily traffic reports capture staring’s disruptive potential with
the term “rubbernecking,” a canny summation of our reflexive compulsion
to look. In line at the supermarket, a freak on the tabloid cover or the sensational
photo of a murder victim lures our hapless eyes, trumpeting harsh evidence
of the randomness of human embodiment and our own mortality. We
may gaze at what we desire, but we stare at what astonishes us (figure 2.1).
Second, like all physical impulses, staring has a history sedimented over
time and across space that is specific to each culture, which in turn shapes
its meaning and practice. The intensity of our physical urge to stare has
been strictly monitored by social rules ranging from ancient ritual protections
against the “evil eye” to modern-day mothers’ wary pronouncement of
“Don’t stare!” In modern, urban culture where so many of our daily visual
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