Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

A PHYSICAL RESPONSE 19
in search of information. Drawn by the inexplicable, we try to integrate new
information into what we already know to reduce our uncertainty about the
world. Both Berns and Langer assert that what humans really want is predictability
in what we grudgingly know to be an unpredictable world. 4 Ironically,
at the root of our craving for novelty is an anxious drive to be rid of it
so that we can sink into a calmer world where nothing startles or demands
our visual attention.
Here is the contradiction at the heart of staring, then: the extraordinary
excites but alarms us; the ordinary assures but bores us. We want surprise,
but perhaps even more we want to tame that pleasurable astonishment, to
domesticate the strange sight into something so common as to be unnoticeable.
These clashing impulses make staring self-cancelling, abating once we
reassert the equilibrium of familiarity. Langer says that we judiciously court
the novel, trying to control our visual explorations. In other words, we prefer
to stare for our own reasons and on our own terms rather than be forced into
a stare by something or someone stareable. For example, the middle-class
value of traveling, seeking a diverse environment, or even favoring ethnic
food can be seen as forms of deliberate, and therefore controlled, stimulation
through novelty, positioned within a model of consumption that indicates
upper-class status. Such intentional novelty seeking differs from a
reactive stare driven by the novel object. The rawest, most basic form of
staring is the physiological expression of being caught off guard, captured by
the unexpected. Staring is at once a pleasurable encounter with novel stimuli
and a disconcerting hijacking of our visual agency by the impulse to stare.
We at once want and do not want to gawk at such compelling sights.
Because we both crave and dread unpredictable sights, staring encounters
are fraught with anxious contradiction. The functional and formal conditions
of our bodies that are termed disabilities are one of the most unpredictable
aspects of life. Like death itself, disabilities come to us unbidden as we move
through a world that wears us down even while it sustains us. Seeing disability
reminds us of what Bryan S. Turner (2006) calls “ontological contingency,”
the truth of our body’s vulnerability to the randomness of fate. Each one of
us ineluctably acquires one or more disabilities—naming them variably as
illness, disease, injury, old age, failure, dysfunction, or dependence. This inconvenient
truth nudges most of us who think of ourselves as able-bodied toward
imagining disability as an uncommon visitation that mostly happens to
someone else, as a fate somehow elective rather than inevitable. In response,
we have refused to see disability. Avowing disability as tragic or shameful,
we have hidden away disabled people in asylums, segregated schools, hospitals,
and nursing homes. 5 When we ourselves develop disabilities, we often
hide them as well, sometimes through semantic slights-of-hand, sometimes
through normalizing medical procedures that erase disability, and sometimes