Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

A PHYSICAL RESPONSE 23
of the elderly, abandoned by the institutions of our ‘humanity’ and waiting
for the call of death” (1988, 127). The visual comportment of people
with significant disabilities—often those with cognitive, developmental,
or perceptual impairments—catalog them as blank starers. The supposed
dumb look, blind eye, and idiotic expression are highly stigmatized ways
of appearing that draw interrogative stares from those who are properly
focused. This type of purportedly empty stare demands no response, initiates
no interchange, and produces no knowledge. Blank stares function,
then, as visual impotence.
The distracted stares of attention-deficit disorder or blank stares of inattention
point to a failure to adroitly separate the ocular wheat from the chaff.
Such lookers visually manifest a failure of knowing. 12 Their stares signify
an inability to make sense of what is seen, exemplifying what psychologists
call disorientation as opposed to effective orientation. As with eye contact
in general, attentiveness is brittle. 13 Like trying to start a car engine with a
low battery, attention repeatedly sparks toward coherence until its iterations
sputter into a nothingness born of futility. The demeanors of deficient attention
and blank stares unsettle their witnesses and stigmatize their bearers.
The world, not the individual, is in control. Thus staring is the opposite of
paying attention because the starer is not master of the encounter.
With these habitual starers, staring betrays a basic confusion, a thwarting
of coherence, a betrayal of perceptual synthesis. These stares are potential
mastery transformed into lingering moments of chagrin. Instead, our eye
behavior must be carefully controlled if we are to display a positive image
of ourselves to others. Proper looking should not edge into blank or unfocused
stares in what Erving Goffman (1959) calls our “presentation of self
in everyday life.” 14 We must look like we are paying attention, but never like
we are staring.