Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

26 WHAT IS STARING?
We build the world to accommodate the demands of seeing. Because
technologies of printing supplanted spoken voices as a way to communicate,
we are awash in printed words. Forests worldwide have disappeared
in the service of pulp mills. New magazines are born by the hour, and
books are everywhere. We have become sedentary in part because technologies
of vision now bring the world to our living rooms. With the Internet
and text messaging, we connect to one another and roam a universe of
information.
The built environment also enforces a hierarchy of the senses. Automobiledependent
cities or suburbs, for example, restrict the mobility of blind people. 5
We seldom even consider the advantages of blindness, such as being able
to navigate without artificial light or engaging fully with other senses such
as touch and smell. Those without a sense of smell—we do not even have
a common word for this deprivation—seem only mildly compromised in
contrast to the blind. In fact, smell-lessness might even seem an advantage
for some modern ascetic demands such as female slimness.
The modern imagination, moreover, has long seized upon the dynamics
of looking as a source of narrative boldness and a vehicle for making meaning.
Our preference for sight dates back to at least the classical Greco-Roman
burgeoning of architectural and artistic iconography that celebrates looking
as a source of knowledge. The ideal appeared in a perfectly proportioned
statue or temple. But even the Greeks, with their paradoxical faith in both
vision and abstraction, mistrusted the power of sight at the same time they
celebrated it. Whereas Aristotle respected the senses, Plato worried about
the power of images to obscure fundamental truths. The classical myths of
Narcissus, who was seduced and drowned by his own reflection; of Orpheus,
who lost his lovely Eurydice forever by turning back to look; and of Medusa,
who turned men to stone with her stare, each testify to what Martin Jay calls
“vision’s malevolent power” (1993, 28). A founding image of our culture,
Medusa’s fierce look, surrounded by threatening serpentine locks, is widespread
in both ancient Greek myth and the archeological record that survives
today. Medusa’s vivid story demonstrates the uneasy power of the stare.
After the clever hero, Perseus, severed her head by using a mirror to avoid
her petrifying gaze, he appropriated her power to vanquish his enemies and
rivals.
A persistent fascination with staring endures in the traditional curse of
the evil eye (Siebers 1983). Like the Medusa myth, the evil eye superstition
is about the primacy, and power, of vision. This belief in ocular potency for
enacting evil in the world is apparently universal. From the ancient Roman
oculus fascinus , the Italian mal occhio , the Dutch booze blik , to the Ethiopian
ayenat , almost all cultures have a word for the evil eye (Gifford 1958, 6).
Like Perseus brandishing Medusa’s head, people across cultures ward off