Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

32 WHAT IS STARING?
In everyday life, we tend to experience what medical science terms normal
and abnormal as the usual and unusual. As we saw in chapter 2, we are drawn
toward what is visually unusual, toward novelty as a form of psychological
stimulation and an antidote to visual boredom. Even more, the new has value
in our contemporary, forward-looking society, partly because consumer culture
requires us to be hungry for the newness that constant consumption demands.
But what is novel can be quickly glossed by “ideological tools” such
as rationalization and normality. So while contemporary landscapes provide
us with novelty, that novelty is at the same time policed by the conflicting
requirement for sameness that rationalization dictates. Medical science’s
influential preference for normality and prejudice against abnormality can
render novelty in human form repugnant to us. Modern culture strictly prescribes
our behavior, appearance, and our relations with one another, even
while we celebrate freedom and choice. Stareable sights break the rules we
live by, which is what makes them unusual. We may want to see the unusual
but perhaps not be the unusual. Novelty, in this context, is both what we seek
and avoid.