Looking Continued
Ok, so, I’m dutifully following up on this “looking� conversation, as requested. I figured, why append my comments to the previous post when I could get a new entry out of it? Then the Great One of Few Ideas and Creativity (me) won’t have to think of another entry. Though after spending the last three consecutive days staring continuously at Microsoft Word with the end-of-semester blues, I’m not sure how inspired I’ll be today, now that I’m in recovery.
Here’s the angle I want to introduce to the conversation: To what degree is intentionality involved when “the gaze� is employed? The comments thus far have established the functionality of looking; I agree that a well-formed stare can get a lot done, socially speaking. The question is, to what extent is this “looking� put into action by a conscious strategy?
Visual attention can be difficult to control. One of the faculty in my department, a great guru of attention research, runs his subjects through a visual search paradigm in which they must repeatedly seek out target letters from an array of distractors. So if you come in every day for an hour with the task of finding the letter “E� over and over again, you get pretty good at it—so good that you can do it just as quickly when there are many distractors on the screen as when there are just a few. One subject who went through this training said that afterwards, he couldn’t read a page of text without all the “E’s� popping out in front of him (I think it eventually subsided.) But the idea is that you get all these automatic mechanisms set up – either through experience or hard-wired in your brain – that determine what’s going to dominate your perception of a scene – and very likely, where you direct your eyes.
I’m not a biologist, but I imagine that eyeballs are evolutionarily very old, and that much of the guidance of our oculomotor system is shared with some of the rudimentary mechanisms that you would find in other species. So when there is something that you want to get rid of in your environment – say, a cheating student – and the situation constrains you from acting in a more physical way, then it may be a basic reflex to stare.
Here’s an informal way to find those situations where “looking� is governed more by automatic responses than by deliberate thought – think about all the times when you “look� and you don’t even want to. This is obvious in the case of gory scenes, like “rubbernecking� when you see an accident on the highway… or fixating on Dubya’s smirk when you know it will make you irate. And so on. This may be your reflexive way of *making things go away.* Or at least, your irrational, typically-human way of trying to make things go away when of course, it usually can’t. But in the case of your teacher’s glare…maybe sometimes it does.
To try to bring this all back into the earlier comments—if “looking� is automatic, and perhaps even undesirable, on the part of the “looker,� then this may change around the politics of Looking a bit. Usually the object of gaze is interpreted as the subordinate one, but the person doing the gazing may have lost an equal degree of agency over his/her behavior. And at this point, I think I’m fully overlapping with John’s comments. I like the terminology – the continuous “feedback loop� of looks, which we interpret entirely post-hoc in terms of deciding exactly who is controlling the situation—when the ultimate locus of control may be some Darwinian social melodrama that human beings just got trapped into.