Perhaps the real task these days is (…) to probe the ways in which the sense of ‘looking after’ someone is just as much a possibility as ‘looking at’ them in le regard, and ‘watching out for someone’ is an ethical alternative to controling surveillance. I remember very well a conversation I had in the mid-nineties in Berlin with the poet Allen Ginsberg about the ‘gaze of the Buddha’, in which he demonstrated for me the non-dominating, benign way in which looking takes place in that religion. Perhaps it is time to look for comparable examples in traditions a bit closer to home.
journal of visual culture
Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol 1(1): 87-92 [1470-4129(200204)1:1;87-92;022425]