The essay incorporates three large areas of transformations that have shaken up the contemporary scene: institutional deterioration, the detonation of the social pact(s), and the exhaustion of ecosystems, both biological and sociopolitical. The objective is to think about the impacts of these transformations on our mindsets and address the critical work involved in the production of knowledge about the world. This essay brings the question of methodological imagination to the center of the discussion in an attempt to illuminate an area that often is opaque in academic work. Three dimensions that have marked the work of ros as a researcher and thinker about the modern world are addressed, deepening understanding of the social production of meaning and the dynamics of power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Keywords: politics of gaze<\/a>, sociocultural studies<\/a>, sociodigital analysis<\/a>, technopolitics<\/a>, violence<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Essays on the Abyss: Politics of Gaze, Violence, Technopolitics.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n The essay incorporates three large areas of transformations that have shaken up the contemporary scene: institutional deterioration, the detonation of the social pact(s), and the exhaustion of ecosystems, both biological and sociopolitical. The objective is to think about the impacts of these transformations on our mindsets and address the critical work involved in the production of knowledge about the world. This essay brings the question of methodological imagination to the center of the discussion in an attempt to illuminate an area that often is opaque in academic work. Three dimensions that have marked the work of ros as a researcher and thinker about the modern world are addressed, deepening understanding of the social production of meaning and the dynamics of power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Keywords: sociocultural studies, politics of gaze, violence, technopolitics, sociodigital analysis....<\/p>\n\n\n\n A good archaeological report does not only indicate those layers from which the objects found come, but above all, those layers that had to be traversed beforehand. Beyond the intense transformations that have shaken the contemporary scene, which I group - for analytical purposes - into three major areas: institutional deterioration, the explosion of the social pact(s) and the depletion of both biological and socio-political ecosystems, I am interested in reflecting in this essay on the impacts that these transformations have had on our ways of thinking and approaching critical work in the production of knowledge about the world. In other words, I am interested in bringing to the center of the discussion the question of methodological imagination, an expression with which I try to illuminate an often opaque fringe in academic work that - it seems to me - remains tied to a set of canons, procedures and modes that today crash against a reality that is not at all that which saw the emergence of ethnography or participant observation, such as the interview or the survey, to cite some methods that have been central in the development of the social sciences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From this question, I seek to develop three dimensions that have marked my work as a researcher and thinker of the contemporary: the analysis of images and regimes of visibility; violence and the atrocious; and the analysis of networks through large volumes of data. All three are closely related to my concerns to deepen my understanding of the social production of meaning and the dynamics of power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the collection of essays em>Horizontes fragmentados. El desorden global y sus figuras,<\/em> that I wrote in 2005, I was interested, among other things, in the question of the gaze and its technologies, that gaze that seeks to unravel, to understand, to produce knowledge. My concern focused and continues to focus on what I will call \"regimes of visibility\", which I understand as complex socio-historical constructions that articulate to the following points:<\/p>\n\n\n\n a) Particular historical formations, for example: West\/East; Europe\/Latin America; Modernity\/Late Modernity; Center\/Periphery. This means that in-visibility is always situated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n b) Socializing and intermediary institutions that model and modulate it: the family, the school, the churches, the media, the cultural industries. One learns to see and this action has cultural and socio-political repercussions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n c) Logics of political power that become cognitive power. Whoever determines what is visible and invisible, configures what is cognizable and enunciable in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At that time I asked myself a question about the technologies of the gaze and their relationship with what I called the sciences of proximity or distance, which were associated with \"looking and understanding the far\" and \"looking and understanding the near\", a trail that I followed through the inventions of the telescope and, shortly after, the microscope. But this question gradually became a meta-reflection fundamentally linked to the disputes over the representation of reality. The ways of looking, historically produced and never neutral, interested me insofar as they allowed me to approach the field of social and cultural struggles for the legitimate definition of the real.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Walter Benjamin<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nPolitics of the gaze: understanding (in)visibility<\/h2>\n\n\n\n