User:Aitantv/Rolando Vázquez (2021) Vistas of Modernity

Decoloniality & Aesthetics

• "morphology of the white gaze" (p3)
• "How the interactions between modernity and coloniality is not reducible to the separation between visible and the invisible, in that it implies the entwinement and disjuncture between the enjoyment of the sovereign self and the suffering of others" (p3-4)
• "no metropolis without the colony...no modernity without coloniality" (p5)
• "Are we historically implicated in the suffering of others?" (p5)
• "While modernity names the historical affirmation, the taking place of the western project of civilization, coloniality names the historical negation, the displacement, the eviction of other worlds of meaning." (p6)

+ Is that all modernity/colonialism is? Do we need a more balanced, less didactic view?

+ Are we in a sense also exoticising other cultures, countries, leaders, states, and evincing them of any repsonsibility for colonialism? It's not only a European problem but this essay focuses on the European responsibility using primarily the Eiffel tour as evidence for how representation becames the very experience of reality. Representation > perception.

• "Decolonial artistic practices are mobilizing non-eurocentric cultural archives, embodied experiences and memories that have been under erasure." (p9)

Le Tour: the Modern Gaze

• "Modernity is characterized by the dominance of vision" (p23)
• "...through the gaze modern aesthetics turns the representation of the real into the expereince of the real" (p23)
• "...for decoloniality, aesthetics is not understood as a criterion of taste and beauty, but rather as a ge-historical field for the control of representation and experience, for the control of subjectivity and more broadly life experience." (p24)
• "The dominance of the gaze in western aesthetics has to do with a history of the possibility of abstrating reality into an object of representation, and in turn exercising the power of represenation to produce a world as artifice." (p 25)
• "Modernity worlds the world as representation" (p 25)
• Martin Heidegger 'The Age of the World View' (1976) pp.340-355: "Man becomes the center to which the existent as such is related".
• "This subjecr is produced in its constitution as the center, as the gaze that owns world-historical reality." (p26)
• modern gaze = representation > perception
• "There is nothing else to perceive other than what is being represented, other than what is being produced as reality, as world view." (p 27)
• "the becoming spectator of the subject" (p 27)