Between the Measuring Stick and the Stick: Considerations on Perception and Social Indiscipline

Abstract

This essay aims to analyze perception and indiscipline in times as crucial as those we are currently living through, under the force of the COVID-19 pandemic. With this in mind, the text approaches the problem through broad analytical variants focused on discipline–indiscipline and perception. This perspective requires considering them in themselves and in their intersubjective dimension. Perception is an element within the human cognitive framework; in its apprehension it presupposes mental states as well as bodily, spatial, and contextual presence. It is constitutive of consciousness and self-consciousness in its very structure. Discipline, in turn, is understood as a civic exercise of affiliation to an order. Its realization requires stability. Elements that disrupt what is conceived as stable hinder social cooperation at macro-social levels, since social life follows a specific structure of norms and rules agreed upon collectively. Faced with this dilemma, the hierarchical structure withdraws and seeks new relations in order to realize itself. The emergence of imbalance entails a new structuring or adaptation – a form of relationality on different bases – and a redefinition of rules and commitments.