ABSTRACT
In April 2004, I was invited to speak at a conference on visual culture at the University of California, Berkeley. Speakers were asked to respond to an essay by W. J. T. Mitchell titled, ‘‘Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture,’’ which offers a series of definitions of the emergent field of visual studies, distinguishing it from the more established disciplines of art history, aesthetics, and media studies. As an admitted outsider to the fieldof visual studies, I chose to comment on the following statement:
‘‘Visual culture entails a meditation on blindness, the invisible, the unseen, the unseeable, and the overlooked’’ (Mitchell, 2002: 170). In my last book, Sight Unseen, I attempted to show blindness through my own experience, and a survey of representationsof blindness in literature and film.At the same time, I wanted to show seeing, to sketch my understanding of vision, drawn from a lifetime of living among the sighted in this visual culture we share. I started from the premise that the average blind
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person knowsmore about what it means to be sighted than the average sighted person knows aboutwhat itmeans to be blind. The blindgrowup, attend school, and leadadult lives among sighted people. The language we speak, the literature we read, the architecturewe inhabit,were all designedby and for the sighted. If visual studies entails a meditation on
blindness, it ismyhopethat itwill avoidsome of the missteps of similar meditations of the past. Specifically, I hope that visual studies can abandon one of the stock characters of the western philosophical tradition-‘‘the Hypothetical Blind Man’’ (Gitter, 2001: 58). The Hypothetical Blind Man-or the Hypothetical as I will call him for the sake of brevity-has long played a useful, though thankless, role as a prop for theories of consciousness. He is the patient subject of endless thought experiments where the experience of the world through four senses can be compared to the experience of the world through five. He is asked to describe his understanding of specific visual phenomena-perspective, reflection, refraction, color, form recognition-as well as visual aids and enhancementsmirrors, lenses, telescopes, microscopes. He is understood to lead a hermit-like existence, so far at themarginsofhis society, that he has never heard this visual terminology before the philosophers bring it up. Part of the emotional baggage he hauls around with him comes from other cultural representations of blindness, such as Oedipus and the many Biblical figures whose sight is withdrawn by the wrathful God of the Old Testament or restored by the redeemer of the New. His primary function is to highlight the importance of sight and to elicit a frisson of awe and pity which promotes gratitude among the sighted theorists for the vision they possess. I will not attempt to survey every appear-
ance of the Hypothetical throughout the history of philosophy. It is enough to cite a
few of his more memorable performances, and then to suggestwhathappenswhenhe is brought face to facewith actual blind people through their own first-hand, eye-witness accounts. Professor Mitchell alludes to the passages in Descartes’ La Dioptrique where he compares vision to the Hypothetical’s use of sticks to grope his way through space. Descartes’ references to the Hypothetical are confusing and are often conflated by his readers. In one instance, he compares the way the Hypothetical’s stick detects the density and resistance of objects in his path, to the way light acts on objects the eye looks at. In a later passage, Descartes performs a thought experiment, giving the Hypothetical a second stick which he could use to judge the distance between two objects by calculating the angle formed when he touches each object with one of the sticks. Descartes does not explain how the Hypothetical is supposed to make this calculation or how he can avoid running into things while doing so. I doubt that Descartes actually believed that any blind person ever used two sticks in this way. In fact, the image that illustrates his discussion shows the Hypothetical’s dog sound asleep on the ground, indicating that theHypothetical is goingnowhere. Even so, Descartes’ description of the way a blind person uses one stick reflects a basic misunderstanding. He imagines that the blind use the stick to construct a mental image, or its equivalent, of their surroundings, mapping the location of specifically identified objects. In fact, then as now, a stick or cane is a poor tool for this kind ofmental imaging. The stick serves merely to announce the presence of an obstacle, not to determine if it is a rock or a tree root, though there are sound cues-a tap versus a thud-that might help make this distinction. Inmany situations, the cane ismore of an auditory than a tactile tool. It seems that in Descartes’ desire to describe vision as an extension of or hypersensitive form of
touch, he recreates the blind man in his own image, where the eyemust correspond to the hand extended by one or perhaps two sticks. The most detailed depiction of the
Hypothetical came about in 1693, when William Molyneux wrote his famous letter to JohnLocke.Heproposed a thought experiment where a blind man who had learned to recognize geometric forms such as a cube and a sphere by touch, would have his sight restored through an operation. Would he be able to distinguish the two forms merely by looking at them? The Molyneux question continues to be debated today, even though the history of medicine is full of case studies of actual blind people who have had their sight restored by actual operations. Apparently, Molyneux was married to a blind woman, which has always led me to wonder why he did not pose his hypothetical question about her. Perhaps he knew that others would object that marriage to a philosopher might contaminate the experimental data. There was a risk that the philosopher might prime her answers or otherwise rig the results. Certainly in commentary on actual cases of restored sight, debaters of the Molyneux question are quick to disqualify those who were allowed to cast their eyes upon, for instance the faces of loved ones, before directing their gaze at the sphere and the cube. Denis Diderot’s 1749 ‘‘Letter on the Blind
for the Use of Those Who See’’ is generally creditedwithurgingamoreenlightened,and humane attitude toward the blind. His blind man of Puiseaux and Nicholas Saunderson, the English mathematician, were both real rather than hypothetical blind men. As he introduces the man from Puiseaux, Diderot is at pains to supply details of his family history and early life to persuade his reader that this is a real person. Significantly the man from Puiseaux is first encountered helping his young son with his studies,
demonstrating both that he is a loving family man, and capable of intellectual activity. But the questions Diderot poses generally fall under the purview of the Hypothetical. Certainly, many of his remarks help support Descartes’ theory relating vision to touch:
Diderot praises the blind man’s ability to makephilosophical surmises about vision, but does not have a high opinion of blind people’s capacity for empathy:
The phrasing of the question here suggests an afterthought. I imagine Diderot, at his table, conjuring up two men, one pissing, one bleeding. While his visual imagination is practiced inmaking these sorts ofmental images he is less adept at tuning his mind’s ear. He recognizes that for the blood to be spilt at a rate sufficient to create the same sound as the flowing urine, the bleeding man would normally cry out in pain. So he imagines, in effect, a bleedingmute. But he fails to take into account the relative viscosity, not to mention the different odors, of the two fluids. But Diderot cannot think of everything. Now I imagine a blind man wandering
onto the scene. My blind man is not quite the one Diderot imagines. For one thing he is a bit preoccupied; the philosophers
have dropped by again. They talk at him and over his head, bandying about names that are now familiar to him: Locke, Molyneux, Descartes. They question him about his ability to conceptualize various things: windows, mirrors, telescopes-and he responds with the quaint and winsome answers he knows they have come for. Anything to get rid of them. Distracted as he is, the sound of the bleeding mute’s plashing blood registers on his consciousness. Lacking Diderot’s imagination, however, the thought does not occur to him that this sound emanates from a bleedingmute. His reason opts instead for the explanation that the sound comes from some man relieving his bladder-a farmore commonplace phenomenon, especially in the mean streetswhere theblindman resides. It is not that the blind man has no fellow feeling for the mute. Come to think of it, the mute would make a good companion. He could act as a guide and keep an eye out for marauding philosophers, while the blind man could do all the talking. But the blind man does not have enough information to recognize the mute’s dilemma. The only hope for the bleeding mute is to find some way to attract the blind man’s attention, perhapsby throwing something. But surely, such a massive loss of blood must have affectedhis aim.While theblindman, living as he does at the margins of his society, is accustomed to being spurned by local homeowners and merchants who find his presence unsightly, and so might flee the bleeding mute’s missiles without suspecting that his aid is being solicited. The blindman quickens his pace as best
he can. The mute succumbs at last to his mortal wound. And the philosopher shifts to another topic. I am wrong to make fun of Diderot, since
his treatment of blindness was at once far more complex and farmore compassionate than that of other philosophers.And it is not as if his low opinion of the blind’s ability
to empathize with others’ pain has ceased to contribute to attitudes about blindness. Consider this anecdote from recent history. Some weeks after September 11, 2001, the blind musician Ray Charles was interviewed about his rendition of ‘‘America the Beautiful,’’ which received a good deal of air time during the period of heightened patriotism that followed that event. The interviewer, Jim Gray, commented that Charles should consider himself lucky that his blindness prevented him from viewing the images of the World Trade Center’s collapse, and the Pentagon in flames: ‘‘Was this maybe one time in your life where not having the ability to see was a relief?’’ Like Diderot, the interviewer assumed that true horror can only be evinced through the eyes. Many eyewitness accounts of the event however, were strikingly nonvisual. Many people who were in the vicinity of Ground Zero during and soon after the disaster found it hard to put what they saw into words, in part because visibility in the areawasobscuredby smokeandash, and in part because what they were seeing did not correspond to any visual experience for which they had language. People described instead the sound of falling bodies hitting the ground, the smell of the burning jet fuel, and the particular texture of the ankle deep dust that filled the streets. But for the majority of television viewers, eye-witnesses froma distance, those events are recalled as images, indelible, powerful and eloquent. To many, like the reporter interviewing Ray Charles, it is the images rather than the mere fact of the events that produce the emotional response. The assumption seems to be that because the blind are immune to images they must also be immune to the significance of the events, and therefore must be somehow detached from or indifferent to the nation’s collective horror and grief. It is fortunate for anyone interested in
dismantling the image of blindness
fostered by the Hypothetical Blind Man, that we have today a great many first-hand accounts of blindness. In recent decades, memoirs, essays, and other texts by actual blind people attempt to loosen the grip the Hypothetical still seems to hold on the sighted imagination. Thanks to work by disability historians, we are also beginning to have older accounts of blindness drawn from archives of institutions and schools for the blind around the world. One such account is a text written in 1825, by a 22year-old blind French woman named The´re`se-Ade`le Husson. Born in Nancy into a petit bourgeois household, Husson became blind at nine months following a bout of smallpox. Her case attracted the attention of the local gentrywho sponsored a convent education for her, and encouraged her to cultivate her interests in literature and music. At the age of 20 she left home for Paris where she hoped to pursue a literary career. Her first text, ‘‘Reflections on the Moral and Physical Condition of the Blind’’ seems to have been written as a part of her petition for aid from theHoˆpitaldesQuinze-Vingts, an institution that provided shelter and financial support to the indigent blind of Paris. For the most part, her text follows the example of comportment and educational manuals of the time, offering advice to parents and caretakers on the correct way to raise a blind child, and to young blind people themselves on their role in society. It is by turns formulaically obsequious and radically assertive, since she writes from the premise-revolutionary for the timethat her first-hand experience of blindness gives her a level of expertise that equals or surpasses that of the institution’s sighted administrators. While it is unlikely that Husson’s convent education would have exposed her to the work of Descartes or Diderot, she considers some of the same questions previously posed to the Hypothetical. It is possible that the provincial
aristocrats, who took up her education, may have engaged in amateurish philosophizing inher presence. For instance, like Diderot’s blind man of Puiseaux, she prefers her sense of touch to the sight she lacks. She recounts how, at the time of her first communion, her mother promised her a dress made of chiffon, then, either as a joke or in an attempt to economize, purchased cheaper percale instead. When the young Husson easily detected the difference through touch, her mother persisted in her deception, and even brought in neighbor women to corroborate. Whether playing along with the joke, or as a genuine rebuke of her mother’s attempt to deceive her, Husson retorted:
In a later discussion of her ability to recognize household objects through touch, her impatience seems out of proportion, unless we imagine that she frequently found herself the object of philosophical speculation by literal-minded practitioners:
Her emphasis on square versus round objects as well as her tone and her taunt, ‘‘You with the eyes of Argus,’’ suggests an irritation that may come from hearing theMolyneux question one toomany times. She is also arguing against the notion that such words as ‘‘square’’ and ‘‘round’’ designate solely visual phenomena, to which the blind have no access and therefore no right to use these words. Almost a century later, Helen Keller gives
vent to a similar irritation at literal-minded readers. In her 1908 book, The World I Live In, she gives a detailed phenomenological account of her daily experience of deafblindness. Early on, she footnotes her use of the verb ‘‘see’’ in the phrase, ‘‘I was taken to see a woman’’:
Keller makes good use of her Radcliffe education to show that the more one knows about language the harder it is to find vocabulary that does not have some root in sighted or hearing experience. But, she argues, to deny her the use of seeinghearing vocabulary would be to deny her the ability to communicate at all. In their 1995 book,OnBlindness, two phi-
losophers, one sighted and one blind, conduct an epistolary debate thatmight seem to put to rest all the old hypothetical questions. Unfortunately, Martin Milligan, the blind philosopher, died before the discussion was fully underway. If he had lived, we
can assume not only that he and his sighted colleague, Bryan Magee, would have gotten further with their debate, but also that theywouldhaveeditedsometestyquibbles about which terms to use and which translation of Aristotle is more accurate. Milligan, who worked primarily in moral and political philosophy, andwas an activist in blind causes in the United Kingdom, forthrightly resists the impulse to allow the discussion to stray far from the practical and social conditions that affect the lives of real blind people. For instance, he cites an incident from his early life, before he found an academic post, when he was turned down for a job as a telephone typist on a newspaper because the employer assumed that he would not be able to negotiate the stairs in the building. He identifies this as one of thousands of examples of the exaggerated value sighted people place on vision. Any thinking person has to recognize that sight is not required to climbor descend stairs.He asserts that the valueof sightwouldbe that it would allow him tomove around unfamiliar places with greater ease. He concedes that vision might afford him some aesthetic pleasure while viewing a landscape or painting, but insists that he can know what he wants to know about the visible world from verbal descriptions, and that this knowledge is adequate for his needs, and only minimally different from the knowledge of sighted people. He accuses Magee of voicing ‘‘visionist’’—or what I might call ‘‘sightist’’—attitudes that the differences between the sighted and the blind must be almost incomprehensibly vast, and that vision is a fundamental aspect of human existence. Milligan says that these statements seem
This prompts Magee to cite his own early work on race and homosexuality, as proof of his credentials as a liberal humanist. He also speculates, somewhat sulkily, about whether the first 18 months of Milligan’s life when his vision was presumed to be normal, might disqualify him as a spokesman for the blind, since he might retain some vestige of a visual memory from that period. Later, Magee consults with a neurologist who assures him that the loss of sight at such an early age would make Milligan’s brain indistinguishable from that of a person born blind. And so the discussion continues. Along the way, Magee makes some
claims about sight that seem to me to be far from universal. For instance, he states that:
Magee asserts that when sighted people are obliged to keep their eyes closed even for a short time, it induces a kind of panic. To illustrate his point, he notes that a common method of mistreating prisoners is to keep them blindfolded, and this mistreatment can lead them to feel anxious and disoriented. I suspect that his example is influenced by traditional metaphors that equate blindness with a tomb-like imprisonment. Surely a blind prisoner, accustomed to the privation of sight, might still
have similar feelings of anxiety and disorientation, due to the threat, whether stated or implied, of pending bodily harm. To his credit, Magee does allow that
some blind experiences are shared by the sighted.Milligandescribes howmanyblind people negotiate new environments, and can feel the presence of large objects even without touching them as ‘‘atmospherethickening occupants of space.’’ Magee reports that when he
Here, and in a few other places in the correspondence, Magee and Milligan seem to be moving in a new direction. It is not merely that they discover a shared perceptual experience, but one that is not easy to categorize as belonging to one of the five traditional senses.Here, a ‘‘feeling’’ is not the experience of texture or form through physical contact, but an apprehension, of an atmospheric change, experienced
kinesthetically, and by the body as a whole. This seems to point toward a need for a theory of multiple senses where each of the traditional five could be subdivided into a number of discrete sensory activities, which function sometimes in concert with and sometimes in counterpoint to others. Helen Keller identified at least three different aspects of touch that she foundmeaningful: texture, temperature, and vibration. In fact, she understands sound as vibrations that the hearing feel in their ears while the deaf can feel them through other parts of their bodies. Thus she could feel thunder by pressing the palm of her hand against a windowpane, or someone’s footsteps by pressing the soles of her feet against floorboards. What these blind authors have in
common is an urgent desire to represent their experiences of blindness as something besides the absence of sight. Unlike the Hypothetical, they do not feel themselves to be deficient or partial-sighted people minus sight-but whole human beings who have learned to attend to their nonvisual senses in different ways. I have deliberately chosen to limit my discussion here to works by people who became blind very early in life. One of the most striking features of the Hypothetical Blind Man is that he is always assumed to be both totally and congenitally blind. Real blindness, today as in the past, rarely fits this profile. Only about 10-20 percent of people designated as legally blind, in countrieswhere there is suchadesignation, are without any visual perception at all. It is hard to come by statistics on people who are born totally blind, in part because it only becomes an issue when the child, or her parents, seek services for the blind, which tends to occur only when the child reaches school age. We can assume that more infants were born blind in the past, since some of the most prevalent causes of infantile blindnesshavebeeneliminated
by medical innovations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nevertheless, in the past, as now, the leading causes of blindness occur later in life, andoften leave some residual vision. Some may retain the ability to distinguish light from darkness, while others may continue to perceive light, color, form, and movement to some degree. Some people may retain the acuity to read print or facial expressions, while lacking the peripheral vision that facilitates free movement through space. And regardless of the degree or quality of residual vision, blind people differ widely in the ways they attend to, use, or value these perceptions. Althoughthe situationof theHypothetical
is rare, his defenders are quick to discount anyone with any residual sight or with even the remotest possibility of a visual memory. In traditional discussions of blindness, only total, congenital blindness will do. In a review of my book Sight Unseen, Arthur Danto asserted that I had too much sight to claim to be blind (Danto, 1999: 35. He quoted a totally blind graduate student he once knew who said that he could not conceptualize a window, and that he was surprisedwhenhe learned thatwhenaperson’s face is said to glow, it does not in fact emit light like an incandescent light bulb. Danto does not tell us what became of this student or even give his name, using him only as a modern-day version of the Hypothetical. Then he goes on to relate the history of the Molyneux question. If only the totally blind can speak of
blindness with authority, should we make the same restriction on those who talk about vision? Is there such a thing as total vision?Weknowthat a visualacuityof 20/20 is merely average vision. There are individuals whose acuity measures better than 20/20, 20/15 or even 20/10. Such individuals can read every line of the familiar Snellan eye chart, or, as in the case of Ted Williams, can read the print on a baseball
whizzing toward their bat at a speed close to 90 miles per hour. How many scholars of visual culture, I wonder but won’t ask, can claim such a level of visual acuity? What visual studies can bring to these
discussions is an interrogation of the binary opposition between blindness and sight. It is clearly more useful to think in terms of a spectrum of variation in visual acuity, as well as a spectrum of variation in terms of visual awareness or skill. The visual studies scholar, highly skilled in understanding images, who loses some or even all her sight, will not lose the ability to analyze images and to communicate her observations. In his essay, ‘‘Showing Seeing,’’ W. J. T. Mitchell describes a classroom exercise where students display or perform some feature of visual culture as if to an audience that has no experience of visual culture. The exercise assumes that some students will be better at the task, while others might improve their performance with practice, and in all cases their aptitude would have little, if anything, to dowith their visual acuity. Theskill, as Iunderstand it, is in the telling asmuch as it is in the seeing-the ability to translate images in all their complexity and resonance into words. And as we move beyond the simple
blindness versus sight binary, I hope we can also abandon the cliche´s that use the word ‘‘blindness’’ as a synonym for inattention, ignorance, or prejudice. If the goal is for others to see what we mean it helps to say what we mean. Using the word in this way seems a vestigial homage to the Hypothetical, meant to stir the same uncanny frisson of awe and pity. It contributes on some level to the perception of blindness as a tragedy too dire to contemplate, which contributes in turn to lowered expectations among those who educate and employ the blind. It also contributes to the perception among the newly blind themselves that the only response to their new condition is to retire from view.
