ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a couple of representations from 1891 and shows that the normative positivisms of Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blind are such that, although blindness is explicit in the title and the dramatis personae, vision is the play's dominant theme. Cultural Disability Studies in Education (CDSE) discourse might critique how the audience is 'made to concentrate on one particular aspect of blindness – the helplessness that it induces in sufferers, and their resulting feelings of anxiety and distress'. When engaging with CDSE one of the many fields and disciplines on which tutors and students can draw is aesthetics, roughly defined as the study of beauty and the sublime. The anti-cripistemic dimensions of dominant normative positivisms endorse a related notion of social aesthetics. The dominance of normative positivisms is at its strongest in relation to how the blind characters interact with each other.
