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Works Cited

Arnold, Th

omas. 1894. Th

e Language of the Senses with Special Reference to the Education of the Deaf, Blind, Deaf & Blind.

Margate, England: Keble’s Gazette.

Berger, Maurice. 1989. Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s. New York. Harper and Row.

Bourdon, Sébastien. 1740. “Seventh Conference.” In [Anon.] 1740 Seven Conference Held in the King of France’s Cabinet of

Paintings. London: T. Cooper.

Canguilhem, Georges. 1991 [1966]. Th

e Normal and the Pathological. Trans. Caroyn R. Fawcettt. New York. Zone.

Couétoux, L. and Hamon de Fougeray. 1886. Manuel pratique des méthodes d’enseignement spéciales aux enfants anormaux

(sourds-muets, aveugles, idiots, bégues, etc.). Paris: Félix Alcan.

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Denis, Th

éophile. 1895. “Les Artistes sourds-muets au Salon de 1886.” In Etudes variées concernant les sourds-muets. Histoire—

Biographie—Beaux-arts. Paris: Imprimérie de la Revue Francaise de l’Enseignement de Sourds-muets.

De Man, Paul. 1983. Blindness and Insight. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Memoirs of the Blind: Th

e Self Portrait and Other Ruins. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas.

Chicago. Chicago University Press.

Diderot, Denis. 1975–. Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Hermann. 25 vols.

Dryden, John. 1695. De Arte Graphica: Th

e Art of Painting by C. A. du Fresnoy. London. J. Hepinstall.

Fried, Michael. 1983. Absorption and Th

eatricality. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Fry, Edward F. with Donald P. Kuspit. 1986. Robert Morris: Works of the Eighties. Chicago. Museum of Contemporary Art.

Gautier, Th

éophile. 1856. “Du Beau dans l’Art.” In L’Art moderne. Paris: Michel Levy.

Haworth-Booth, Mark. 1987. Paul Strand. New York: Aperture.

Josephs, Herbert. 1969. Diderot’s Dialogue of Language and Gesture: Le Neveu de Rameau. Columbus: Ohio University Press.

Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillipe. 1989. Typography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

La Lumière Observations. An II. Anon. Observations pour les aveugles de l’Hôpital des Quinze-Vingts sur le project décret du

comité de secours de la Convention Nationale pour la suppression de cet hopital, Paris: J. Grand.

Paulson, William R. 1987. Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Blind in France. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Taussig, Michael. 1993a. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge.

Vigée Lebrun, Elizabeth. 1989. Memoirs of Madame Vigée Lebrun. New York: George Braziller [1903].

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Blindness and Visual Culture

An Eye Witness Account

Georgina Kleege

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 off ers a series of defi nitions of the emergent fi eld of visual studies,

distinguishing it from the more established disciplines of art history, aesthetics and media studies.

As an admitted outsider to the fi eld of visual studies, I chose to comment on the following state-

ment: “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 representations of blindness in literature and fi lm. 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 person knows more about what it means to be sighted than the average sighted person knows

about what it means to be blind. Th

e blind grow up, attend school, and lead adult lives among sighted

people. Th

e language we speak, the literature we read, the architecture we inhabit, were all designed

by and for the sighted.

If visual studies entails a meditation on blindness, it is my hope that it will avoid some of the mis-

steps of similar meditations of the past. Specifi cally, I hope that visual studies can abandon one of the

stock characters of the western philosophical tradition—“the Hypothetical Blind Man” (Gitter 2001,

58). Th

e 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 fi ve. He is asked to describe his understanding

of specifi c visual phenomena—perspective, refl ection, refraction, color, form recognition—as well as

visual aids and enhancements—mirrors, lenses, telescopes, microscopes. He is understood to lead a

hermit-like existence, so far at the margins of his society, that he has never heard this visual termi-

nology 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 fi gures

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 appearance of the Hypothetical throughout the history of philoso-

phy. It is enough to cite a few of his more memorable performances, and then to suggest what happens

when he is brought face-to-face with actual blind people through their own fi rst-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’s references to

the Hypothetical are confusing and are oft en confl ated 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

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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 the Hypothetical is going nowhere. Even so, Descartes’

description of the way a blind person uses one stick refl ects a basic misunderstanding. He imagines

that the blind use the stick to construct a mental image, or its equivalent, of their surroundings, map-

ping the location of specifi cally identifi ed objects. In fact, then as now, a stick or cane is a poor tool for

this kind of mental imaging. Th

e 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. In many situations, the cane is more 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 eye must correspond to the hand extended

by one or perhaps two sticks.

e most detailed depiction of the Hypothetical came about in 1693, when William Molyneux

wrote his famous letter to John Locke. He proposed 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? Th

e 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. Th

ere 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 Th

ose Who See” is generally credited with

urging a more enlightened, 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. Signifi cantly, the man from Puiseaux

is fi rst 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 pervu of the Hypothetical. Certainly, many of his remarks help support Descartes’ theory relating

vision to touch:

One of our company thought to ask our blind man if he would like to have eyes. “If it were not for

curiosity,” he replied, “I would just as soon have long arms: it seems to me my hands would tell me

more of what goes on in the moon than your eyes or your telescopes.” (Diderot 1999, 153)

Diderot praises the blind man’s ability to make philosophical surmises about vision, but does not have

a high opinion of blind people’s capacity for empathy:

As of all the external signs which raise our pity and ideas of pain the blind are aff ected only by cries, I

have in general no high thought of their humanity. What diff erence is there to a blind man between a

man making water and one bleeding in silence? (Diderot 1999, 156)

e phrasing of the question here suggests an aft erthought. I imagine Diderot, at his table, conjuring

up two men, one pissing, one bleeding. While his visual imagination is practiced in making these

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Blindness and Visual Culture

sorts of mental images, he is less adept at tuning his mind’s ear. He recognizes that for the blood to

be spilt at a rate suffi

cient to create the same sound as the fl owing urine, the bleeding man would

normally cry out in pain. So he imagines, in eff ect, a bleeding mute. But he fails to take into account

the relative viscosity, not to mention the diff erent odors, of the two fl uids. 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. Th

ey talk

at him and over his head, bandying about names that are now familiar to him: Locke, Molyneux,

Descartes. Th

ey 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 bleeding mute. His reason opts instead for the explanation

that the sound comes from some man relieving his bladder—a far more commonplace phenomenon,

especially in the means streets where the blind man 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. Th

e only hope

for the bleeding mute is to fi nd some way to attract the blind man’s attention, perhaps by throwing

something. But surely, such a massive loss of blood must have aff ected his aim. While the blind man,

living as he does at the margins of his society, is accustomed to being spurned by local homeowners

and merchants who fi nd his presence unsightly, and so might fl ee the bleeding mute’s missiles without

suspecting that his aid is being solicited.

e blind man quickens his pace as best he can. Th

e mute succumbs at last to his mortal wound.

And the philosopher shift s to another topic.

I am wrong to make fun of Diderot, since his treatment of blindness was at once far more complex

and far more 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 aft er 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. Th

e 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 fl ames: “Was this

maybe one time in your life where not having the ability to see was a relief?” Like Diderot, the inter-

viewer 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 aft er the disaster found it hard to put what they saw into words, in part because

visibility in the area was obscured by smoke and ash, 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 fi lled the streets. But for the majority of television viewers, eye-witnesses

from a 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. Th

e assumption seems to be that because the blind are immune to

images they must also be immune to the signifi cance of the events, and therefore must be somehow

detached from or indiff erent to the nation’s collective horror and grief.

It is fortunate for anyone interested in dismantling the image of blindness fostered by the Hypotheti-

cal Blind Man that we have today a great many fi rst-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. Th

anks to work by disability historians, we are also

beginning to have older accounts of blindness drawn from archives of institutions and schools for the

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blind around the world. One such account is a text written in 1825, by a twenty-two-year-old blind

French woman named Th

érèse-Adèle Husson. Born in Nancy into a petit bourgeois household, Hus-

son became blind at nine months following a bout of smallpox. Her case attracted the attention of the

local gentry who sponsored a convent education for her, and encouraged her to cultivate her interests

in literature and music. At the age of twenty she left home for Paris where she hoped to pursue a lit-

erary career. Her fi rst text, “Refl ections on the Moral and Physical Condition of the Blind” seems to

have been written as a part of her petition for aid from the Hôpital des Quinze-Vingts, an institution

that provided shelter and fi nancial support to the indigent blind of Paris. For the most part, her text

follows the example of comportment and educational manuals of the time, off ering 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 time—that her fi rst-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

in her 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 fi rst communion, her mother promised her a

dress made of chiff on, then, either as a joke or in an attempt to economize, purchased cheaper percale

instead. When the young Husson easily detected the diff erence 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:

I prefer my touch to your eyes, because it allows me to appreciate things for what they really are,

whereas it seems to me that your sight fools you now and then, for this is percale and not chiff on.

(Husson 2001, 25)

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:

We know full well that a chest of drawers is square, but more long than tall. Again I hear my readers

ask what is a square object! I am accommodating enough to satisfy all their questions. Th

erefore, I

would say to them that it is easy enough to know the diff erence between objects by touching them,

for not all of them have the same shape. For example, a dinner plate, a dish, a glass can’t begin to be

compared with a chest of drawers, for the fi rst two are round, while the other is hollow; but people

will probably point out that it is only aft er having heard the names of the articles that I designate that

it became possible for me to acquire the certainty that they were hollow, round, square. I will admit

that they are right, but tell me, you with the eyes of Argus, if you had never heard objects described,

would you be in any better position to speak of them than I? (Husson 2001, 41)

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 the Molyneux question one too many

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, Th

e World I Live In, she gives a detailed phenomenological account of her daily

experience of deaf-blindness. Early on, she footnotes her use of the verb “see” in the phrase, “I was

taken to see a woman”:

e excellent proof-reader has put a query to my use of the word “see.” If I had said “visit,” he would

have asked no questions, yet what does “visit” mean but “see” (visitare)? Later I will try to defend myself

for using as much of the English language as I have succeeded in learning. (Keller 2003, 19)

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Keller makes good use of her Radcliff e education to show that the more one knows about language

the harder it is to fi nd vocabulary that does not have some root in sighted or hearing experience.

But, she argues, to deny her the use of seeing-hearing vocabulary would be to deny her the ability to

communicate at all.

In their 1995 book, On Blindness, two philosophers, one sighted and one blind, conduct an epis-

tolary debate that might 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 they would have edited some testy quibbles about which terms to use and

which translation of Aristotle is more accurate. Milligan, who worked primarily in moral and politi-

cal philosophy, and was 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 aff ect 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 identifi es 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 climb or descend stairs. He asserts that the value of sight

would be that it would allow him to move around unfamiliar places with greater ease. He concedes

that vision might aff ord 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 diff erent from the knowledge of sighted

people. He accuses Magee of voicing “visionist”—or what I might call “sightist”—attitudes that the

diff erences 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

to express the passion, the zeal of a missionary preaching to the heathen in outer darkness. Only, of

course, your “gospel” isn’t “good” news to us heathens, for the message seems to be that ours is a “dark-

ness” from which we can never come in—not the darkness of course that sighted people can know, but

the darkness of never being able to know that darkness, or of bridging the vast gulf that separates us

from those who do. (Magee and Milligan 1995, 46)

is 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 fi rst eighteen 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:

By the sighted, seeing is felt as a need. And it is the feeding of this almost ungovernable craving that

constitutes the ongoing pleasure of sight. It is as if we were desperately hungry all the time, in such a

way that only if we were eating all the time could we be content—so we eat all the time. (Magee and

Milligan 1995, 104)

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 infl uenced 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.

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To his credit, Magee does allow that some blind experiences are shared by the sighted. Milligan

describes how many blind people negotiate new environments, and can feel the presence of large

objects even without touching them as “atmosphere-thickening occupants of space.” Magee reports

that when he

was a small child I had a vivid nonvisual awareness of the nearness of material objects. I would walk

confi dently along a pitch black corridor in a strange house and stop dead a few inches short of a closed

door, and then put out my hand to grope for the knob. If I woke up in the dark in a strange bedroom

and wanted to get to a light-switch on the opposite side of the room I could usually circumnavigate the

furniture in between, because I could “feel” where the larger objects in the room were. I might knock

small things over, but would almost invariably “feel” the big ones. I say “feel” because the sensation, which

I can clearly recall, was as of a feeling-in-the-air with my whole bodily self. Your phrase “atmosphere-

thickening occupants of space” describes the apprehension exactly. I suddenly “felt” a certain thickness

in the air at a certain point relative to myself in the blackness surrounding me. . . . Th

is illustrates your

point that the blind develop potentialities that the sighted have also been endowed with but do not

develop because they have less need of them. (Magee and Milligan 1995, 97–98)

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 fi ve traditional senses. Here, a “feeling” is not the experi-

ence of texture or form through physical contact, but an apprehension, of an atmospheric change,

experienced kinesthetically, and by the body as a whole. Th

is seems to point toward a need for a theory

of multiple senses where each of the traditional fi ve could be subdivided into a number of discrete

sensory activities, which function sometimes in concert with and sometimes in counterpoint to oth-

ers. Helen Keller identifi ed at least three diff erent aspects of touch that she found meaningful: 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. Th

us 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 fl oorboards.

What these blind authors have in common is an urgent desire to represent their experiences of blind-

ness as something besides the absence of sight. Unlike the Hypothetical, they do not feel themselves

to be defi cient or partial—sighted people minus sight—but whole human beings who have learned

to attend to their nonvisual senses in diff erent 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 fi ts this profi le. Only about 10–20 percent of people designated

as legally blind, in countries where there is such a designation, 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 blindness have been eliminated by medical innovations in the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nevertheless, in the past, as now, the leading causes of blindness

occur later in life, and oft en 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 diff er widely in the ways they attend to, use or value these perceptions.

Although the situation of the Hypothetical 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

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he was surprised when he learned that when a person’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. He then 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? We know that a visual acuity of

20/20 is merely average vision. Th

ere 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 ninety

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. Th

e 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 in which students display or perform some feature of

visual culture as if to an audience that has no experience of visual culture. Th

e 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 do with their visual acuity. Th

e skill,

as I understand it, is in the telling as much 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

clichés 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.

I will leave you with a futuristic image of blindness. In Deborah Kendrick’s story, “20/20 with a

Twist,” Mary Seymour, chief administrator of the department of visual equality, looks back on her

life from the year 2020. In this blind Utopia, the major handicaps of blindness have been eliminated;

private automobiles were phased out a decade earlier and technologies to convert print to Braille or

voice had become ubiquitous and transparent. Of course, Mary refl ects, it was not always like this. Back

in the dark ages of the 1980s and ’90s, Braille profi ciency had ceased to be a requirement for teachers

of blind children, Braille production facilities and radio reading services were shut down, and blind

children were no longer being educated at all. Mary and other blind people who had grown up in an

earlier, slightly more enlightened period, banded together to lead a nonviolent, visionary rebellion

to bring down the oppressive regime. Th

ey tampered with the power supply—since darkness is no

impediment to blind activity—scrambled computer transmissions and disrupted television broadcasts.

All across the country, television screens went blank while the audio continued, interrupted periodi-

cally by the revolutionary message: “You, too, can function without pictures.”

e rebel leaders were captured, however, and forced to undergo implantation of optic sensors,

which, the captors reasoned, would transform them into sighted people who would see the error of

their ways and abandon the cause. But the rebels persisted. Th

e power supply was shut down com-

pletely. Th

e government fell, and the captured leaders were liberated in triumph.

Signifi cantly, the optic sensors did not transform the revolutionary leaders into sighted people.

Rather, each acquired only a facet of visual experience. One gained the ability to perceive color. Another

developed a sort of telepathic vision, allowing him to form images of places at great distances. Mary’s

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398

sensor gave her a kind of literal hindsight, making her able to create a detailed mental picture of a room,

only aft er she had left it. Th

ese bits and pieces of vision serve as a badge of the former rebels’ heroic

past, and allow them to perform entertaining parlor tricks, but are otherwise easy to disregard.

is is a far cry from the Hypothetical. In Deborah Kendrick’s image of the future, blindness is a

simple physical characteristic rather than an ominous mark of otherness. If the Hypothetical Blind

Man once helped thinkers form ideas about human consciousness surely his day is done. He does too

much damage hanging around. It is time to let him go. Rest in peace.

References

Charles, Ray. Interview. Th

e Today Show. NBC Television, October 4, 2001.

Danto, Arthur. 1999. “Blindness and Sight.” Th

e New Republic 220 (16):34–36.

Diderot, Denis. 1999. Th

oughts on the interpretation of Nature and other philosophical works. Ed. David Adams. Manchester:

Clinaman Press.

Gitter, Elisabeth. 2001. Th

e Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, the Original Deaf-blind Girl. New York:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Husson, Th

érèse-Adèle. 2001. Refl ections: Th

e Life and Writing of a Young Blind Woman in Post-revolutionary France. Eds.

Catherine J. Kudlick and Zina Weygand. New York and London: New York University Press.

Keller, Helen. 2003. Th

e World I Live In. Ed. Roger Shattuck. New York: New York Review Books.

Kendrick, Deborah. 1987. 20/20 with a Twist. In With Wings: An Anthology of Literature by and about Women with Disabilities,

eds. Marsha Saxton and Florence Howe New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York.

Magee, Bryan and Milligan, Martin. 1995. On Blindness. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Mitchell, W. J. T. 2002. “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture.” Journal of Visual Culture 1 (2):165–181.

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399

Disability, Life Narrative, and Representation

G. Thomas Couser

Disability is an inescapable element of human existence and experience. Although it is as fundamen-

tal an aspect of human diversity as race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, it is rarely acknowledged

as such. Th

is is odd, because in practice disability oft en trumps other minority statuses. Th

at is, for

people who diff er from the hegemonic identity in more than one way, certain impairments—such as

blindness or deafness—may function as their primary defi ning characteristic, their “master status.”

In this sense, disability may be more fundamental than racial, ethnic, and gender distinctions. Yet

until the recent advent of Disability Studies, it escaped the critical scrutiny, theoretical analysis, and

recognition accorded other forms of human variation.

At the same time, disability has had a remarkably high profi le in both high and popular culture,

both of which are pervaded with images of disability. Unlike other marginalized groups, then, dis-

abled people have been hyper-represented in mainstream culture; they have not been disregarded so

much as they have been subjected to objectifying notice in the form of mediated staring. To use an

economic metaphor that is a literal truth, disability has been an extremely valuable cultural commodity

for thousands of years. Th

e cultural representation of disability has functioned at the expense of dis-

abled people, in part because they have rarely controlled their own images. In the last several decades,

however, this situation has begun to change, most notably in life writing, especially autobiography: in

late twentieth century life writing, disabled people have initiated and controlled their own narratives

in unprecedented ways and to an extraordinary degree.

Indeed, one of the most signifi cant developments—if not the most signifi cant development—in life

writing in North America over the last three decades has been the proliferation of book-length accounts

(from both fi rst- and third-person points of view) of living with illness and disability. Whereas in the

1970s it was diffi

cult to fi nd any representation of most disabling conditions in life writing, today one

can fi nd multiple representations of many conditions. Equally signifi cant, and more remarkable, one

can fi nd autobiographical accounts of conditions that would seem to preclude fi rst-person testimony

altogether—for example, autism, locked-in syndrome, and early Alzheimer’s disease.

A comprehensive history of disability life writing has yet to be written, but it is safe to say that

there was not much in the way of published autobiographical literature before World War II. War both

produces and valorizes certain forms of disability; not surprisingly, then, disabled veterans produced

a substantial number of narratives aft er the war. Polio generated even more narratives; indeed, polio

may be the fi rst disability to have engendered its own substantial autobiographical literature (Wilson).

In the 1980s and 1990s, HIV/AIDS and breast cancer provoked signifi cant numbers of narratives;

many of these challenge cultural scripts of the conditions (such as that AIDS is an automatic death

sentence or that breast cancer negates a woman’s sexuality [Couser 1997]). A dramatic example of

the generation of autobiographical literature devoted to a particular condition is the advent of auto-

biographies by people with autism (sometimes referred to as “autiebiographies”). Before 1985 these

were virtually nonexistent; since 1985, nearly one hundred have been produced. (Th

is number does

not include the many narratives written by parents of autistic children.) Th

us, one major post-World

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400

War II cultural phenomenon was the generation of large numbers of narratives about a small number

of conditions.

A complementary phenomenon has been the production of small numbers of narratives about a

large number of conditions, some quite rare and some only recently recognized. Among these condi-

tions are ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), Alzheimer’s, aphasia, Asperger’s syndrome, asthma,

cerebral palsy, chronic fatigue syndrome, cystic fi brosis, diabetes, disfi gurement, Down syndrome,

epilepsy, locked-in syndrome, multiple sclerosis, obesity, obsessive-compulsive disorder, stuttering,

stroke, and Tourette syndrome. As the twentieth century drew to a close, then, many disabilities came

out of the closet into the living room of life writing.

Like life writing by other marginalized groups—women, African Americans, and gays and les-

bian—life writing by disabled people is a cultural manifestation of a human rights movement; sig-

nifi cantly, the rise in personal narratives of disability has roughly coincided with the disability rights

movement, whose major legal manifestation in the United States is the Americans with Disabilities

Act, which was passed in 1990 (but which, some would argue, has never been fully implemented).

e fi rst fl owering of disability autobiography is also part of a disability renaissance involving other

arts and media. Disability autobiography should be seen, then, not as spontaneous “self-expression”

but as a response—indeed a retort—to the traditional misrepresentation of disability in Western

culture generally.

is rich body of narrative can be approached in a number of ways. One way of getting at the relation

between somatic variation and life narrative is through an everyday phenomenon: the way deviations

from bodily norms oft en provoke a demand for explanatory narrative in everyday life. Whereas the

unmarked case—the “normal” body—can pass without narration, the marked case—the scar, the limp,

the missing limb, or the obvious prosthesis—calls for a story. Entering new situations, or re-entering

familiar ones, people with anomalous bodies are oft en called upon to account for them, sometimes

quite explicitly: they may be asked, “What happened to you”? Or, worse, they may be addressed as

if their stories are already known. Evidence of this is necessarily anecdotal. Let one compelling ex-

ample suffi

ce. Harriet McBryde Johnson, a Charleston lawyer and disability rights advocate who has

a congenital muscle-wasting disease, reports remarks made by strangers she encounters on the street

as she drives her power chair to the offi

ce:

“I admire you for being out: most people would give up.”

“God bless you! I’ll pray for you.”

“You don’t let the pain hold you back, do you?”

“If I had to live like you, I think I’d kill myself.” (2)

One of the social burdens of disability, then, is that it exposes aff ected individuals to inspection, inter-

rogation, interpretation, and violation of privacy.

In eff ect, people with extraordinary bodies are held responsible for them, in two senses. First, they

are required to account for them, oft en to complete strangers; second, the expectation is that their ac-

counts will serve to relieve their auditors’ discomfort. Th

e elicited narrative is expected to conform to,

and thus confi rm, a cultural script. For example, people diagnosed with lung cancer or HIV/AIDS are

expected to admit to behaviors that have induced the condition in question—to acknowledge having

brought it upon themselves. Th

us, one fundamental connection between life narrative and somatic

anomaly is that to have certain conditions is to have one’s life written for one. For people with many

disabilities, culture inscribes narratives on their bodies, willy nilly.

Disability autobiographers typically begin from a position of marginalization, belatedness, and pre-

inscription. Yet one can see why autobiography is a particularly important form of life writing about

disability: written from inside the experience in question, it involves self-representation by defi nition

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401

Disability, Life Narrative, and Representation

and thus off ers the best-case scenario for revaluation of that condition. Long the objects of others’

classifi cation and examination, disabled people have only recently assumed the initiative in repre-

senting themselves; in disability autobiography particularly, disabled people counter their historical

subjection by occupying the subject position. In approaching this literature, then, one should attend

to the politics and ethics of representation, for the “representation” of disability in such narratives is

a political as well as a mimetic act—a matter of speaking for as well as speaking about.

With particularly severe or debilitating conditions, particularly those aff ecting the mind or the

ability to communicate, the very existence of fi rst-person narratives makes its own point: that people

with condition “X” are capable of self-representation. Th

e autobiographical act models the agency

and self-determination that the disability rights movement has fought for, even or especially when

the text is collaboratively produced. One notable example is Count Us In: Growing Up with Down

Syndrome, a collaborative narrative by two young men with the syndrome in question. Not only is

the title cast in the imperative mood—“count us in”—the subtitle puns on “up” and “down,” a bit of

verbal play that challenges conventional ideas about mental retardation, such as that those with it

never really mature. Autobiography, then, can be an especially powerful medium in which disabled

people can demonstrate that they have lives, in defi ance of others’ common sense perceptions of

them. Indeed, disability autobiography is oft en in eff ect a post-colonial, indeed an anti-colonial,

phenomenon, a form of autoethnography, as Mary Louise Pratt has defi ned it: “instances in which

colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with [read: contest] the

colonizer’s own terms” (7).

People with disabilities have become increasingly visible in public spaces and open about their

disabilities. But their physical presence in public life represents only a rather limited kind of access.

Properly conceived and carried out (admittedly, a large qualifi er), life narrative can provide the public

with controlled access to lives that might otherwise remain opaque or exotic to them. Further, much

disability life writing can be approached as “quality-of-life” writing because it addresses questions

discussed under that rubric in philosophy, ethics, and especially biomedical ethics. It should be re-

quired reading, then, for citizens in a world with enormous technological capability to sustain life and

repair bodies in the case of acute illness and injury but with very little commitment to accommodate

and support chronic disability. Because disability life narratives can counter the too oft en moralizing,

objectifying, pathologizing, and marginalizing representations of disability in contemporary culture,

they off er an important, if not unique, entree for inquiry into one of the fundamental aspects of hu-

man diversity.

Works Cited

Couser, G. Th

omas. Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1997.

Johnson, Harriet McBryde. Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a Life. New York: Henry Holt, 2005.

Kingsley, Jason and Mitchell Levitz. Count Us In: Growing Up with Down Syndrome. New York: Harcourt, 1994.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Wilson, Daniel J. “Covenants of Work and Grace: Th

emes of Recovery and Redemption in Polio Narratives.” Literature and

Medicine 13, 1 (Spring 1994): 22–41.

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