How Do Blind People “See”?

The Issue of New Visibility and Reproduction of the Field of Social “Seeing” in Blind People as “Visual Subjects” in the Perspective of Visual Culture Studies

Abstract

The paper deals with the issues of new visibility and reproduction of the field of social “seeing” in blind people as “visual subjects” in the perspective of Visual Culture Studies. Taking an assumption that visual culture entails considerations on blindness, the invisible, the unseen, and the unseeable in social perspective, the author tracks the ways in which the blind function as visual subjects in a visual society, i.e., people who are constituted as an active social agent of sight (regardless of his or her biological capacity to see) and as the effect of a series of categories of visual subjects. In this context, Nicholas Mirzoeff refers to the example of the blind, who became an object of social state concern at the beginning of the panoptic era, leading to the establishment of state institutions for the blind. Panopticism created the blind as what has now become a “natural” target of social and state and concern precisely because “seeing” and “being seen” has become problematic in the concern of the disciplinary nation-state. In his essay The Question of Cultural Identity, Stuart Hall distinguishes three types of subjects: the enlightenment, sociological, and postmodern. The reference to the rational subject also applies to the blind. Mitchell mentions René Descartes’s Optics, in which the philosopher considered sight an “extended form of touch,” comparing it to “a staff used by the blind” to strengthen the path in real space. Similarly, in the perspective of the postmodern subject, it is worth recalling Paul Virilio’s model of “sightless vision” – the reproduction of an intense blindness that is the last form of the “industrialisation of the non-gaze” by “the vision machines.” Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the fractal subject proves that the life of the blind is “the social construction of vision.” The visual subject that we find in the concept of biopictures by W.J.T. Mitchell leads us to the conclusion that images can be created in a way like creating images of an object, by feeling them in the imagination of blind people. Nicholas Mirzoeff suggests an introduction to the term “visual event” instead of the concept of “visual subject,” which is generated in an interface with visual technology on computer-mediated communication process, in which blind people can be also participated. Finally, The Passing by Bill Viola has been interpreted in the context of internal images. It is difficult not to recall this concept when talking about pictures that are the result of the blind “seeing.” The images generated by the “mind’s eye” come from dreams, memories, images, and imaginations in which we see ourselves, but from the observer’s point of view as a blind person. Viola assigns this function of internal images to the video camera which acts as a tool of awareness as it becomes a reflection of our “I.” According to Viola, one can describe the dynamics of consciousness, which at one end places external images (also perceived by the blind) and internal images (states of feelings, emotions, dreams, and the social effects of “seeing”).