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First published August 2005

Blindness and Visual Culture: An Eyewitness Account

Georgina KleegeView all authors and affiliations
Volume 4, Issue 2
https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412905054672

Abstract

This essay comments on W.J.T. Mitchell’s statement that ‘Visual culture entails a meditation on blindness, the invisible, the unseen, the unseeable, and the overlooked’. If visual studies entails a meditation on blindness, it is this article’s hope that it will avoid some of the missteps of similar meditations of the past. Specifically, it hopes that visual studies can abandon one of the stock characters of the western philosophical tradition: the ‘Hypothetical Blind Man’, who serves as a prop for theories about consciousness. This figure is considered briefly in the theories of Descartes, Locke and Diderot, then it is compared with first-hand accounts of blindness from the autobiographies of blind people written in the 19th and 20th centuries.

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Published In

Volume 4, Issue 2
Pages: 179 - 190
Article first published: August 2005
Issue published: August 2005

Keywords

  1. blind autobiography
  2. blindness
  3. Denis Diderot
  4. disability studies
  5. Helen Keller
  6. philosophy of perception
  7. visual culture

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