Abstract
Western society associates knowledge with vision while affiliating blindness with ignorance. Following critical disability studies and drawing upon non-structured interview data and ethnographic observations with visually disabled people, the article opposes this idea by examining how blind assemblages construct knowledge and highlight its heterogeneous and dynamic character, usually obscured by visual shortcuts. After discussing how the research participants encounter discourses devaluating knowledge not based primarily on vision, the article focuses on divisive practices that lead to the construction of dis/ability and ab/normality, and how they can be revised by conceiving knowledge, senses and dis/ability as assemblages. The heterogeneous and dynamic character of knowledge, which the text argues for, defies perceiving blindness as a deficit and blurs the divisions between the self and the other as well as the sighted and the blind since knowledge is produced collectively.
Introduction: The dominance of vision in Western societies
I am obsessed with travelling. I’ve loved travelling ever since I was little when I used to travel a lot with my parents. They had this superb idea that while I could see, I should see as much as possible. So, they took me to Morocco, China and Israel. We cruised around Europe a lot – London, Paris . . . They tried to show me as many places as they could. They infected me, and now I love to travel. But people keep asking me, ‘What do you get out of it? You know, . . . why do you travel?’
(Interview, 22 September 2014)
Eva, who is visually disabled, 1 loves to travel because she can experience different cultures, taste foreign food, meet new people, visit festivals, enjoy the sea breeze and much more. Her experiences are not much different from those of a sighted person, which are not based solely on visual perceptions (Richards et al., 2010). When comparing travelling to when she was able to see, Eva says that ‘visual perceptions do not seem that crucial’ (Eva, interview, 22 September 2014). Still, people ask Eva, with astonishment, why she travels. Why is this? Why do they wonder what she gains from it?
Vision is regarded as central to experience. Perception studies have been vastly vision-centric, claiming that ‘one can learn everything that can be learned about perception in general by studying vision’ (Stokes & Biggs, 2015, p. 350). Studies of memory also express this dominance – more research is conducted on vision than other sensory modalities (Gallace & Spence, 2014, p. 112). Hutmacher (2019) notices that textbooks on perception or cognitive psychology allocate more space to vision than other modalities as they perceive it to be the most complex and highly developed sense. Although some recent studies criticize such vision-centrism and are attentive to the diversity of perceptual objects, this dominance is still present, as Stokes and Biggs (2015) note. Scientific vision-centrism corresponds to general thinking about sight: most people put vision first when asked about their experience with objects and fear losing the sight modality most (Hutmacher, 2019). This interlinking creates a vicious circle in which scientific discourse reflects and strengthens the prevalent perception; subsequently, people are taught that vision is the most important of all senses.
Since ancient Greece, the dominance of vision has been interconnected with knowledge. The history of knowledge is the history of understanding and privileging the epistemological nobility of light and vision – a long tradition most conspicuously visible in the ancient Greek culture of light (Schillmeier, 2010, p. 93). Schillmeier (2010) goes back to Plato and his legacy, according to which blindness ‘allows neither “seeing as thinking” nor “seeing as sensing”’ (p. 57). To reach the truth, Plato’s philosophical approach required the purification of things by dismissing the empirical, which is lost in the multiple. According to him, ‘Neither philosophers nor politicians should be blind since the blind are not able to grasp the One, the idea of things, but “wander in the region of the many and variable”’ (Plato, 2000 in Schillmeier, 2010, p. 48). In sum, Greek philosophy associates blindness with ignorance and non-knowledge. This is also present in the Aristotelian hierarchy of senses favouring sight, hearing and smell, and related to humanity, over touch and taste, regarded as animal senses (Richards et al., 2010, p. 1099).
The alliance of sight/vision and knowledge fully developed with the Enlightenment and its empirical means to see the truth. According to John Locke, ‘sight is the least imperfect of all senses’ in accessing knowledge (Schillmeier, 2010, p. 86), although every representation is necessarily blurred. Moreover, the development of modern science was based to a huge extent on optical machines (Sober, 2010), and the dominance of vision has permeated both the natural and social sciences. The project of modernity is intertwined with the visible, where humans are both the object and the subject of knowledge (Foucault, 1995). Therefore, a lack of sensory skills leads to a lack of full understanding (Schillmeier, 2010, p. 87). Vision-centrism in Western societies is becoming even stronger today, as people are surrounded by visual images and technologies as never before (Mukherjee, 2015).
Critical disability studies as analytical tool
To challenge the discourse associating sight with knowledge and blindness with ignorance, experienced also by visually disabled people in my study based in the Czech Republic, I turn to critical disability studies (CDS). The history of CDS dates back to the beginning of this century and advances political and intellectual reconsiderations of the existing paradigms and frameworks surrounding disability. Drawing on the Frankfurt School’s critical legacy and reflecting current developments in disability studies and its founding principles, CDS investigate opportunities for political, economic and social change (Meekosha & Shuttleworth, 2009). Disability studies revolve around the social model of disability that aims to mitigate inequality by changing material, economic and social structures and to enable disabled subjects to use their potential fully (Bayliss, 2009). This article develops CDS’s critical reflection on this model, claiming that the effort to include people with disabilities in existing modernist discourses is not enough; we need to redefine how we think about boundaries and differences, about the relationship between the whole and parts, about how we conceive of dis/ability.
Research on visual disability in CDS is on the rise, especially in recent years (Chaudhry, 2018; Davis, 2019; Hammer, 2019; Kleege, 2010; Michalko, 1999; Porkertová, 2021; Schillmeier, 2006, 2010; Thomson, 2018; Titchkosky et al., 2019; Whitburn & Michalko, 2019). Whitburn and Michalko (2019, p. 226) note that ‘the social model of disability, like the religious and medical explanations before it, lacks conviction against the binds that prevent people with impaired vision from gaining full citizenship. A more critical position must acknowledge some of the complexities that we raise here, in order to carry more conceptual strength.’ One of the elemental concepts that needs a critical revision is knowledge because the rational Enlightenment subject is built on knowledge in the humanist and political sense (Williams, 2005).
Despite this importance, studies explicitly focused on blindness and knowledge are scarce in both disability and critical disability studies (Hirschmann, 2020; Michalko, 2001; Schillmeier, 2006, 2010; Whitburn & Michalko, 2019). Especially Whitburn’s and Michalko’s articles, together with Schillmeier’s work, address this topic, however, their arguments remain primarily on the theoretical, abstract level and are not based on empirical research. Consequently, I support and develop their work by discussing it with unique empirical data based on interviews and ethnography with visually disabled people, which I will specify in the methodology section.
Whitburn and Michalko (2019) stress that it is not enough to concentrate either on social consequences like the social model or on biological circumstances, that is, visual impairment. According to them, CDS emphasize relationalities and analyse how people with visual disability are influenced by a combination of both biological and social conditions and thus ‘move away from comfortable yet totalising definitions of blindness and sightedness’ (Whitburn & Michalko, 2019, p. 219). Although I subscribe to this plea for relationality and a retreat from totalizing definitions, my study shows that the combination of social and biological conditions is still problematic, mainly in its linear logic – there is a subject which is influenced by conditions. My research demonstrates that visually disabled people are not influenced. Rather, they create various blind assemblages, transgressing boundaries between the material and the discursive and resisting this linear logic. I propose the abovementioned term being inspired by Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2005) and the Deleuzian branch of CDS (Abrams et al., 2019; Duff, 2014; Feely, 2016; Fox, 2011, 2013; Gibson, 2006; Goodley et al., 2018), where it is still rarely used in connection with visual disability (Paterson, 2017, 2020; Schillmeier, 2010) and sparsely supported by empirical data (Porkertová, 2021).
The concept of assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2005) refers to a compound of varied elements – organic and inorganic, linguistic and material – mutually affecting and transforming each other. In accord with poststructuralist thought, Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2005) rejected the idea of static, essential entities. Assemblages are being transformed as new connections emerge and old ones disappear. This dynamic is true also for blind assemblages, which are not stable and established forever, but are always temporary, created by various elements. An assemblage is the result of constant change and dynamic processes that, in certain situations, attain a temporary stable contoured form that enables one to do something, to create different connections and further assemblages.
Plato (Schillmeier, 2010, p. 48) warns that a blind person is not able to grasp the One, the idea of things. Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2005) criticize this reduction to the One, which conceals heterogeneous registers and simultaneously operates with the notion of in/completeness. Assemblage goes beyond the dualism between the One and the multiple and thus maintains heterogeneity and expresses community. It is always complete (but not completed); it lacks nothing in principle and escapes the idea of separating the whole and its parts, of devaluing certain knowledge or bodies as incomplete (see Schillmeier, 2010; Shildrick, 2009).
All things are assemblages composed of and connected to other assemblages. Conditions, which Whitburn and Michalko want to combine, are also assemblages and therefore cannot be divided as either biological or social. By interconnecting the concept of assemblage with particular blind practices, this study defies the notion of blindness as ignorance and instead shows it as heterogeneous, interwoven with other assemblages, and producing varied, rich knowledge.
Methodology
This study is based on non-structured interviews and ethnographic observations with six people with visual disability whom I had not known previously: two men, aged 22 (Milan) and 32 (Roman), and four women, aged 30 (Jessie), 30 (Eva), 45 (Vlasta) and 66 (Helena). It also included Eva’s sighted life partner (Filip), with whom I conducted two interviews and who had participated in several ethnographic observations, and a recording from a public talk given by an author of audio descriptions for people with visual disability. Except for Milan, who is congenitally visually disabled, everyone ceased to see with their eyes during their teenage years or in their early twenties due to a progressive disease. The data were collected between 2014 and 2017.
Multiple interviews were conducted and recorded with all participants under informed consent. They were asked to choose their pseudonyms, and other identifiers were concealed. Jessie did not want to be anonymized, so I use her real first name. Some of the encounters were for the purpose of research (one year, two to four interviews with each participant, 35 hours of recorded material). Others were casual meetings (data collected over three years; coffee/dinner at my place, concerts, trips, etc.) where the line between doing research and doing friendship was blurred. 2 During informal meetings, interesting topics arose, and, occasionally, participants themselves stressed that something could be of value to the study. With permission, I took notes of such situations (35 pages of fieldnotes). The original data are in Czech, and I have translated them into English.
Although the term ‘observation’ hints at the fact that we observe using sight, ethnography is much richer. It consists of sharing, which I have intensely experienced not only while doing research (which is always a collective work) but also while acting as a companion/guide. Vannini et al. (2012) note that ‘in our everyday lives, most of us pay little conscious attention to how we sense’ (p. 8). In disability assemblages that participants created with me, bodies and senses were very much present, including my sense of sight, which acted differently – I noticed other things from when alone or with a sighted person. This coincides with Stoller’s (1997) plea for a ‘sensuous awakening’ (p. xii) and his critiques of disembodied observation. The researcher’s embodiment when studying someone else’s experience is also stressed by Paterson (2009). Research often dismisses sensuous experience (Vannini et al., 2012), and sensory sociology focuses on dimensions that tend to be excluded from sociological analysis (Coleman, 2016). Doing research with visually disabled people awakens the embodied and sensuous consciousness of both the participant and the researcher and has an autoethnographic character.
To conduct the qualitative data analysis, I used Atlas.ti 7 software, which enabled me to gradually translate data into analytical material. Coding, commenting, reorganizing, drawing a mental map, connecting data with literature and using certain analytical tools to approach them are parts of this translation (Konopásek, 2008). During this process, some of the old qualities were lost, but new ones emerged by creating new connections. In addition to factual codes (travelling, touch or television), I also created more abstract ones with analytical potential (knowledge, strategies, visual perspective, etc.), codes from disability studies and the sociological literature (in/dependence, norms, patronizing approach, etc.) and codes from Deleuze-Guattarian philosophy (assemblage, content and expression), which I used as an analytical framework. Because I coded both the data and the literature with all these kinds of codes, visible connections could be made, and I could deepen the analysis.
The article (1) discusses how participants in the study encounter discourses that devalue knowledge not based primarily on vision. It then (2) focuses on divisive practices that lead to constructions of dis/ability and ab/normality and how they can be challenged by conceiving knowledge, senses and dis/ability as assemblages. (3) The heterogeneous and dynamic character of knowledge, which the text argues for, enables us to grasp doing knowledge without visual shortcuts and (4) blurs the divisions between the self and the other as well as the sighted and the blind as knowledge is produced collectively.
Knowing subject, blind object
Since the 17th century, blindness has been reduced to an individual impairment based on the lack of sight (Schillmeier, 2006). However, the word ‘blind’ (slepý in Czech) is used also as a metaphor in relation to ignorance (Michalko, 2001). This association has a huge impact on the everyday lives of visually disabled people. The mistrust of a blind person’s ability to know or make decisions is related to the perception of them as being dependent and non-autonomous, whereas independence and autonomy constitute a full subject (Shildrick, 2009). This causes the tendency to communicate with people with disabilities through their accompanying persons.
People often communicate with assistants. You come to the hospital, and they say, ‘So, she can sit here’ (laughter), and ‘She will be taking these pills.’ And the assistant replies, ‘But she is legally competent.’
And how do you find this?
Humiliating. I try to do things mostly by myself only, even seeing doctors.
(Interview, 13 October 2014)
Thus, the knowing subject becomes a ‘blind object’ who processes information with difficulty and is unable to make decisions. Czech is a Slavic language, and, like other European languages, its modern form intertwines with European culture originating in antiquity and Christianity. The word ‘blind’, although still used in public discourse, is no longer considered correct because of its negative connotations. Some participants, especially Roman, deliberately use the word as reclamation, albeit rather as a personal stance than a political act (however related). But many avoid its use in relation to themselves.
I would not call myself blind. Sometimes, I use it when I give an example of someone treating me badly and say, ‘He thought I was a stupid blind woman.’ So, I tend to use it in its pejorative meaning. [. . .] The word ‘blind’ is burdened with meanings.
(Interview, 15 October 2014)
In Eva’s opinion, the word ‘blind’ is linked with ‘stupid’. When asked which word she prefers, Vlasta laughed, ‘I use everything – blind, stupid (laughter). I don’t care at all’ (Interview, October 13 2014). Although Vlasta stated that she does not care what term people use to refer to her, she also associated ‘blind’ with ‘stupid’.
In the late 20th century, the word ‘blind’ was replaced by the term ‘non-sighted person’ (nevidomý) 3 in both official and media discourses in the Czech Republic. However, the expression ‘nevidomý’ is also questionable. It starts with the negative prefix ‘ne’ (non), which implies being the opposite of normal – four out of six participants said it reminded them of the word ‘non-knowing’ (nevědomý), which they associated with a lack of knowledge.
The connection between seeing and knowing can be found in the language we use relating to knowledge or thinking processes. Verbs such as ‘see through’, ‘envision’ and ‘foresee’ refer to conceiving or obtaining knowledge; terms such as ‘view’ or ‘I see’ imply thinking. English is full of such expressions (Michalko, 1999, 2001; Schillmeier, 2010) and so is Czech. Michalko (1999, p. 100) comments that blind people use words like ‘see’, ‘look at’ or ‘see you later’ because ‘they must also use the language of the sighted world if they are to lay claim to legitimate citizenship and not be banished to a purely private world’. However, people with poor or no sight (i.e. sight that does not allow them to create certain assemblages) use these words not only because they want to be included into a society governed by visuality, but also because they intend the figurative meaning of these words.
Milan used the phrase ‘I see it like this’ in relation to his opinion. The idiom ‘see you later’ refers to meeting. Eva spoke of wanting to ‘see what they cook in the world’. Instead of wanting to touch something, she wants to ‘look at it’. Roman fetched a basket he made and stated, ‘Again, I see all the flaws. Here I can see that one twig is loose.’ Touching often implies getting to know something, which is associated with seeing. ‘I know that I’ve touched something, and I see, oh, it’s this’, Jessie said (Interview, 17 October 2017). It is different from wanting to touch something in order to have a haptic experience, like feeling an interesting texture. The distinction between touching and seeing thus lies in the information received and not in the fact that one is performed using hands and the other using eyes. Words like ‘seeing’ or ‘not seeing’ hold diverse meanings and form various assemblages, not all of which are connected to eyes. Thus, people with visual disability can see in certain situations. They create different connections related to the concept of seeing and its derivatives (Osman & Doboš, 2019; Paterson, 2020). Yet, sighted people often hesitate when using the word ‘see’ in front of a person with visual disability – an occurrence observed and communicated by some of the participants and confirmed by past studies (Kleege, 1999).
Modern divisions challenged by dynamic assemblages
The seeming inappropriateness of certain terms in relation to visual disability lies in the separation of material, disciplinary, categorical and ethical boundaries that CDS revise (Shildrick, 2009). Such divisions make certain things belong, while others do not (see Latour, 1993). Eva’s parents used to avoid saying the word ‘reading’ around her and preferred the phrase ‘listening to a book’. Traditionally, the written word belongs to an eye and the spoken word to an ear.
But Eva says that ‘listening to a book’ is listening to an audiobook, narrated by an actor incorporating tonal variation, dramatic pauses and music. This differs greatly from the information rendered by a screen reader – a process she calls ‘reading’, which allows her to choose the speed, the gender of the speaker or easily return to certain passages. It disrupts the conventional understanding of reading associated with eyes. Disability steps out of a normative frame and gradually disrupts others, opening new paths to escaping normative organization (Goodley et al., 2014: 347–350; Shildrick, 2009, pp. 125–145).
Thus, for studying visual disability/blindness, critical revision of the separation between the material and the discursive, a current CDS task (Goodley et al., 2019), is essential. Besides the focus of disability studies on a cultural level that produces hierarchic divisions between normality and abnormality (see Oliver, 1990; Oliver & Barnes, 2012; Titchkosky, 2007; Tremain, 2015; Wendell, 1996), CDS have also started concentrating on the materialization of dis/ability, where discursive and material aspects make complex associations. This perspective is present mainly in approaches inspired by poststructuralism and its Deleuze-Guattarian tradition, with strong posthumanist reverberations (Braidotti, 2013; Duff, 2010, 2014; Fox, 2013; Goodley, 2007; Goodley et al., 2014; Hickey-Moody, 2019; Kuppers & Overboe, 2009; Shildrick, 2009, 2012).
In Eva’s reading, the significance lies in what is done rather than how or through what it is done. The concept of assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2005) is particularly useful to escape the modernist divisive tradition, to express a dynamic combination of diverse elements and to articulate the relationship between what is done (e.g. reading) and what is said (e.g. listening vs reading). Relations within an assemblage are constituted along two axes: horizontal, the segments of content and expression, and vertical, the movement of territorialization and deterritorialization that de/stabilizes the assemblage – as the text does not work with this axis, I leave the terms unexplained. Content is a pragmatic system ‘of bodies, of actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2005, p. 88); it expresses what is done (p. 504). Expression is a semiotic system ‘of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2005, p. 88); it expresses what is said (p. 504).
Deleuze and Guattari stress that content and expression must be accessed simultaneously. ‘In each case, it is necessary to ascertain both what is said and what is done’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2005, p. 504). This principle enables us to avoid the division between signifier/signified and to attribute the origin to content or expression. Assemblage escapes reduction: It cannot be said that expression represents content or vice versa, nor is there causality between these concepts. There is a continual passage between these two lines: ‘Expressions are inserted into contents [and] signs are at work in things themselves just as things extend into or are deployed through signs’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2005, p. 87).
The notion of a direct relationship between content and expression, where one is assumed to represent the other, manifests itself in the construction of blind assemblages, which can attain rigid, normative contours. Specific activities that defy the normative order are made linguistically invisible, and, some connections, such as reading a book or seeing, seem inappropriate in relation to a person with visual disability. As Milan, the only participant who was visually disabled since birth, recounts:
There’s practically nothing in it for me, in kite flying. What I mainly care about is when the kite whips away and flies, the feeling that it was you who let it go.
And the reactions from people, like ‘What do you get out of it?’. . . Have you encountered this?
Yeah, I have. But I understand them because they have no experience with it, not that I would wish it on them. Or it depends, any knowledge is good in a sense.
(Interview, 8 November 2014)
Milan says there is practically nothing in it for him; still, the joy he describes suggests that there is a lot in it for him. What is said (segment of expression) does not correspond to what is done (segment of content). His thinking is permeated by discourse that deprives the nonvisual experience of its value. Believing that visual experience is necessary for learning, mediating meaning and enjoying certain activities leads to the frequent exclusion of people with visual disability (Richards et al., 2010). Yet, many sighted people would not be content with watching how someone else flies a kite. They would want to experience the feelings described by Milan – to fly the kite, not just observe it.
Doing knowledge without visual shortcuts
The idea that experience and knowledge must be limited without sight or visual memory was also present during a discussion at the Mezipatra Queer Film Festival after a screening of The Way He Looks (2014), a film about a visually impaired boy, which I watched with Eva and Filip. Its second screening used audio descriptions, and sighted people were given eye masks. After the film, the audience discussed the audio descriptions with their author.
You must realize one thing. When you work for the visually impaired, you have two groups of people with disabilities. One is a group of people born this way. It is simply a permanent defect. And these people do not have any visual memory. The second group lost their sight during their lives. When I am to say that a horse was running in a vast grassy corral, you can easily imagine it. Every one of you has seen a corral, you know what grass is, and I doubt there is anybody here who hasn’t seen a horse. You can tell this to a visually impaired person in any way you like. They won’t be able to imagine it, in the same way that they cannot imagine colours, car brands . . . And, of course, when you’re writing, you must avoid comparisons.
(Recording, 21 November 2014)
Disability is considered a deficit, a loss or a tragedy (Braidotti, 2013, p. 161), an abnormal and disturbing difference (Gagnon & Stuart, 2009, p. 47), and the author conceptualized blindness as a deviation from the norm, as a defect.
He added that, sometimes, he consults commentaries with a person who has been congenitally visually impaired. On other occasions, the whole process progresses without any supervision, based solely on prior experiences. This coincides with modern divisions, where not only the discursive and the material are separated, the senses also get purified, differentiated from each other. The division between the five senses as well as the borders between them are arbitrary (Classen, 1993). Vannini et al. (2012) highlight that the senses are ‘contaminated’ (p. 5) and experience is multi-sensuous. ‘By claiming that [senses] are constructions, we highlight their quality as products and practice, as action and interaction, as work and performance’ (p. 6). Yet, blindness is conceived as the opposite of sight, as non-sight (Michalko, 1999; Schillmeier, 2010), which results in overlooking the grey zone, a whole spectrum found between these poles that many people have experience with (Fourie, 2007). The inability to perceive the grey zone, the variety of blind assemblages and the perception of sight and non-sight as opposites is projected onto the demand for a ‘completely visually impaired’ consultant, which is not congruent with the experience of many people with visual disability.
If vision is regarded as central to experience (Stokes & Biggs, 2015), and sight and blindness are perceived as opposites, the reduction of things and events to the visual results in the author’s proclamation that visually impaired people have limited imagination and certain information is irrelevant to them. Let’s focus on the sentence ‘The horse was running in a vast grassy corral’. It is an assemblage, and single words from it cannot be separated from each other – the corral from the horse or the grass from the viewer, sighted or blind. And all these things cannot be separated from activities that assemblages enable. Thus, their heterogeneous character becomes more evident.
The word ‘vast’ is not exclusively visual but expresses time-space; the horse finds it spacious and can run fast. The significance lies in what is done, not just what it looks like. The word ‘corral’ is not strictly visual either. It represents a barrier or limit and refers to an activity – the horse cannot escape. The author turned to the audience, assuming it was composed of only sighted people, and said ‘You know what grass is’, implying that a person born with visual impairment would not. But they have felt it, walked on it, sat on it. The word ‘running’ is not visual either; it is tied to movement and activity. Moreover, horses are known to most people with visual disability, and they have had the chance to pet them and know them. The author’s example did not depict in any way a purely visual world, and yet, he implied that vision is the necessary means to knowledge. Visuality is never purely visual. It is always an assemblage, a conjunction of the material and the discursive. The same is true for blindness, which is not the opposition of vision.
When I asked Milan, who is congenitally visually disabled, what an image or an idea means, he hesitated for a while. Then, he said he recalls certain feelings that an audio description on TV or a description in a book evoke. But even visual information like colours is not empty. Although he said it is of a little interest to him, he learnt colours as a child, creating particular assemblages by associating them with certain things, like that the sun is yellow. He also learnt chic colour combinations and has a favourite clothes shop with nice shop assistants who always give him good advice, so people praise his look. This mandatory compliance with the visual world is often criticized (Michalko, 1999; Osman & Pospíšilová, 2016), but my point goes elsewhere – not even colours are purely visual.
The idea of dynamic, various assemblages that blindness creates allows us to grasp it affirmatively, not as a deficit, and understand knowledge at diverse levels. Schillmeier (2006, p. 481) points out, ‘The very strength of disability studies has been, precisely, to propose alternatives to challenge the reductionist perspective(s) of modern epistemological politics.’ Vannini et al. (2012) add that until something is odd, sense-making practices are barely noticeable. When visual shortcuts disappear and other senses and information come to the fore, it is possible to observe the practices of doing knowledge better.
In gift shops, I try to touch [models of] the important buildings. When we were in New York, I looked at the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Statue of Liberty. I touched all of them, and then I knew what they were like. Moreover, I remembered what the Empire State Building looks like from photos. And then it was a great experience to stand on the top of it.
(Interview, 22 September 2014)
Heterogeneous elements are being interlinked in the assemblage of knowledge. On top of the Empire State Building, Eva’s haptic and visual memories were actualized and linked with knowing she was on top. Moreover, she had learned essential information from books, movies and travel guides. It is not just a building that happens to be tall and offers a great view. It is one of the most famous and significant skyscrapers in the world with a great history. That is the reason so many tourists want to go there. Eva’s experience was multi-sensuous (see Vannini et al., 2012), connected to the knowledge and memories she had had from before. Her story shows the Empire State Building as an assemblage of diverse elements that strays from the usual visual shortcuts. When the dominance of vision, seemingly crucial for obtaining knowledge, is put aside, the heterogeneity of not only knowledge but also of things, both living and non-living, becomes palpable.
Milan explains his practice of getting to know something as follows:
In a zoo, I’ve always relied on there being some sort of excursion, where you can touch the animals. When you hear them, it is interesting but, at the same time, not enough, as you are not able to feel the animals close up. You cannot get to know them. I like to learn things about exotic animals, for example, on TV, when there is a programme about Africa or Asia – what kind of animals live there, what they eat, how they survive and so on. It is exciting and captivating for me.
And when I say, for instance, a tiger, what do you think it is?
A big cat [. . .] in a jungle. It is assumed to be a feline predator.
(Interview, 19 October 2014)
Both Eva and Milan connected knowledge to certain aspects that are not present. When recollecting the Empire State Building, Eva actualized her visual and haptic memory and previous information. Milan also drew upon something he knew, comparing a tiger to a big (house) cat. 4 Haptic cognition is important for him; a domestic cat, unlike a tiger, can be touched, and they are both feline predators. However, the author of audio descriptions for people with visual disability stated that comparisons should not be used: ‘This looks “like” – no way!’ (Fieldnotes, 21 November 2014).
The ability to compare entails the ability to make distinctions, name things, know differences and similarities, which is associated with vision as di/vision. As Schillmeier (2010) states: [Blindness] blends clear and distinct di/visions. Blindness enacts troubled visual knowledge, because it cannot be apprehended by the clear-cut categories of sight and insight, which are most powerful in performing the either/or, that is, in differentiating what is from what is not. Blindness overflows distinct di/visions, remaining an ambivalent, ambiguous, and vague object that refers to more than what one is able to see. (pp. 43–44)
As Milan’s example shows, the competence of making comparison and differentiating does not concern only sighted people. But his case emphasizes that there does not have to be clear, once-and-for-all established borders to make distinctions and thus comparisons. Things are composed of intertwined organic, inorganic, semiotic and material elements – they are dynamic assemblages. A tiger in a zoo is a different assemblage from that in a jungle. Sometimes, it is important that it is a feline predator. The connection to this information is made, and, through it, it is possible to connect it with a domestic cat. Other times, this information is not present, it is not relevant, it does nothing, makes no further connections. This impurity of things and their dynamic character is always there; blindness just makes it obvious, challenging the either/or modernist discourse. Schillmeier (2010, p. 67) adds, ‘Instead of di/visioning the world into different ontological spheres of the “empirical many” and the “intellectual one” to become knowledgeable, blindness is neither only one nor only many; but one and many.’ Acknowledging the heterogeneity and impurity of both knowledge and things does not lead to being lost in the region of the many and variable like Plato reserved for the blind. One can still distinguish between things and admit their fluid borders.
Nonetheless, in a zoo, for example, purifying and constructing borders, both symbolically and materially, are ways to expose animals to the visitor’s sight. Milan underscores the tiger’s connection to a jungle, in which it is meaningful, like the Empire State Building makes sense only in New York City. Although zoos legitimate their existence by, among others, an educational function, they often fail to fulfil it. The animal is extracted from its original environment, and detailed descriptions containing information about where an animal lives and what it eats, things that Milan is interested in, are often skipped by sighted people. Therefore, vision does not equal knowledge. In the examples mentioned above, knowledge is reduced, as visual shortcuts leave out important information.
Collectivity and negotiations in knowledge production
Conceiving knowledge and things as heterogeneous assemblages accentuates their collective production. When my partner and I were in a zoo with Eva, we read the captions to her and described exotic animals using comparisons. We also visited castles and sights and found ourselves reading the information. When I am alone, I tend to skip longer texts. Thanks to Eva, I read them and learned more than I would have without her. Elements in assemblages constantly affect and transform each other – having the option to read something was not enough; Eva’s curiosity gave me the will to do it. I also notice different things and describe them in different ways with her. Thus, her disability, her inability to see with her eyes, actualized my ability to read the captions, which would not have happened with a sighted person, in a ‘sighted assemblage’.
Eva and I form blind assemblages and mediate knowledge together. This process takes time. The sighted person learns to become aware of what should be described – they must learn how to express it – and the visually disabled person can identify what they can hear, as Jessie mentioned. Every configuration enables something else to be done, to connect and generate other assemblages, to get to know something, to feel that ‘any knowledge is good in a sense’, as Milan noted.
CDS stress that dis/ability affects all living beings (Goodley, 2013; Shildrick, 2012), and blindness ‘emphasise[s] relations with other people, animals and technology’ (Whitburn & Michalko, 2019, p. 228). Whitburn and Michalko (2019) note that ‘collective action is constitutive of blind epistemologies, and an introduction to blindness should account for this development affirmatively by decentring the individual’ (p. 230). The epistemological discourse perceives blindness as ‘the other side of knowledge’ (Schillmeier, 2006, p. 472, emphasis in original), but the example of Eva and I shows there is no ‘other’ side, no di/vision between the blind and the sighted, like Schillmeier (2006, 2010) criticizes. Blindness cannot be reduced to the lack of vision, to a mere disfunction. It is an affirmative, driving force of creation, like knowledge produced together. Concepts like autonomy, agency or independence are challenged (Gibson, 2006; Goodley, 2013; Schumm, 2010).
The collective character of knowing and learning is also palpable in descriptions from sighted people, which take two forms: either something absent is described or something present and experienced is accompanied by a description from a sighted person.
I’ve noticed that a person who cannot see processes things differently because the stimuli come to them differently. There is a difference when you can look at something and you see it and when someone else describes it to you. The latter needs more work. You need to recollect it, compare it to something. I like when I can touch things. And then I feel that it is this or that – it has a certain surface. When people describe it to me, I have a feeling . . . I have a problem imagining what it looks like.
(Interview, 1 November 2014)
Descriptions by sighted people do not usually focus on qualities discernible by touch, which seems to be more relevant to Jessie than purely visual descriptions. The art of description and what another person, sighted or visually disabled, understands do not equal what the description seemingly represents. Foucault (1995) criticizes the notion of a direct relationship between the visible and the articulable, which ‘has the measure of both the things that it describes and the language in which it describes them’ (Foucault, 2003, p. 141). A myth is created of a ‘pure Gaze that would be pure Language: a speaking eye’ (Foucault, 2003, p. 142). Seeing would then be equal to knowing. Deleuze (1988/2006, pp. 47–69) elaborates on Foucault’s reflections on the relationship between content (what is visible) and expression (what is articulable) as well as on the difference of their forms. Although ‘what we see never lies in what we say’ (Deleuze, 1988/2006, p. 64), it is not possible to speak randomly about random images, as the relationship between seeing and articulation is grounded in their mutual presupposition.
For Eva, her partner Filip’s descriptions are an indispensable part of travelling. Roman made a similar observation and stated that he enjoys comments made by sighted people. However, translations between the visible and articulable are not a straightforward path from A to B but constant reconnections and transformations, where some qualities are lost and others are achieved (see Latour, 1995). I do not describe everything I see, but I notice things I would not without the need to articulate them to my visually disabled companion. ‘Visibilities are neither the acts of a seeing subject nor the data of a visual meaning. [. . .] [T]he visible is like the articulable: they are the object not of a phenomenology, but of an epistemology’ (Deleuze, 1988/2006, pp. 50, 58). Eva told me how her friend notices and describes things Filip would not and said it is possible that, were two people to describe the same place to her, she might think she was in two different places. The blind assemblages that Eva creates with other people, objects or environments are being composed and decomposed, producing various, situated knowledge (Haraway, 1991).
Although it might seem that for connecting the articulable and the visible, a sighted person is necessary, it is not true. Both Roman and Eva have vivid visual memories. She told me that she imagines things ‘very visually’. She can recall green trees and orange squirrels, although she immediately added that the image might look inaccurate. Roman can also see colourfully.
What do you focus on in those documentaries about nature?
On the narrator.
And are you imagining something at the same time?
Yeah, I can see it, beautifully, maybe better than they have it on the screen. I can see the animal, for instance, the bear, the river that is stormy and the fallen trees.
(Interview, 14 October 2014)
Descriptions are actualized as images, and Roman or Eva see what is said in their minds, even if these images do not exactly match those seen by the person talking. Thus, blindness does not inevitably mean an absence of vision. For many people who used to see, vision is still present in the processing of information. Michalko (1999, p. 33) says that even if vision is no longer present in his sensory experience, it remains a key factor for interpreting the world. The visible does not necessarily exist materially, and Eva and Roman compare it to descriptions in a book where both sighted and visually disabled people create their own images. Even Milan used this comparison, although he does not imagine the descriptions in a visual way. Every person imagines something slightly different, but good narration in a book prompts enjoyment for all.
Often, the indirect relationship between content and expression needs negotiation. Eva does consultations for a television company about audio descriptions. The descriptions should give visually disabled people information that is commonly obtained through vision (and there is no unified rule in the Czech Republic of how to do it). Sometimes, Eva offers her feedback on completed episodes so that the production knows what to do and avoid it next time. Other times, she participates in the very process of audio-description making.
They were doing Záhady Toma Wizarda [Tom Wizard’s Mysteries; 2007], which is a programme for kids, and the audio description said, ‘Hugo and Viki are walking through the forest’, followed by a minute of silence. So, I said that I would like to know more about that walk. And it was nice that the sound engineer [. . .] had the same idea and agreed. . . that, OK, they are walking through the forest, but let us imagine a 10-year-old, visually impaired child. I would get bored during the dull minutes. There is silence. While sighted children see walking through the forest, a visually impaired child does not hear it. So, it would be good to, for instance, narrate, ‘The forest is broadleaved, or coniferous. The sky is cloudy as it is about to rain’ – or something. I would talk to them in that minute.
(Interview, 15 October 2014)
Television is different from books and the radio, which have no dead air for a visually disabled person. Everything is expressed and connected, including sounds, music and silence. Eva wants to fill the emptiness with connections. Dis/ability and blindness are dynamic assemblages that enable and disable further connections to be linked. When a connection between eye and image cannot be made, other ways might be found. Thus, in blind assemblages, the visible is often present, but it is mediated, for example, through commentary. When creating audio descriptions, discussions arise about what needs to be said, what needs to be known.
This was an awkward situation. There was a villain in yellow wellingtons in one episode, and the editor just said ‘wellingtons’ . . . he studied special pedagogy that taught him that you should not tell colours to visually impaired people (laughter). But the yellow wellingtons were significant, and the whole story revolved around them, so they remade it in the end and added the colour in. And they asked, ‘So can we tell you colours?’ And I said, ‘Why couldn’t you?’ (laughter).
(Interview, 15 October 2014)
A good description fills emptiness. It provides information that may not be necessary but is interesting and reveals other crucial information as well. The solution is not to omit what seemingly cannot be understood but to try to find ways to mediate it. However, when myths intervene, such as not informing visually disabled people about a colour or that some knowledge is not accessible, this can prove misleading.
Conclusion
As knowledge is essential for establishing the modern subject (Foucault, 1995), the association of sight with knowledge and blindness with ignorance (Schillmeier, 2010; Whitburn & Michalko, 2019) needs to be critically revised. Nonetheless, this topic has met with little attention so far. To challenge the association of blindness as incomplete and deficient for obtaining knowledge, it is not sufficient to draw on the social or material explanation, because both blindness and knowledge are discursive-material. Critical disability studies offer analytical tools to revise essentialist, stable divisions and ‘move away from comfortable yet totalising definitions of blindness and sightedness’ (Whitburn & Michalko, 2019, p. 219).
Based on interviews and ethnography with visually disabled people, I linked the concept of assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2005) to particular blind practices. Blind assemblages demonstrate that knowledge does not come primarily via seeing, but from doing; from using other senses, from memories, from sharing, from doing things with others, etc. These assemblages are diverse, variable and temporary, as the research participants create them with various people, objects, environments. Every assemblage enables one to do something else, to create different connections and further assemblages, to produce collective, varied, situated knowledge. Consequently, there are no other sides of knowledge based on divisions between the blind and the sighted (Schillmeier, 2006).
Blindness does not mean the absence of visuality and vision; they are always present in the forms of visual memories, sighted people or visual discourses. And yet, I call the assemblages ‘blind’, not ‘semi-blind’. This is because there is not a clear border between these terms. There is no ‘pure’ blindness, not even of people who do not see with their eyes. The same is true for visuality, which is never purely visual, the opposition of blindness. Those two concepts meet, are linked through miscellaneous connections, form assemblages.
The concept of assemblages stresses the connectivity and heterogeneity of blindness, shows how large and unconfined blindness actually is and how various, rich, colourful knowledge its assemblages produce. Along with assemblage, visual disability can be another analytical tool that enables us to observe the practices of doing knowledge without visual shortcuts. Visually disabled people do not need assemblage theory to notice the heterogeneity of knowledge, senses, or things, because they experience that organic, inorganic, semiotic and material elements are intertwined (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2005). They show that one does not have to adhere to modern, clear-cut categories or to wander in the region of the many and variable, as Plato associated with blindness (Schillmeier, 2010). One and many are no longer excluding terms.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Jolana Navrátilová, Robert Osman, Lucie Pospíšilová, Pavel Doboš, Bradley McGregor, as well as to the anonymous reviewers and the editor at this journal, for their constructive comments on earlier versions.
Funding
This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (Disability Geography: Visually Impaired Experience with Urban Space, 20-03708S).