Content area
Full Text
As a representation of blindness, Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blind is highly problematic and becomes more so if we fail to engage with its social implications. This essay teases out these issues, compares their representation with contemporaneous works of realism, and illustrates the play's twenty-first-century relevance on the basis of visually impaired embodiment.
The critical term aesthetic blindness designates the highly problematic epistemological myth of blindness to aesthetic qualities. Encapsulated in the term are two erroneous yet commonplace preconceptions: first, that blindness is synonymous with ignorance; and, second, that aesthetic qualities are perceived by exclusively visual means. The representational problem that justifies this coinage is that blindness and aesthetics-like blindness and knowledge-are often constructed so that the one is remote from the other, in accordance with an ocularcentric aesthetic, and thus incompatible with visually impaired embodiment. When "conducted according to visual criteria," as David Feeney puts it, "imaginative affirmations" of blindness frequently serve to isolate people who have visual impairments from "their natural resources of aesthetic receptivity" (85). This point is exemplified in work from the eighteen-nineties, the era of the aesthete from which several blind characters sprang. Based on predominantly visual renderings of beauty and, by extension, knowledge, many such representations focus on sight, which means that the ontological status of the characters becomes diminished as they take on a ghostly form, an existence within yet without human society.
Any new work on disability aesthetics is bound to acknowledge a debt to Tobin Siebers's definitive monograph on the subject. Of particular interest to me is the way in which he explores the significance of aesthetics in relation to Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell's suggestion that disability is the "master trope of human disqualification" (125). The aesthetics of human disqualification are resonant throughout this essay, but where Siebers explores the way that some bodies make other bodies feel, I concentrate on the normative means of such perception. For Michael Davidson, disability aesthetics emphasizes the "extent to which the body becomes thinkable when its totality can no longer be taken for granted, when the social meanings attached to sensory and cognitive values cannot be assumed" (4). I take an approach that complicates the visual premise about these matters, but agree with Siebers and demonstrate that understandings...