Blindness and Visual Culture: An Eyewitness Account

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.