Essay: Blind Witches of New Worlds

[featherxquill]

Finished my latest essay for cultural studies a few hours ago. In writing it, I used Tad William's Otherland and, since I know other people who might be interested by this, I am going to post it. Anyone also ineterested in cultural studies might be ineterested.

It is about visual culture, and how it affects the blind, since blind people have no access to visual culture, but still live in a highly visualised world, and are shaped (and othered) by it. Anyway, here it is.

Essay Question:

What does it mean to connect and interact with the visual? How has the shift from photographic reality to virtual reality changed the way human beings conceive of themselves and the spaces they inhabit? Refer to both ‘traditional’ photographic texts as well as digitally constructed environments in your answer.

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“I do not know how long I have sat here whispering under my breath, but I can

 feel the sun beginning to rise in this strange place… Was it the English poet Keats

who called himself ‘one whose name is written in water’? So. I will be Martine

Desroubins, the blind witch of a new world, and I will write my name on air.”

 

--Tad Williams, “Otherland, Volume Two: River of Blue Fire”, page 306

 

 

The Macquarie Encyclopedic Dictionary defines ‘blind’ as “Lacking the sense of sight; unwilling or unable to try to understand; not controlled by reason (etc)” and ‘vision’ as “The act of seeing with the eye; the power, faculty or sense of sight (etc)” (1990, pages 94 and 1068). An allegedly objective source, the dictionary establishes vision as something related to power, and blindness a lack of that power, or a lack of reason.

 

In a highly visual society, even someone who cannot directly interact with visual culture is shaped, defined and othered by it. This essay, focussing on Paul Strand’s Blind Woman (1916) and the character Martine Desroubins in Tad Williams’ Otherland series, will explore the how blind people connect and interact with the visual; vision/blindness as a binary, how it is represented in traditional photography, and the ways in which assumptions about sight and blindness can be subverted by virtual realities. This brings into question what ‘sight’ actually is, and how what we see and the way we see it frames the way we conceive of ourselves and the spaces we inhabit.

 

 

Photography, a visual medium, has been regarded since its inception largely as an objective medium, something that simply captures and represents reality. “The belief… was that unlike a person, a machine is objective – it is not effected by emotion, mood, and so on, it simply records reality without mediating that reality in any way” (Sullivan, 2005).

 

Taken in 1916, Paul Strand’s Blind Woman can be placed in photographic history after the introduction of the Kodak box brownie camera (in 1900) that allowed widespread use of the technology, but long before the digital age. Taking to the slums of New York and “arming himself with a camera equipped with a false lens at a right angle to the actual one so he could photograph unsuspecting subjects”, Strand took portrait shots of the street’s inhabitants (Sante, 1998). Based on the technological context of the time and knowledge of Strand’s methods, we can assume that Blind Woman was taken candidly, that the woman did not know that she was being photographed. Although the shot is mediated and framed by both artist and context, we can assume that it has not been digitally manipulated – most notably, that the sign around the woman’s neck was indeed present when the photograph was taken, probably part of her daily attire.

 

The woman is framed so that only her head and upper chest are visible; every part of her body apart from her face and a single lock of hair hidden by black cloth. The white sign on her chest contrasts starkly, “BLIND” emblazoned upon it in black, block letters. The backdrop is minimal, a blank wall. Everything about this woman is seemingly explained by her face, misshapen eyes, and by the single, dominant signifier – the word ‘blind’. Her entire identity is summed up in one word. Paradoxically, the visual sign, both the one around her neck and the photograph itself is being used to represent and define her, yet this visual medium is something she has no access to. According to Schirato and Webb, “every act of looking and seeing is also an act of not seeing” (2004, pg. 12). If this is the case, the photograph of the blind woman cannot be a simple reflection of reality – the act of framing her in a way that defines her only by her inability to see is deliberate and culturally coded. For all the viewer knows, if the photograph was taken from further away, she could have been standing surrounded by her family, and have been given more identities in relation to them – wife, mother, sister, daughter, lover. To the woman in the picture, the visual is not real. To the woman in the picture, the visual does not exist, and yet she is framed by it, represented by it, and othered by her inability to conceive of herself this way in such a visually oriented space.

 

 

“I like to look at her anyway,” says Jeanne Schinto, “believing, almost against my will, that she possesses an interior eye, one that is capable of seeing the truth better and more easily than I do” (2000). Such is the case with Otherland’s blind Martine Desroubins, who, trapped in a virtual simulation world, becomes a leader, owing to her ability to ‘see’ the computer coding, to conceive of herself and the virtual space she inhabits in a way that her sighted companions cannot. Cyber technologies – complex, virtual, highly visual worlds (like the Otherland network described in the novels) problematise the idea of the visual as real, bring into question the nature of sight and challenge the way we conceive of ourselves, space, and the relationship of our body and mind to this virtual reality. 

 

“One could argue that ‘simulated reality’ aims for a digital reality to be experienced as ‘real’ and negates the ‘in between’ of virtuality” (Gemeinboeck, 2004). This is certainly the aim of Otherland’s creators, the ‘Grail Brotherhood’ – seeking to create a network that is ‘real’ enough to spend an immortal, virtual existence within, severed from their earthly bodies. The group of travellers, including Martine, become trapped in the network, unable to drop offline, and, possibly because of their belief in the visual as real, completely mortal (the characters who die a virtual death in the network also die bodily in the ‘real world’ – something that brings up interesting questions about the virtual world and the Cartesian notion of the mind/body split, but which space prevents in this essay).

 

Martine, on entering the network, is overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information she perceives, but over time becomes used to it, and realises that what she has is ‘vision’ – a way of perceiving the online environment that gives her a certain type of power: “I have reached a stage now where I can “read” the physical information of our environment as well as I can decipher the sign-posts of the real-world net, and thus can move around here almost as easily as any of my sighted companions – in fact, in many ways my abilities seem to be blossoming far beyond theirs” (Williams, 1998b, p. 449). In this virtual world, the vision/blindness duality still seems to exist, but the connotations and power roles attached to it in the ‘real’ world have been subverted – Martine can see, and her enemies are the ones that are blind, that fear her because she has access to information they do not, ways of seeing that they cannot hope to understand or counter, just as Strand’s blind woman had no access to the visual medium that defined and othered her by her lack. Martine’s gaze, however, is restricted by her attachment to the visual real, her assumptions that what she is reading is ‘physical information’, and not simply ‘sign-posts’. In the final book of the series, she endeavours to come to terms with the fact that she and her companions are “not actually prisoners in a temple of stone, but in the idea of a temple” (Williams, 2001, p.670). Her paradoxical gaze allows her to conceive of herself and the space she inhabits in a way that redefines her understanding of reality.

 

I – along with the rest of us, I suppose – have been fooled by the way this network mimics reality, and have tried to make sense of the world as though it were in fact the real world. Even using the astonishing abilities I have here, I have allowed myself to hear only what could be heard, touch only what could be touched, and then channelled that data into something safely like the real-world model. The irony of this – that a blind woman should so desperately struggle to make a place where she is superior to her companions into something more like the real world in which she is inferior to them – is almost staggering.

So what would !Xabbu do?… He would open himself. He would let what was around him speak and he would listen without prejudice instead of trying to force the information into some orderly, preconceived scheme.

I tried to do the same. (Williams, 2001, p.627)

 

By exploring a virtual environment through a blind character, Tad Williams’ Otherland questions the nature of sight and of the visual by presenting a reality that mimics the physical world but does not represent it in any kind of unmediated or ‘real’ way. This suggests that in cyberspace, individuals must re-interpret their assumptions about what they see as ‘real’, and, in doing so, re-conceive of themselves in these new online places.

 

 

We live in an image saturated, highly visual world. In such contexts, even blind people must connect and interact with the visual – they must conceive of themselves and the spaces they live in with reference to visual culture, even though they have no access to it. Vision and blindness exist in a binary where vision is associated with power and reason, and blindness the lack of these things. Traditional photography, like Paul Strand’s Blind Woman, through the idea of the camera as ‘objective’ served to reinforce this binary by defining an entire identity by this one characteristic – lack of access to the visual. In the shift to digital technology and virtual reality, as depicted in Tad Williams’ Otherland; cyberspace and digitally constructed environments problematise the idea of the visual as ‘real’, bringing into question what ‘sight’ actually is, and forcing us to reconsider the way we conceive of our ourselves and the spaces when we regard what we see as truth. The shift from traditional photography to virtual reality means that we can all conceive of reality in new and different ways, that we can redefine ourselves if we choose; that we may indeed all become blind witches of new worlds.

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

 

Gemeinboeck, Petra 2004, ‘Virtual Reality: space of negotiaton’, Visual Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1, pages 52-59.

 

The Macquarie Encyclopedic Dictionary, 1990, Macquarie Library, Australia.

 

Sante, Luc 1998, A Year in the Life - Paul Strand's breakthrough moment, accessed at http://slate.msn.com/?id=3473 on Sept 4.

 

Schinto, Jeanne 2000, ‘Shooting Blind’, Antioch Review, Vol. 58 Issue 1, p87, 12p.

 

Schirato, T and Webb, J 2004, Reading The Visual, Allen & Unwin, Australia.

 

Strand, Paul 1916, Blind Woman, accessed at http://www.getty.edu/art/collections/objects/oz141970.html on Sept 4, 2005.

 

Sullivan, Nikki 2005 The Myth of the Photographic Real. Lecture notes, accessed Sept 4, 2005 at http://www.ccs.mq.edu.au/ug/101/lecture3b.pdf

 

Williams, Tad 1998a Otherland, Volume One: City of Golden Shadow, DAW Books, New York.

 

Williams, Tad 1998b Otherland, Volume Two: River of Blue Fire, Orbit, London.

 

Williams, Tad 1999 Otherland, Volume Three: Mountain of Black Glass, Orbit, London.

 

Williams, Tad 2001 Otherland, Volume Four: Sea of Silver Light, Orbit, London.