Eye Contact and the Performative Touch of Blindness.

This paper treats blindness as itself a performance. It understands it as movement, as essentially a kinaesthetic phenomenon. Touch, of course, becomes an exaggerated cogent sense for those of us who are blind. This is not only cogent, but a conventional understanding of blindness. This paper, in contrast, makes use of touch in an almost reverse way; it explores how those who see come in touch with, come to touch and are touched by blindness. Through invoking my own experiences as a blind woman and my movement in public spaces, I address the cogency, hyperbolic, valued sense of touch that is essential in performing blindness – in how my movement through the world comes to be 'seen' as the movement of a blind person, as blindness. This, I treat, as performance. I also treat myself, the blind person, as performer and the others, the others who see, as the audience. This audience is not passive; it is not merely a congregate of spectators. Instead, it is invested in blindness insofar as it must recognize it, in part, for its own existence. Sight, after all, its recognition, is established through what is understood as its opposite, as not seeing, and one expression of this is blindness. When blindness is performed as something other than the opposite and the absence of sight, it is disturbing; it disturbs the common-sensical idea that blindness seeks its own absence, namely sight. This is why Diderot (1982) and his company were surprised when 'their blind man' replied when asked if he wanted sight: 'If it were not for curiosity ... I would just as soon have long arms: It seems to me my hands would tell me more of what goes on in the moon than your eyes or your telescopes' (77–78). For Diderot's 'blind man,' sight is a mere curiosity. It does little in comparison with touch, to bring us in touch with the world or even with the moon. Eyes can see the moon, but not 'what goes on in the moon'. The sense of sight gives those who see a way to 'be in touch' with the world and its appearances, including people. One of those ways, a way that is often used to get someone's attention, to perform a 'look' is eye contact. As a way to concretize the premise of blindness as performance and that this performance is conducted in what I have called elsewhere 'the theatre of the eyes' (Healey 2021), I engage the phenomenon of eye contact as a way to draw out the implicit connections between sight and touch and, between blindness and sight. I make use of the work of blind disability studies theorist Georgina Kleege (2018), particularly when she says, 'eye contact ... feels like nothing for me' (5). This allows me to engage eye contact, typically understood as a visual phenomenon as first, a phenomenon that is reliant on touch and secondly, as one reliant on its performance to make an appearance. This paper shows, too, how eye contact, as Kleege suggests, has as much to do with feel as it does with sight. As Aristotle (1907) wonders, touch is not one, but 'a group of senses,' (II. 11) a sensorium. And perhaps, 'flesh' is its medium and its real organ lies inward. Perhaps blindness, too, is a sensorium, not a damaged one, but a keenly sensitive and perceptive one; a sensitivity and perception guided by the medium of the performance and located in the inwardness of coming in touch with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]