The Visual, The Invisible, And Blindness: The Uncanny In Self–landscape Relations

Abstract

This article examines experiences of the uncanny within woodlands of Southern England among walkers who have impaired vision. It proposes that uncanny experiences disrupt assumptions that humans actively perceive a passive landscape by approaching the landscape as an actant provoking uncanny experiences that shift senses of self–landscape relations. Optical tropes have pervaded notions of both the uncanny and conceptualizations of self–landscape relations in contemporary European intellectual thought. Here, attention to the case study of blindness reconfigures these understandings and reveals the slippery nexus of the visible and the invisible in uncanny experiences. Motifs of vision are refracted in the experiences of “phantom vision” through which people who have noncongenitally impaired vision might “see” in their “mind’s eye.” The palpable, felt, multisensorial senses of the uncanny are revealed with the presences of trees and visceral nature of darkness. Uncanny landscapes are characterized by presences, the unknown, and disjunctures, in which notions of familiarity and strangeness, known and unknown, collide.

Keywords::

• senses
• landscape
• vision impairment
• blindness
• uncanny

Acknowledgements

With deep gratitude to my walking companions for our wanderings together through the South Downs. Thank you to colleagues at the University of Sussex for your comments on earlier drafts, particularly Jon Mitchell, Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner, and James Fairhead.

Notes

1 This paragraph begins with a continuation of Ingold’s (2000) use of the term “environment” to respond directly to his theorizations, at the end of this paragraph I use the term “landscape”, which is then used consistently unless engaging Ingold’s ideas specifically. While "landscape" is a notion characterized by an ocularcentric tradition in Western thought, the notion of the “environment” is much associated with Ingold’s ecological approach to perception that problematizes a notion of “culture”. Given that culture is significant in exploring uncanny experiences, I choose to use the term landscape as this article engages with both the ocularcentric legacy and the relevance of culture in approaching "uncanny landscapes”.

2 ”Impaired vision” is a generic term that includes “blindness.” I use the term “blind” when referring to my walking companion’s experiences as this is their preferred term. This is significant to them as it distinguishes their sensory experience (specifically the current absence of sight) from other people who have “impaired vision” but might have “partial sight.”

3 Significantly, this article uses a person-centered case study approach and does not seek to generalize an "experience of blindness”. This article focusses on experiences in the woodlands surrounding Stanmer Park in East Sussex, UK.

4 The relationship between blindness, touch, and sight in both spatial imagery and the sensorium is particularly significant given that this has continued within philosophical debate since the eighteenth century, centred around the so-called "Molyneux question" (for outline see Paterson 2006).

5 Elen associated “touching” with a stereotype of “being blind,” explaining “just because you are visually impaired, people expect us to want to do the same thing. I am not interested in touching, feeling, you know?!.”

6 For discussion on the comparisons of knowledge gained through touch and the eye(s) see Paterson (2006, 232).

7 See Sack’s (2010) for further discussion of “seeing in the mind’s eye” for people who have impaired vision and the diversities of this experience.

8 The notion of “interiorities” has been used to refer to experiences including the imagination (Hogan and Pink 2010).

9 In Bachelard’s terms, reverberation “becomes the figure of transportation, guiding disparate images from one place to another” (Trigg 2012b, 40).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karis Jade Petty

Karis Jade Petty is a Lecturer of Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex, UK. She has conducted ethnographic research examining the sensory experiences of the English countryside among walkers who have impaired vision over the last decade. Petty’s work examines themes including perception, landscape, walking, the more-than-human, the senses, the body, and the imagination. She is currently writing her first monograph based on this ethnographic research. [email protected]