How Vision Metaphors Exclude the Blind
Writers often equate perfect vision with perfect understanding — they’re wrong
Metaphors do not run cleanly through our language. They blur. In this series of essays, we’ve followed stories from the material histories of lenses in order to take apart the idea of “sight” as a metaphor for perception itself. We began by observing that the lens is a figure for multiplicity, a way to consider a topic or object from multiple interpretive angles. We have traced the mechanical development of the lens through war, statecraft, nationalism, and fashion, seeing how this very special object has gathered other meanings around it, like the nacre that accretes to form a pearl. But the core metaphor of the lens is the idea of a thing through which we see. The lens points us to all the refractive powers of human subjectivity.
But what of disability? Sight is a bodily sense, and people experience it differently. In considering vision as a metaphor for understanding and subjectivity, we often fail to acknowledge its ableist implications. In English, we use the word “see” to mean “understand.” I see your point, I might say. The word “blind” as a figure for lack of knowledge or perception runs rampant. People claim to be “blind to race,” as if not looking at somebody were the same as not participating in a racist society…
