Perceptual Aspects of Art for the Blind

Abstract

ness closely resembles that of the sounds of music. Musical sounds are pure dynamics, pure expression. Vision tells us that music is produced by sound-makers, but the music itself contains no such instruments. Music exemplifies the abstractness of the auditory world quite in general. The auditory world is limited to the activity of things, the voices of humans and animals, the noises of water and wind, the cracking and banging and whistling of materials manipulated by nature and humans. Therefore, as I mentioned, the auditory world is empty, reduced to ocThis content downloaded from 157.55.39.180 on Tue, 27 Sep 2016 04:32:52 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Art for the Blind 59 casional, mostly discontinuous signals. Whereas the visual world makes its presence constantly known and offers attractive targets and lures, sound appeals less to elementary attention. Fraiberg observes that the creeping of infants is motivated essentially by visual targets, things they want to reach, and that therefore children born blind will not creep unless they are given special incentives. Combine the auditory experiences, on which the blind so heavily depend for their knowledge of the outside, with the kinesthetic percepts reporting about the behavior of the body, and you get the sense of a thoroughly dynamic world, a world limited abstractly to action. But how about the equally indispensable knowledge of the objects performing the actions? The sense of touch, which informs sightless persons about the shape of things, does its work also in an entirely dynamic fashion. Touch lacks the abstractness of kinesthetic experience. It is geared to apprehending the presence of objects within bodily reach and to discovering their location, size, and shape. At the same time, however, its conscious dependence on the body hampers the kind of detachment from the self prompted by vision. To understand the difference between the self and the outer world is the primary task of human cognition. This achievement is necessarily delayed in the blind person because of the intimate haptic connection between the perceiver's own body and the objects perceived by touch. The central position of the self, which in visual perception is counteracted by the direct awareness of an outer world organized around centers of its own, is much less contested in haptic experience. The body of the perceiver occupies the largest space in the narrow territory of tactile reach. The body is constantly alive with the network of tensions that keeps its activity present in consciousness, whereas the outer objects transmit no such kinesthetic aliveness. Even so, the perceiver's self and the things it can touch are closely connected. From the base of the self's body, arm and hand reach unmistakably outward toward the object to be conquered. And while the exploration supplies knowledge about the objective dimensions of the physical things under scrutiny, the gestural operations by which the information is obtained preserve their dynamic abstractness of reaching, searching, meeting, pressing, embracing, etc. Consequently, the properties of the haptically explored objects are perceived in an equally dynamic fashion. The hands moving toward, say, a clay vessel standing on the table are met first of all by an active resistance, an obstacle that blocks the path of the exploration. The belly of the vessel bulges forward and outward. As the fingers grip the neck and converge around it, they experience it as an active constriction, which then reverts into the gaping aperture on top. Such dynamic perception is not alien to the sense of vision either,2 but it is much more compelling when the haptic senThis content downloaded from 157.55.39.180 on Tue, 27 Sep 2016 04:32:52 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms