Salience and Blindness: A Haptic Hike on Gins Mountain

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This paper attempts to follow an improbable ridge line between architecture, geography and linguistics, between the optic and haptic ends of the concept of salience, through a reading of Helen Keller Or Arakawa, Madeline Gins’s 1994 essay-cum-joint-biography partly devoted to “salience” approached through the blind figure of Helen Keller (1880-1968). In a chapter titled “Or Mountains Or Lines”, prominent features envisaged from a sighted perception give way, under the condition of blindness, to saddle-points, swivel-areas and moments of stylistic tentativeness when words and/or syntax begins to fail. Salience, revisited through Keller’s apprehension of mountains as vaporous and mobile masses, leads to tentativeness in writing and to what I here call “failience” in discourse: the failure to stabilise discursive referents, the unsettling reversibility of syntactic lines based, for example, on the swivel-point of an “-ing” form. At work in Gins’s writing is the invention of a cathectic, tactile grasp of the world through langage. In order to ease access to a “faulty” perception, Gins invites her readers to transit through the writing of blind cartographer William Prescott, in particular through his “tactile”, linear mapping of the Andes Cordillera, approached as a mobile rhizome rather than as a collection of fixed, “raised” points. Mapping, under conditions of blindness, implies wander lines as much as lines of (thin) air.