Abstract
This chapter examines Maturana and Varela’s autopoietic theory and José Saramago’s Blindness. It argues that Blindness stages a new realist ontology of knowledge that shows striking parallels to autopoietic theory. The chapter’s first part examines Maturana and Varela’s anti-representational theory of knowledge: its pivotal insight is that all knowledge is primarily about worlds, and about world-making. Far from involving a pre-given observer representing a pre-given reality, knowledge is about the co-constitution of minds and worlds in the process of living. The second part focuses on Blindness’s depiction of the apocalyptic collapse of a city in the wake of a fantastic epidemic of white-blindness. It highlights the novel’s critical examination of the age-old connection between vision and knowledge. Saramago is shown to present a phenomenology of blind perception offering two insights. First, in destroying the fiction of the Cartesian detached observer, white-blind perception is immersed in its embodiment, demonstrating that blind minds are “embodied minds” in Maturana and Varela’s sense, minds thrown back on the sensorimotor apparatus of their bodies. Second, the white-blind discover that survival requires them to reconstitute their world from the ground up in an enactive rather than autonomous process: they reclaim their humanity as a symbiotic collective.
Published Version
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