Dialogue in The Dark: A New Way of Seeing

How to Create An Harmonious City for Blind And Partially Sighted People

Blu-Mathilde Bonan

More than two million people in the United Kingdom live with sight loss. Nevertheless, government officials and policymakers do not take this portion of the population into account. In this essay, I contend that an anthropological approach to city design could lead to a more inclusive ‘way of seeing’. My research is based in London and follows my experience in a multi-sensorial exhibition set in complete darkness. By initially illustrating phenomenological approaches to the landscape, I then emphasize how its unfixed nature elicits ‘unexpected’ responses from different people; finally, I demonstrate that the unpredictable nature of cityscapes should be a collective concern as ‘being’ implies ‘being-with-others’.

A few months ago, I experienced ‘seeing’ in complete darkness. For the first time in my life, I was able to move beyond sight, by ‘seeing’ London landscapes through senses other than the visual. For one hour I became blind. I engaged in an experience called “Dialogue in the Dark”, an immersive, sensorial exhibition where commonplace actions, such as crossing a road, taking a bus, and going to a food market or coffee shop, were undertaken in complete darkness (Dialogue In The Dark, 2020). Under such conditions, roles are reversed. Blind individuals, who are accustomed to navigating the world in complete darkness, guide the sighted participants who, during this experience, are unable to see. This strong and impactful exhibition represents a way of cultivating a shared understanding of the world. De facto, a dialogue set in the dark could have the potential to lay the grounds for a more inclusive construction of city landscapes; one that takes ‘being’ as ‘being-with-others’ (Coward, 2010).

In the aftermath of this experience, I became aware of the ways in which the London city landscape “reveals” itself to blind and partially sighted people. Sadly, I soon came to realise that government officials and policy makers scarcely acknowledge the diversity of lived experiences found within the built environment. As a matter of fact, nearly half of all blind and partially-sighted people in the UK have reported feelings of anxiety and fear when moving around public spaces, with 95% of people colliding with obstacles found in their neighbourhoods and one third receiving serious injuries within a period of just three months (RNIB, 2015). While more than two million people are living with loss of sight across the United Kingdom (RNIB, 2018/19), documents show that instead of facilitating universal access, the layout of streets continues to frustrate the implementation of undifferentiated mobility. The law clearly states that there is a governmental duty to prevent obstructions (Highway Act, 1980 in ibid.) and forbid discriminatory public functions and unequal access to information (Equality Act, 2010 in ibid.); nevertheless, the problem persists owing to a complete lack of understanding, on the part of policy makers, of the lived realities of Others, and the barriers they encounter. One might find that a reconsideration of the interconnectedness of people, their shared environment and material objects is essential for the construction of a more inclusive society and infrastructure. Thus, the decision to approach this issue anthropologically could lead officials to acknowledge the importance of engaging with those who are ‘different’ when investigating the ways in which a city landscape could be built and designed to support and accommodate diversity. How can insight into the needs of others be attained? How can the sighted understand the blind, and vice versa? And how can the built environment become functionally visible to all? A recognition of one’s connection to others and an acceptance of ‘being-with-others’ (Coward, 2010) as an essential part of ‘being’, could be a starting point for identifying inclusivity as a necessary component of city life. Firstly, I will investigate a phenomenological understanding of the world, in order to emphasise the different ways of ‘seeing’ that blind and partially sighted people employ when moving around the London cityscape; I will then elucidate the power-of-things (Bennett, 2004) and materials, as unexpected ‘actants’ (Latour, 1993) on the ways in which the built environment is experienced. Finally, I will examine how infrastructures and mobility can be understood as part of networks that imply not an individual embodiment, but rather a social one. Before concluding, I will briefly analyse the ways in which the issue could be resolved by government officials if they were to adopt an anthropological approach, or otherwise if they were to emphasise the importance of an ongoing conversation. Dialogue, after all, is necessary for any network to function properly.

A Phenomenological Approach to Landscapes

‘This evening I came out of the front door and it was raining. I stood for a few minutes lost in the beauty of it. Rain brings out the contours of what surrounds you. In that, it introduces a blanket of differentiated and specialised sounds which fills the hole of the audible environment. If only there could be something equivalent to rain falling inside, then the hole of a room would take on shape and dimension. Instead of being isolated, cut off, preoccupied internally, you are presented with a world; you are related to a world; you are addressed by a world. Why should this experience strike one as being beautiful? Cognition is beautiful, it’s beautiful to know’.
(John Hull, 1983 in Notes on Blindness, 2016)

John Hull, after losing his sight, decided to keep an audio diary as a way to document what it means to know and see in a world beyond sight. In the marvellously shot documentary, ‘Notes on Blindness’ (2016), the viewer faces the lived reality of a blind individual; the suffering, the frustrations, as well as the ways of coping and rediscovering a world filled up and rescaled by senses other than the visual. Hearing, smell, touch, and taste guided John’s imagination as he recreated a world where his consciousness, his past memories, his interests, and even his perception of time had to be recalibrated and harmonised with a life in the dark (Hull, 1983 in 2016). His notes suggest, however, that he found his own ways of knowing; his own ways of making sense of the world by, for instance, listening to the rain fall on the ground or touching his path in order to establish the environment that surrounded him.

Cognition can be said to be an embodied experience, as human beings act in multidimensional and multi-sensorial ways. While, the Cartesian division of the mind and body has long been overcome (Descartes, 1986 [1641]), there is still a tendency to concentrate on and privilege the visual sense. Edmund Husserl was the first philosopher to highlight the importance of using our full sensory apparatus to understand the world around us (1960); followed by Merleau-Ponty with his theory of embodiment, according to which, the way we think depends very much on what type of body we have (1962 [1945] ). Following this line of thought, it seems clear why policy makers in the context of London, and the general sighted population, have difficulties conceptualising the world of the blind. While anthropologists have debated extensively the possibility of an objective understanding of the world of ‘others,’ the way we ‘see’ largely depends on our cultural and embodied backgrounds. Using ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 1973) or, in other words, immersing oneself into the social world of others using the body as the primary research tool, can give a better understanding and knowledge of the sensed world of ‘others’. Christine Helliwell’s experience with the Dayak people in Borneo (1996) illustrates this idea. As an anthropologist, Helliwell visited these people’s longhouse apartments in order to grasp their modes of sociality and forms of relations; however, she soon realised that the typically Western hegemonic orientation to the visual element of perception prevented her from understanding what the ‘self’ truly meant to the Dayak people. Rather than being linked to an autonomous individual, selfhood is presumed to be collective. Similarly, although the structure of the longhouses suggested separate apartments to a visual observation; through the use of other senses, such as the ‘hearing’ of voices, the collective nature of the buildings makes itself ‘visible’. The longhouses had to be lived in and used by Helliwell, in order for her to fully capture what constitutes sociality in the Dayak community (1996). In other words, a multi-sensorial approach to the study of ‘others’ opens up the possibility of a mutual understanding of how the built environment and society are experienced by those who cannot see. As we shall see, it is the Western obsession with vision as the primary sense that led to the building of landscapes that rely on and only function properly through the use of this one sense.

'Who put that there?': The Power of Things

In 2019, the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB), a community led by blind and partially-sighted people, initiated a campaign, called ‘Inclusive Journeys’, to give a voice to those people who are not usually heard. In one of their videos, the campaign manager Hugh Huddy (Seeing London’s Streets Differently, 2020) highlights the everyday challenges visually-impaired people face, worsened by features of the shared environment which are badly designed and by streets which are disorganised or poorly maintained across the city of London. Huddy states, ‘The [city’s] design is just an accident waiting to happen’ (ibid.). In the video, he also delineates the ways in which some of the elements of the built environment are designed to be visualised by those who do not see. Tactile paving (bumpy, textured paving that signals the end of a road junction: Image 3) and ‘talking buses’ (buses that voice their route number), for instance, were received as empowering guides for visually impaired people. Nevertheless, he also outlines many negative aspects found around the city that could be easily improved, but which are often overlooked by government officials or erroneously dismissed as unimportant, such as deckles bikes randomly lying on the streets (Image 4), or a pavement dropping off abruptly onto a road that is flat (Image 5).

Everyone experiences the built environment differently as indeed ‘everyone is different’, and bodily practices influence cognition, which in turn creates social relations and specific social realities. For instance, in a research paper by Matthews and Vuiakovic, sketches of the cognitive maps of a group of wheelchair users and a group of non-disabled students were analysed. The results showed that there was a distortion in the maps of the former, which represented a simpler picture of the town of Coventry, as they cognitively represented the barriers they would encounter when moving around the city centre by wheelchair (1995 in Ungar, 1997). From this perspective, the built environment is thus not to be understood as immutable and fixed, but rather as ever-changing and mutable according to each individual’s life path. Space, after all, is socially produced (cognitively, physically and emotionally), and as such it can always be open to transformation and change (Tilley, 1994). In addition, each individual gives a different meaning to each place, depending on their life events. Hence, according to Christopher Tilley, a landscape must be truly felt to be understood. However, these feelings can be conveyed to those who are “different” only if they are perceived, discussed, and recounted (1994). In sum, phenomenologically speaking, the world is experienced differently according to each individual body; thus, there is no doubt that sighted policy makers and designers have difficulties conceptualising blind and partially sighted individuals’ everyday challenges. The environment is mutable and unfixed. As such, there is a necessity for those who implement changes in the landscapes to understand the realities of ‘others’. I will now investigate why this is important by highlighting the power-of-things and their impact on everyday social realities.

Continuing with the theme discussed above, landscapes have an ontological nature. They create life stories, and as a result they form specific social relations that are often made visible only once discussed. By virtue of the biographical nature of landscapes, it is inevitable that people will develop an intimacy and familiarity with the sensorial elements of their surroundings and, consequently, these surroundings often go unrecognized even by the sighted. It has been widely demonstrated that the agency of the material world appears visible only when unexpected events occur (e.g. Yaneva, 2008) . While this may be the case for those who see, the power of the built environment is unquestionable in the lives of blind and partially-sighted people, as the ‘unexpected’ is part of their daily routine. One way to accommodate blindness is to make everyday paths familiar. As John Hull describes in one of his notes: ‘One fights back by adopting tiny techniques: familiarity, predictability; the same objects, the same little movements of the hand. One has to establish some kind of environment: study a room, a route, a path in order to establish some kind of territory’ (Notes on Blindness, 2016). Nevertheless, landscapes, the built environment and material objects are ever-changing and variable according to specific perspectives and particular times. For instance, Nicky Gregson illuminates the fluctuating attributes of the deadly material asbestos, that is either defined as hazardous or benign (2010). De facto, it tends to remain invisible to the user’s eye, (such as in the case of its hidden presence in the windows of Selfridges); and, it appears only once structures have been demolished or repaired. It then makes itself known by its extremely negative effects (ibid.). Materials, like buildings, are performative as they always have the potential to exceed and surprise (Gregson, 2010; Yaneva, 2008; Ingold, 2012). This potentiality is part of the daily challenges blind and partially sighted people face when moving around the city of London. Every year more and more individuals report injuries due to ‘unexpected’ objects placed on familiar paths. ‘Who put that there?!’ . Cars parked on pavements, bins and advertising boards, while remaining virtually invisible to those who see, seem to pose the greatest threat to those who do not. As Mohammed, an interviewee, for instance, reports:

‘Bins are a big problem. When the rubbish bins are collected they are left out on the pavements. This makes it harder for me to walk around. The pavements aren’t wide enough to get round if there is a bin on them as well. I have hurt myself so many times. I have fallen over and have scraped my arm or my knee on the bins. I sometimes get abuse from people down my street because when I knock into the bins they sometimes fall over and damage the cars’. (RNIB, 2015)

In other words, blind and partially sighted people have a clear ‘view’ of the ‘force of things’ (Bennett, 2004), as, indeed, they suffer from the consequences of an inanimate object’s ability ‘to animate, to act, to produce effects that can be dramatic and subtle’ (ibid.: 351, my italics). Thus, material objects can shift between different states of being: to transform trash bins from inanimate objects for those who place them and those who see them, into animate obstacles and sources of injury for those who are blind or sight-impaired. This is where the problem lies. While government officials identify bins as simply ‘a residue of human action and inaction’ (ibid.: 350) – as objects related to daily occurrences which go largely unnoticed – blind and partially-sighted people detect and ‘visualise’ these objects as alive on their own terms, ‘as existing excesses of human flows or projects’ (ibid.: 530), which command attention and inspire fear. As a result, although most sight-impaired individuals have learned how to have a dialogue with the built environment, this dialogue can be corrupted, and material objects can elicit unanticipated and/or unpredictable responses.

Unfortunately, modern society neglects the importance of different individuals’ responses to material objects in society’s infrastructure, defining them as part of individual dialogues that do not affect the general community. This follows a grand line of thought that began with modernism. Modernism was a movement that illuminated the general public by defining a specific ‘norm’ as having the aspiration of being an encompassing structure. For instance, architect Le Corbusier created a specific model that defined a healthy, physically strong and capable individual as the ‘norm’, and anyone who did not align with this category would be classified as ‘abnormal’ (Image 6). Consequently, the built environment was designed to fit the modular ‘norm’, which encompassed only a minute portion of society. It is not surprising that this ambitious social engineering project failed, since it overlooked the diversity and complexity of humanity (Ungar, 1997). On the other hand, the advent of postmodernism in the 1970s greatly emphasised style over human needs and, as such, those people who had special requirements were generally excluded from any type of inclusive participation and inclusive movement within the built environment. A contemporary example that clearly demonstrates this issue is the way in which information around the cityscape of London is delivered. Here, government officials fail to acknowledge those whose capacity to receive information is limited; instructions and news are disseminated through mediums such as site notices, leaflets or websites, thereby deliberately rendering the built environment ‘illegible’ to blind and partially sighted individuals. Unfortunately, today’s society still seems to follow the ‘individual model of impairment’ that defines ‘being out of the norm’ as a personal tragedy and characterizes the relation between the specific individual and their surrounding environment as a mismatch (ibid.); society, in other words, hides behind the ideology of ‘neoliberalism’, which assumes that each person’s freedom is based on their own responsibilities (Hyatt, 1997). In this way, the built environment is defined as an objective reality that disabled people have to negotiate with and navigate for themselves. The collective environment is translated into an individual dialogue for all.

To Be, is to 'Be-with-Others' 

Nonetheless, Mohammed’s claim demonstrates that objects, such as trash bins, do not only exercise power over the individual recipient by performing the ‘unexpected’; they also have effects on the larger community. When Mohammed knocks down the bins because he cannot see them, he often damages nearby cars, thus exercising power over the latter (RNIB, 2015). It is safe to say that no ‘actant’ (Latour, 1993) exists independently, but rather actants mediate between all material bodies. According to Actor-Network Theory, everything functions within a specific set of networked relations, where material objects act as mediums between differing social relations (1993). As said by Frow (2001 in Bennet, 2004:355), ‘difference needs to be flattened, read horizontally as a juxtaposition rather than vertically as a hierarchy of being’. In other words, the ‘norm’ implies interconnected differences that need to be acknowledged in order for the network to function properly. Martin Coward brilliantly exposes this issue by recasting the citizen not as an autonomous being, but rather as something inseparable from his/her context, which also includes non-human material bodies (2010). It is specifically the latter that bond individuals with ‘otherness,’ and this relation is emphasised by the author as an essential requirement for the existence of a community. Coward delineates that in the modern state of globalisation exposure to the ‘other’ is what constitutes the current nation-state. Within such a state, metropolitan life is the perfect representation of this relational quality. In cities such as London, life consists of distinctive mobilities: ‘mass movements of bodies, the swift movement of information, and the precise dispersal of goods, power, and waste (2010). The individual worker, then, is inseparable and constituted in and through a complex assemblage of transport, fibre optics, copper wire, and tunnels’ (ibid.: 473). ‘To be’ in such cities, implies a shared reality with ‘others’, and thus entails ‘being-with-others’. This shared reality defines the boundary where the self and the other are established: ‘the point where self stops and other begins’ (ibid.: 476). In other words, sighted individuals need to take into account the ways in which blind and partially sighted people interact with the environment, as the latter constitutes the shared reality that defines each individual’s existence. Dialogue is thus necessary for the functionality of the entire network.

'Dialogue in the Dark' and  concluding words 

As we have seen above, information is transmitted to blind and partially sighted people in a way that cannot be effectively received. It thus comprises a unilateral intimation to a non-universal audience, since, without doubt, visual information is illegible to those who cannot see. As such, responses by the latter might not conform to the expectations of the specific neighbours and policy makers. An organism, after all, functions only if all of its elements collaborate and engage in a constant ‘conversation’ (Simondon, 2017 [1958]). As Coward states, ‘touching is a hybrid event in which human and nonhuman join at shared surfaces of contact: where walls tell us about the singularity we are when we dwell in a particular house, or wires expose us to the plural others whose messages are carried along them’ (2010: 478). Indeed, phenomenologists would affirm that to deeply understand the ‘other’s’ position, one would have to engage bodily and sensorially with their world. However, it seems quite optimistic to think that government would actually engage with this approach. Instead, I argue that a candid conversation with these ‘others’ would be a more helpful strategy. It has been shown in many other cases that the involvement of the recipients of change is essential for the proper delivery of that change (e.g. Fennel, 2011). Help, in other words, can be provided only once the presence of ‘otherness’ is accepted as a necessary condition for a society to properly function: a society that, after all, exists only as a ‘being-with-others’. How can we have insights into other people? How can the sighted understand the blind? Through real engagement with locals’ blind experiences and their integration into the construction of the city. Building for diversity is the answer; not the reverse.

More than two million people in the UK are visually impaired. Nevertheless, governments officials and policy makers still do not take this portion of the population into account. This is evident by their definition of extremely underwhelming measures as sufficient to accommodate “different” needs. Through anthropological theories of the built environment, I investigated the ways in which the latter could be rendered visible to all. Firstly, I analysed phenomenological approaches to the landscape, as sensory embodiments of different personal realities. Then I considered how the unfixed and mutable nature of these landscapes could elicit unpredictable and ‘unexpected’ responses from different individuals who interact with them. Finally, I exposed the reasons why ‘the unexpected’ should be a collective concern, explaining that ‘being’ in a city implies ‘being-with-others’ and that a negative turn of events for one impacts the other. Accordingly, as a network, society can only function properly if there is an ongoing conversation between all of its constituents. Art projects, such as the exhibition ‘Dialogue in the Dark’ (2020) and the documentary film ‘Notes on Blindness’ (2016), can provide a wider understanding of the sensory experiences of a city set in complete darkness, and demand further investigation. However, what is crucial for the existence of a harmonised built environment is the integration of blind and partially-sighted people into policy making decisions and infrastructural projects. As Hugh states in the RNIB campaigning movie, ‘There isn’t really any such thing as a normal person, everyone on the street is different. And I’m just normal, because I’m different’ (2020). As such, to achieve harmony and have a society participate in an ongoing conversation aimed at improving the community and the quality of life of all its members, people need to start acknowledging and accommodating everyone . Thus, a dialogue without biases set in the dark could, eventually become the appropriate way of ‘seeing’.

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