The Speech of the Blind

Both George and Butler’s texts, dealing with the issues of representation and misrepresentation, provide insight into how exactly hegemony and alterity interfere with, or rather shape, experience, and by examining such normative claims inherent within these constructions, one can attempt to transcend their existing order.

Butler argues in terms of a ‘feminist critique’ in her work Gender Troubles, addressing problems within the feminist movement as being causes of misrepresentation. By comparing and contrasting, or rather by showing a progression from, Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray, Butler finds that the issue with a feminine critique comes down to attempting to build a social constructionist theory of gender on the basis of an almost arbitrarily established binary. This binary has become so established and naturalized within our episteme that even a counter-movement against issues within the binary does not even address the issue of why such a binary should exist in the first place. Its representation seeks to describe much more than the ‘biology’ of a person, and “the sex which is not one, then, provides a point of departure for a criticism of hegemonic Western representation and of the metaphysics of substance that structures the very notion of the subject” (13). The representation of the subject is what needs to be examined.

In a similar fashion, George quotes Keller, and connects her to Burke on the basis of a similar idea, saying “We cannot be free…until we know the nature of our bondage and examine the chains that bind us” (341). In this way, both Keller and Butler are feminist and disability critics. They are not only attempting to fight against a hegemonic order that has ostracized their identified presence, but they are doing so by deconstructing the basis for such alterity. Moreover, Keller argues against critics who say that she cannot possibly know about the things she writes about because of her inability to see or hear, by essentially questioning the notion that the critic could possibly know them either. This brings to mind not only Locke’s understanding of signification and the inability to know the essence of substances, but perhaps more concretely it reminds me of the “Egyptian Life-Class” metapicture presented in Mitchell’s text, and moreover Burke’s theory of terministic screens. While seeing and hearing seem essential to our means of experience, Helen Keller, capable of three of the ascribed senses, is able to write about our mutual experiences in a similar fashion, emphasizing and reinforcing the Burkian concept that language does in fact bring things into being: “the brain of the race is so permeated with color that it dyes even the speech of the blind” (345). This in itself can be taken as a mechanism to dismantle deterministic claims, like Butler’s, on the basis of a hegemonic order.