“I see a produce market,” says ViaOpta Daily, a new app developed by Basel-based bigpharma Novartis A.G. that provides visually impaired users with a narration of everyday life. But can an app really “see” and legitimately “speak” about what it sees? In this paper, I will explore the philosophical foundations and implications of a new class of assistive technologies (ATs) that aim to help the visually impaired to “read” daily life, textualizing and narrating that which is not yet textual or spoken, for example, a sunset or a busy street, as well as colors and objects.I seek to explore what the process of narration of the non-textual suggests about a realist correspondence between symbol (word), concept, and an external reality as perceived by the dominant sighted. How might one contrast “helping”, as Novartis hopes to do, the visually-impaired to “know” their experience in such a textual way, and alternative understandings of knowing the world that seek a renewed relationship of thought with language through the valorization of inner sensory experiences to which the visually impaired are believed to be particularly disposed? Given the textualization of lived experience through technology, how might we consider in a nuanced way the space for authorship, the vision and voice, of the visually impaired self?
After a presentation and analysis of the ViaOpta ATs and the discourses that accompany them, I will problematize the materialist realism suggested by the discourses promoting these ATs. Thinkers such as French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, physicist Arthur Zajonc, philosopher Georg Kühlewind, and blind writer and literary scholar Jacques Lusseyran suggest that our very consciousness, by which we come to understand ourselves, as microcosm, in relation to the macrocosm of nature or the world, has always been in a state of becoming. Furthermore, they remind us of the critical importance of perception and language in that becoming.A progress narrative towards an ever more quantified knowledge of ourselves and the world is rejected as the sufficient moral basis for technological development in favor of an ethics of free individual experience and interaction, with the attendant consequences for possible relationships to language, including silence. Here I hope to offer a critique of the dominant paradigm according to which ATs that narrate the non-textual for the visually impaired are developed and imagine an alternative trajectory for them that would make room for intuition (from Latin intueri, “to look at”) and imagination in being in the world, making them moral technologies. This includes space for the renewal of the mimetic faculty through the recovery of that primal, pre-textual relationship with objects and others that Walter Benjamin calls sensuous similarity.Or as Georg Kühlewind described it, “Once ‘tree’ also included the experience of the tree” (2008, 71).
The Boundary Object
I view these ATs as translation tools for the boundary object of blindness. Visually impaired individuals are grouped as a deficient population that carries the boundary object of deficient sensory perception into the worlds of governance and technoscience. Based on a sense of vision understood as a stable, unmoving, externally-situated capacity that can be read from the body, ATs promote a narrowly-defined understanding of vision as normative. Introducing this issue through an analysis of the ViaOpta suite of apps will allow to ground the ethical considerations of ATs built on such a normative view within a larger citizenship ethic.
Star et al. define boundary objects as:
“those scientific objects which both inhabit several intersecting social worlds and satisfy the informational requirements of each. Boundary objects are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common use, and become strongly structured in individual-site use. (…) They have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable means of translations. The creation and management of boundary objects is key in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting social worlds.” (1999, 509)
For ATs for the visually impaired, these social worlds include blind individuals, researchers, patient organizations (as shown on ViaOpta’s website and in the app), state welfare institutions, and NGOs. In the production of blindness as a boundary object, we can understand these various actors as collaborating to “produce representations of nature” (1999, 517).
The intersections of different social worlds and actors, according to Star et al.:
“place particular demands on representations and on the integrity of information arising from more than one world. When participants in the intersecting world share information together, their different commitments and perceptions are resolved into representations – in the sense that a fuzzy image is resolved by a microscope. This resolution does not mean consensus. Rather, representations or inscriptions contain at every stage the traces of multiple viewpoints, translations, and incomplete battles. (…) The production of boundary objects is one means of satisfying these potentially conflicting sets of concerns.” (1999, 520)
We might think of language as it operates in the ATs as one way that different ways of being in the world are channeled into a normative representation of a mechanical human being to satisfy the predictability necessary for a successful governance project, of a completed project for consciousness.
Introducing the ViaOpta Suite of Apps
The ViaOpta “suite” of apps, released in 2014, includes ViaOpta Daily, Hello, Nav, and Sim. Information about the apps can be found on their official website, https://www.viaopta-apps.com, and download is available free of charge on GooglePlay or Apple Store.
Via Opta Daily uses the camera of the patient’s smartphone to analyze, identify, and narrate objects, scenes, colors, money, and text. It also includes a magnifier, a timer, a selfie-taking assistant, and a weather function. Via OptaNav uses the GPS function of a smartphone or smartwatch to narrate the user’s journey to a new or favorite destination, as well as let their location be known by family and friends who are also connected through the app. ViaOpta Sim uses the smartphone’s camera to superpose over video, whether recorded or live, a “simulated” user-selected eye disease and selected degree of severity. Via Opta Hello, also available as software for desktop PCs, allows the user to associate a photo of a contact to the user’s contact list, marrying the facial recognition capacity of Microsoft AI Cognitive Services with the smartphone camera to allow real-time identification of individuals or alternatively their identification in photos, for example on social media. The range of functions of the family of apps addresses the unique challenges that often accompany visual impairment: loss of meaning in everyday life due to difficulty interacting with objects and others in the world (a need addressed by ViaOpta Daily), a solitary lifestyle due to reduced mobility (addressed by ViaOpta Nav), and social exclusion owing to discrimination, a lack of empathy, and public misunderstanding of visual impairment (addressed by ViaOpta Sim). Adjunctive to these challenges is the loss of economic value of the blind individual. Because the family of apps enlists the blind user (albeit anonymously) into a continuous data collection function for the development of recurrent neural networks involving object, facial, and speech recognition by artificial intelligence, all essential for an emerging techno-bio-governance capacity, we can think of the blind user as acquiring through their use economic value vis-à-vis major players like Microsoft and Novartis through demonstrating to the latter the utility of the blind market segment.
Each of the apps has been downloaded by over 10K users, a small portion of the estimated 250 million individuals globally who are affected by visual impairment. Perhaps because the apps were developed in collaboration with patient organizations, I struggled to find critical feedback about them. In the sections that follow, I will undertake a critical analysis of each, seeking to understand how value operates through the app and calling attention to the philosophical assumptions of its development. I will seek to appreciate how these aspects are communicated through discourse, such as television advertisements available for view on YouTube.
ViaOpta Daily
The Novartis website describes ViaOpta Daily as “a personal assistant to help people with low vision with their everyday activities.” The general conditions of the app caution, however, that it “has been designed to simulate and support real-life situations but does not replace human senses”. It is available in twelve languages,and its functions and benefits are described by the app website as allowing the user to:
“understand the world around you with greater ease using features such as the voice-guided money, scene, object, and color recognizers; learn what is in front of you with the new scene and object recognizer features; listen to the weather forecast, set a timer, and access your phone’s contact list. The app also has a built-in magnifying glass for convenience.”
The icons on the mobile interface are adapted for low vision and can be rearranged or removed as convenient for the user.
It should be noted that ViaOpta Daily is not unique in offering these functions. For object and scene recognition, apps like TapTapSee and CamFind are popular, but come with a subscription price of around $10. Apps like Prizma, KNFB Reader, VoiceDream are available for purchase for text-to-speech translation, LookTel for money recognition, and Selfiex for selfie assistance. For two years now, a new free-of-charge app called BeMyEyes exists as an alternative for many of these functions, matching a blind user who requests narration through the app with a sighted human volunteer who provides narration from a distance, though pending availability of a volunteer.
The official TV advertisement for ViaOpta Daily, transcribed below in Appendix A, shows a blind middle-aged woman waking up to start her day by connecting to the app. She pulls the curtains of her home and feels the sun on her face while the app reads aloud in a suave female voice that it is 21°C and sunny. The blind woman then takes the app to her closet where it reads aloud the colors of assorted dresses, among which a short purple one is chosen. The blind woman walks outside to the produce market and buys three pounds of plump green grapes. The male greengrocer places them in her market tote and gives her a five-euro bill for change, for which she solicits the app to confirm the amount. The advertisement concludes with the blind woman producing her white cane and walking down the sidewalk smiling. “The biggest help is always invisible,” says the advertisement. “ViaOpta Daily, an application for Normal Life.”
Blind people are often considered to be invisible in society (and society and the world invisible to them), but thanks to the help of what Bruno Latour would call a non-human actor (H-NH-H), blind people recover visibility. The advertisement implies that integration with a non-human actor, through use of ATs, by which experience is mediated and narrated on demand, leads to a normal life, that is to say, interaction with the world that is not anomalous or pathological. The advertisement suggests some habits that lead to happiness: living alone with lots of devices, performing gender symbolically through dress, and shopping for food. Two further aspects of normal life are especially salient in the advertisement. One is the suggestion that a non-human actor can be a substitute for trust among human actors, as implied when the blind woman must use the app to confirm that the greengrocer has indeed given her five euros in change. Traditionally, when a sighted person is in the presence of a blind person, the sighted person assumes the responsibility of narrating objects for the latter. This can create an awkward situation of reciprocity for the gift of narration. Another is the subtle naturalization of visual primacy and the imperative of satisfying it, as the advertisement is clearly intended for appreciation by the sighted public. The blind actress selects her clothes and chooses her appearance in terms of what sighted society will see (what the advertisement’s sighted viewers see). If the blind woman has a congenital visual impairment, her relationship with color may not accord with that of sighted society, and other considerations, like texture, might take precedence in wardrobe choices. However, the app does not have a function for this. The sighted viewer comes away from the advertisement with a feeling of satisfaction that the app meets all the criteria necessary for the blind individual to be included according to current terms governing social-cultural life, and as a result, to be happy (like the sighted viewer is).
Critical feedback of the app on the AppStore and Google Play was always superficial and involved complications with the app’s functions, such as failing to recognize some objects, misidentifying money denominations, crashing when used on Android devices, conflicting with the narration of the VoiceOver function on iPhone, and perhaps more interestingly, failing to read motion, which I confirmed by putting the app to use. In doing so, I encountered other interesting situations, including some indicative of more foundational issues, situations that I will call “failures” because the narrative provided by the app inadequately captured my own experience of the object or scene in question.
Superficial concerns are not the focus of this paper, but I will address them briefly here insofar as they speak to deeper concerns. When photographing various paintings around my house, the app sometimes chose to describe them by genre (“abstract paintings”) and other times to describe what it considered salient aspects (“red flowers”). There was no way as a sighted user and in some cases as the artist of the painting that I could help the app learn to improve its description to make its language use convey my experience.
Walking outside with the app, I found it to be mostly accurate, though sometimes adding descriptions suggestive of visual primacy, such as “gloomy sky” when, eyes closed, the sky did not appear gloomy to me.
I also found the length of time between photographing a scene and receiving a narration of it to be excessive, and a source of anxiety as I could not wait patiently in calm and presence, but instead had to listen to the app’s noise (“Please wait while processing the image”) repeat itself mechanically and monotonously until the description was produced, sometimes up to 30 seconds later. Presumably this is because, as indicated in the terms and conditions of the app, the photographs must first be sent to CloudSight, Inc. located in California (or to ABBYY in Moscow, in the case of text) for processing. The most interesting situation I encountered outside was photographing a tree from lying on the sidewalk, a non-traditional perspective because not based upon the position of the eyes for knowledge.
This was described by the app as “low angle photography of a leafless tree”. Such description further confirmed to me that the app has been developed with an understanding of sight as emanating from the eyes, as the tree could only considered to be viewed at a “low angle” in relation to the normal position of human eyes. This was also the only instance when the app described an image as “photography”, marking the image as artistic or fanciful because it was taken from a non-sighted perspective. In reality, all of the images I took with the app are equally photographs, though benefitting from the privilege of unmarkedness thanks to their sighted positionality which such unmarkedness in language (“photography”) further naturalizes.
Returning inside my apartment, the app was able to identify many things, but not my desk, presumably because it involves many different objects in a small space. However, rather than admit that it could not identify the space and ask for my feedback in improving its description (so that cluttered and eclectic spaces might also become legitimate desks!), the app simply went silent and did not display a description.
The situations below illustrate how the description of the app can be correct while still failing. These include reducing a menorah to a candelabra (which it of course is, but not only), calling a crucifix a “Jesus Christ statue” (which it also includes), and perceiving a WWI memorial which depicts a woman and a statue just as these elements without recognizing them as part of a larger memorial.
Not surprisingly, the app struggles with reductionism and with understanding objects as wholes when taken from different angles and perspectives. It successfully distinguished my Turkish Angora white and tortoiseshell cat Theo from my stuffed lion, but sometimes recognized Theo as being a white cat and otherwise as a brown cat, depending on the perspective. He could not be recognized as the same, whole cat.
Nuanced colors and patterns are also underdeveloped in the app. Colors with different patterns (e.g. lace, gingham, stripes, paisley) are sometimes misidentified and their patterns incorrectly narrated or unrecognized entirely, while hues such as citrine and mustard are conflated into “brown” or left unidentified. This could create a preference for recognizable, common colors.
The app has a good capacity to recognize wood even when painted, although it sometimes describes wooden things as “brown”.
When describing plants, the app uses the color “green” to describe living plants and the adjective “withered” to describe dying or dead plants. It successfully recognizes tulips but not hydrangeas, and distinguished artificial flowers from living ones in only one instance. When the artificial plant too closely resembles the original, the app cannot tell that it is not living. Just as wood, living and dying, primal and transformed, are however layers of life that are very easy to sense without sight through the senses of touch and smell.
The app recognized me as a woman in all instances, though sometimes it describes my glasses as black and brown, sometimes as tortoiseshell, and still other times does not mention my glasses at all. It chooses the salient aspects of my appearance that are worthy of narration without asking for my feedback on which aspects I would like to be salient, namely the choice to be described as a woman rather than simply a person.
Because description conveys value, I am left wondering what role for the experience of value as informed by the user has been imagined in the development of this app. ARWorks, the company who contributed to its development, explains in a YouTube video that the app has been trained to recognize not only objects but also branded objects, such as Beats by Dre, Mountain Dew, GoPro Hero4, Korg, Kapo, Hugo Boss, and Apple. Clearly, then, it is possible to include additional aspects of an object into the description. The Latin etymology of the name ViaOpta includes via (by way of) and optare (opto) (to choose). Through choice, the market can continue, and ViaOpta can be credited for expanding that market to the blind segment of society. But my concern is with how the descriptions themselves can be made subject to free user choice. What possibility exists to mobilize the market to help technology evolve towards an ever more relevant and present and living way of using language according to holistic experience, including the inner experience, of users? How might it be made to learn to respect this experience in a balanced way, narrating life only when the user requests such narration, as well as learning from this experience? In this way, its function might be distinguished between assistance with everyday objects, effectively relieving the user from exerting their attention in tasks which have little value to them,and learning to narrate new objects, which can only be known and fully described through the lived experience of the user with them, such relationship to form being an important site of meaning formation and renewal. This is an important question to raise now as the capabilities of ATs such as ViaOpta are still in their infancy and humanizing their functions (as opposed to mechanizing the consciousness of their users) at an early stage could ultimately lead to more future choice. This will no doubt require much creativity and disruption given the profit expectations of owners of such apps. As a tweet by an intellectual property lawyer reminded me: ViaOpta is an “amazing digital product,” she writes, “but how do we protect (…) IP?”
ViaOpta Hello
ViaOpta Hello is a joint venture between Microsoft and Novartis that enables facial recognition of one’s consenting contacts through adding their photo to the app. They are sent an email where they are invited to upload photos of themselves for analysis, recognition, and narration. This is an important investment in the blind market segment for Microsoft because Apple has long captured this market, having been the first tech company to incorporate accessibility features as standard on all its products, such as VoiceOver on iPhone. According to the Windows blog, the app took five years to develop (Sauer). According to the app’s website, ViaOpta Hello:
“uses Cognitive services and Microsoft latest image analysis technology to identify people, items, and scenes. Microsoft Cognitive Services work across devices and platforms such as iOS, Android, and Windows. (…) The desktop app can provide a description of the content of pictures from any available document library, and if the picture contains a known contact, the app will identify them by name.”
The official TV advertisement, transcribed below in Appendix B, begins by highlighting many technological innovations such as braille keyboards that have offered greater accessibility to the visually impaired. The narrator then explains that there are still “challenges and needs that are not being met”, and immediately reminds us that “Novartis is committed to helping all people that are affected by challenging healthcare issues”. The accessibility and inclusion of the blind in society is reduced to a “healthcare issue” with social, cultural, and spiritual causes evacuated from the frame. The app is touted as a “digital solution” to reduce “anxiety” and “uncertainty about nearby people and surroundings” following a need expressed by “patient organizations”. The advertisement conflates the capacity of object recognition with facial recognition, essentially reducing the person to a thing among others in its presentation. The blind woman’s friends, whom she photographs in conversation together before approaching them, are recognized and named alongside “a small house”, “a kitchen with stainless steel appliances”, “a flower arrangements”, and a “produce market”. The most awkward part of this app is absent from the advertisement: while the facial recognition feature, like the object recognition, is no doubt indispensable for social media participation and saves sighted people the burden of having to caption their photos with written descriptions, it is not at all clear why a blind person would need the app to alert them to the presence of a contact in real life, “to recognize those around them,” when the person can introduce themselves and greet the blind person as they would any other person.
The advertisement promises to help “patients to participate more fully in their lives,” but judging from the kinds of activities highlighted in this advertisement, one wonders if it is not mainly a question of getting blind people to participate more fully in (alienated) social economic life, through allowing the major players in that life fuller participation in their personal lives. This might require espousing a definition of identity (based on bodily/facial appearance) conducive to the utility of the major players that the blind user and/or their contacts do not share.
Performing gender is also a salient aspect of this advertisement: after attending the business meeting followed by shopping in London, the blind woman meets her male partner for a walk. This is consistent with the other ViaOpta advertisements which only represent heterosexual orientations, implying that their sexuality is the only “normal” life. The ads reify the classic gender binary and the utility of the material reproductive life, suggesting little room for other values, other ways of being an “I” as future-value, in the process of digital transformation.
ViaOpta Sim
This app is designed especially for health care providers (HCPs) and caregivers to simulate the progression of many popular degenerative eye diseases,though users have been quick to point out that the eye diseases available for simulation are rather limited.Like ViaOpta Daily and Hello, it uses the camera function of the user’s smartphone or tablet as a means to supply the background against which vision loss will be simulated. In the TV advertisement for this app, transcribed below in Appendix E, it is promised to help HCPs “visualize the real-world implications these patients face”, including “the emotional frustration of the patient.” The app allows physicians to “view life through the eyes of a patient” and “to walk in the patients’ shoes”, offering a rare “first-person look at living with a visual impairment”. The ad ends with a testimony from an ophthalmologist in Kalamata, Greece.
The main problem with ViaOpta Sim, it seems to me, is its conflation of experience with visual perception, in suggesting the possibility of experiencing a patient’s “emotional frustration” through a simulated visual perception. To suggest as much equates viewing life without any inner experience the patient might bring, including by way of the other senses, and considering their own history of blindness, especially at what age in their life visual perception began to decline.
Clearly there is value creation in having access to the data of non-visually impaired users through this app, the only app in the suite that extends to their market segment, as well as value for a company in positioning itself as indispensable in the patient-HCP relationship. But one wonders if such an app can really capture the integral lived experience of visual impairment. Blind writers such as Jacques Lusseyran caution that, for them, the experience of blindness is rarely the darkness that the sighted believe it to be. In other words, ViaOpta Sim cannot accurately capture full embodied, ensouled, living perception, only visual acuity, and further is built on the assumption of a large role of the latter in the patient’s perception of the world.
ViaOpta Sim contributes to the medicalization of blindness by fragmenting what is in reality a unified experience of life for the blind person who has at their disposal many other senses with which to engage the world, senses which are often more developed for them than for the sighted majority. This fragmentation of perception is then named with the corresponding disease and the progression of visual perception from “normal” vision to severe, from light to darkness, can then be simulated with the swipe of a finger. That “normal” vision is the default view of the device’s camera, and that users access the app through similar devices, has a normalizing universal message that reinforces the ideal of one “normal” shared sense of sight and allows the pathologization of blindness as a technical challenge only, through a mimesis of the eye with the camera lens. If ViaOpta Sim were to avoid being bio-normative, it would need to show not only the possibilities of objects according to one’s level of access to the light which illumines them, but also the range of possible dispositions to the light itself, the range of ways of being in relation to the objects. This would allow to capture the ways of understanding the essences of things (or lack thereof), of perceiving the spiritual (or lack thereof) in the material.
The advertisement mentions that ViaOpta Sim allows “a dialogue that treats beyond the conventional pill.” While the intention may be to help others take eye diseases seriously despite the lack of pills that exist for treating some of them (like dry AMD), the app translates blindness itself, understood as abnormal perception, as a disease to different sighted groups (HCPs, caretakers). In this deficit mindset, by enlisting these sighted groups to a reductionist view of conscious perception, a company is able to position itself – its technological intervention and eventual pills – as the cure, continuing the allopathic tradition of “fighting against” anomalies rather than try to work with them, understanding diseases as living phenomena that seek to evolve our dying material embodiment. Seeking to understand blindness in an integral way might include addressing society’s disposition and values as the source of difficulties, rather than just the eye. An object (smartphone) shared by all becomes an actor which translates the deficiency to different market segments who can make sense of it in the desired way. Through the new visibility afforded by the app, the blind are imagined to “see” in a pathologized way requiring a mechanical perceptive fix. As a popular image circulated on social media on the occasion of “World Sight Day” (ironically a day for the blind), asks, shouldn’t we all share the same vision?
The effect of such reduction of perception to visual acuity, and the insufficiency of the latter compared to the ‘norm’, and its naming, confers an ethical authority to the HCP to intervene, with the help of bigpharma. This linear-causal approach between mechanical failure, technological rehabilitation, and productive citizenship reduces the lived social, cultural, and spiritual experience of blindness to a bio-mechanical outlier, a difference that cannot be appreciated because it is impeding “the same vision” among citizens. Social, cultural, and spiritual challenges, considered by some to inform the evolution of the material, might be overcome, it is implied, if we all shared the same bio-mechanical perception through technology, the same capacity to act on objects, our bodies, and the world, and the same disposition to these. Such a reduction of the layers of human experience to a smartphone screen reinforces a politics of exclusively materially-informed technological change. On balance, we might say that what is promoted is a negative spiritual anthropology and a positive physical one: while no attention is paid to the aforementioned non-mechanical considerations, the focus (and investment) is articulated according to a precise material aspect that can be known with certainty as the good according to which action may proceed. The result of this choice of positive and negative anthropology is that the focus is not on the individual but on the utility of the human collective before which bigpharma, represented in this advertisement as a white-coat wearing white male doctor with an iPad, has a social responsibility to do whatever necessary to allow the collective to continue to hold space in relation to objects and the world according to current terms of understanding of that right relationship.
ViaOpta Sim does not narrate for the sighted, so it is not actually the experience of the blind who use ViaOpta Daily to narrate their experience. Narration, then, as it takes place in the other apps, is a project for blind consciousness via language, to do with valid conditions of access to reality or the true. The absence or presence of such narration is indicative of dominant regimes of knowledge and concepts of nature, especially that of visual primacy.
ViaOpta Nav
This application uses the GPS capacity of a smartphone or smartwatch to narrate a users’ trip, similar to other subscription-based apps such as Ariadne and BlindSquare. It notifies the user when to turn left or right when an intersection is ahead, and when they have reached their destination. It allows the user to save favorite destinations for convenient routine trips. According to the app website, the app offers “an experience that can be life changing if you are living with low vision by helping you to increase your mobility and regain independence. You can access voice-guided and turn-by-turn directions, be alerted to intersections along the way, and even pinpoint and share your exact location with family and friends. Also find points of interest near you.” User complaints for this app included that it does not narrate the journey unless the user is approaching a new street or intersection (that is, it doesn’t always tell the user exactly where they’re at), and it does not take into account construction and detours. The anonymous author Pharma Guy of the Pharma Marketing blog complained that most elderly users who are affected by wet AMD don’t own a smartwatch, and that he believed that the app was only released only boost Novartis’ image and provide the occasion for more PR. His argument is that the app is designed for brand recognition for prospective consumers of Novartis’ drugs for degenerative eye diseases, such as brolucizumab,a promising treatment for wet AMD currently under FDA priority review.
Both official TV ads for these apps emphasize the benefit of discretion the apps confer to the blind user. In the first ad, transcribed below in Appendix C, a grandfather in Budapest connected to ViaOpta Nav via his AppleWatch is walking his granddaughter to the park to play when a young man crossing the intersection in the opposite direction brushes his shoulder – something that presumably would not happen were he walking with a cane.
In the second ad, transcribed below in Appendix D, this “invisible” biggest help of ViaOpta Nav helps a young, attractive man dressed in business casual attire to navigate the streets of Budapest by listening, with his iPhone to his ear like everyone else, until arriving at a cakeshop. There he picks up a small cupcake and chooses “bench’ from his list of favorite places in the ViaOpta interface. He arrives at the bench and is greeted by his girlfriend who takes the cupcake from him and takes his hand. Following the trend observed in other ViaOpta ads, heterosexuality operates in this ad to convey normality and functional society, perhaps rehabilitating the imagined deficient sexuality of the visually impaired person.
Discretion is marketed as an aspect that adds value for the user who can escape the stigma of deficiency. An article published in the Irish Newspaper The Journal on the occasion of the app’s release includes a testimony by an employee of the NCBI:
“It’s discreet, which is so refreshing (…) Traditionally, low-vision aids practically scream, ‘Hey, I can’t see!’ to everyone. But I don’t use a stick, I choose not to, and with these it just looks like you’re looking at any other app.” (Brennan 2017)
Discretion was further emphasized in a PR-type article published in the Irish Medical Times: “ViaOpta Nav and ViaOpta Daily have been created to assist the visually impaired to better experience the world around them in a discreet way, all at the push of a button” (Sutton 2017, 36).
Concurrent with the value of discretion is that of autonomy or independence, represented by the elderly blindfolded superheros on the app website, and promoted by the official ad itself: “These apps can allow people to retain or sometimes even regain their independence.” These values were also highlighted in both aforementioned articles. The Irish Medical Times quotes the CPO head for Novartis Ireland who explains that, “We are delighted that patients will now have the opportunity to benefit from the use of the ViaOpta apps to improve their independence and quality of life” (Sutton 2017, 36). Meanwhile, another user tells The Journal that the app is “one of the most effective and innovative pieces of technology out there. It’s life-saving, gives you back your independence and autonomy” (Brennan 2017).
One might infer from this combination of discretion and autonomy that the stigma associated with being blind can only be remedied through integration of the blind into the current patterns and anti-social terms of social economic life thanks to technology. Put differently, society has no hope of being changed to be more accommodating to those less useful at manipulating objects efficiently, but technology can remedy this human shortcoming and offer new hope.
The Final Solution to the Blind Problem
We might ask where value can be found for the owners of ATs in a long-range strategic view. An article in Engineering & Technology suggests that the need for independence of the blind remains unmet by popular features such as Google Maps because, quoting Head of Solutions, Strategy, and Accessibility at the RNIB, these are:
“centered around car drivers. Even if they refer to (…) ‘pedestrian mode’, they are still talking about roundabouts in the road whereas I want to know where the crossing is (…) The traditional problem I would have would be walking down Euston Road and the system will say ‘yes, you have arrived,’ but the destination that I want is across two lanes of traffic on the other side of the road.” (Pultarova 2015, 54)
The article explains that the goal of the “smart maps of the future would navigate the blind user to the destination via the most convenient crossing with almost pinpoint precision” using “detailed mapping” that “combines positioning data with image processing to enable the blind users to find the door of the exact shop he or she might be looking for” (Pultarova 2015, 54). To bring about this future, developers are currently “experimenting with visual analysis. The idea is that you will be able to take a photograph or video of where you are and this photographic information will be analyzed, blended with the data that’s already available to your device from GPS or any other beacons in the vicinity, and you would be able to read the shop signs” (Pultarova 2015, 54).
Certainly ViaOpta’s combination of Daily and Nav can provide such data to potential developers. Further to this, Shoroog et al. criticize ViaOptaNav for not providing speech recognition technology and not providing specific semantic information such as an obstacle in front of the user or recognizing a destination uttered by the user (129). Systems such as Microsoft 3D Soundscape and TrAvel do provide this information but require a special headset rather than just a universal smartphone like ViaOpta Nav does. Such information is important to help “detect static and dynamic obstacles in video streaming recorded by smartphones” and to help systems “generate an intelligent decision representing an appropriate voice directive and an alert to the user when the obstacle is detected” (Shoroog et al. 2016, 130). Given these limitations, Shoroog et al. propose ENVISION, an AT app that includes a new method to detect “static and dynamic obstacles” recorded by the smartphone’s video in real-time and uses GoogleVoice API for voice recognition to find “a valid path to the destination” (130, 135). The ENVISION system then generates an “intelligent decision representing an appropriate voice directive and an alert to the user when the obstacle is detected” (130).
To summarize, the ultimate solution to being blind in the world is a machine-mediated and narrated existence when faced with objects. Moreover, this mechanical existence should be universal. The chief executive of the Royal London Society for Blind People explains: “You don’t want to have a separate app for the blind, then a separate app for people with dyslexia or other problems. That would be too costly. You want to design things so that they are accessible for everybody right from the start and even make things easier for the sighted” (Pultarova 2015, 54).
This universal solution would necessarily lead to an “emerging Internet of Things as well as Big Data Processing” (Pultarova 2015, 54). Thinking ahead to this “big breakthrough”, the CPO explains that “at the end of the day, we can put a lot of technological solutions in place to deal with the loss of sight, but ultimately it’s the loss of sight that is the cause of the problem. As microchip technology gets even more powerful and faster, the possibility to transmit complex information about the environment into somebody’s brain may become a reality” (Pultarova 2015, 54).
To be sure, this is a technological solution that takes the form of total visibility of all objects and people, and to bring about this solution requires the enrollment of the blind, those individuals deficient in the ability to see objects and to be seen just as others who can see objects are. Business demands to work on what already is, that can be known and predicted, and this as individually as possible to find new space to transform. The newfound visibility of blind individuals, because it is accompanied by an increased visibility of objects, confers autonomy, or the choice of how to act upon objects. But this autonomy must remain discreet so as not to unsettle the external object-focused development agenda of technology and raise the question of alternative development trajectories that would not be object-focused, trajectories that would allow space for alternative dispositions to objects and to light.These dispositions could be known for example through a user-center design philosophy, explored for smartphone ATs for visual impairment by Hakobyan et al.
Exclusion and inequality would not exist, the logic suggests, in a mechanically integrated and known universe, and blindness, understood as the lack of visibility of objects to the blind individual, is the impediment to this. Blindness as a deep boundary object becomes the occasion by which a philosophy of mechanism gets translated to different stakeholders who become enrolled in a telos of predictability wherein, to cite mechanist Pierre Simon Laplace, “the present state of the universe” is “the effect of the past and the cause of the future”.
The discourse accompanying the release of the ViaOpta apps tells a story about blindness as pathological deviation from a defined external norm and technology as salvation in order to enroll such mutation in a development agenda that furthers market penetration for an emerging user-driven (but not user-designed or defined) techno-bio-governance. Such penetration allows for greater visibility of the objects in the world including the human being considered as a material object. With this new visibility comes the mechanistic temptation of considering the conscious human being as only an object consisting of mechanical ‘parts’ of which the sense organs, including the eyes. ATs are developed to work on the deficient parts of this greater technology of the body that exists as a kind of ghost. The technological determinist fear of digital transformation not being inclusive enough, of the blind abandoning ATs and falling off the development trajectory and investment agenda, allows for penetration of technology deep in “normal” life, without regard for alternative temporalities and experiences of meaning. De Abreu writes that “placing causes in the future means a conversion of technological determinism into an instance of indeterminacy which allows (…) to act while an imminent future effects the present” (2013, 267). The way in which ATs are integrated in the lives of the blind has direct import for the criteria according to which technology will be developed more generally, starting from childhood. Blindness is the mutation that drives greater hybridity on a species level.
The danger lies in forgetting that, in as much as the body and objects are now (technologically) visible for evaluation and rehabilitation because they are visible in the light, they may also be sources of light themselves. Technologies of the body may not be ends in themselves within a determined universe but mere physical manifestations that allow for a spiritual origin to work in the world through the new contributions of individual gifts.ATs can be celebrated on the condition that they also allow space for that work to continue, allowing the “I” even greater possibilities for expression and becoming. But to do so, they need to be developed in a manner that leaves space for attention to explore the possibility of being an “I”. When the whole human being is viewed only as a material ghost, the body as technology, with its many senses, is neglected as a space for the cultivation of the attention necessary for conscious cognition, and this neglect infuses language use. The resulting language is characterized by its unmoving quality, its attempts to preserve the material conditions of life by inscribing consciousness in a realist correspondence with words limited by their current definitions and use, with no space attributed for their imaginative use and free redefinition through individual experience.
If we think of language and reproduction as the two main technologies of the self, the latter the source of continued global inequalities justified by the former which maintains as legitimate the national borders that allow for such inequalities to continue to be explained away, we might understand the challenge of language, of the logos, as how to use language in a way that allows for reproduction to be fully externalized (taken on by the market and its technologies) in a way in which who lives and who dies in the future will no longer be based on national privilege (on utility to holding space for space’s sake), but instead on one’s individual contribution to alleviating global inequalities and meeting the needs of others through becoming ever more united with the world, an evaluation of worth financed through individual visibility to those who own the technologies necessary for eliminating those inequalities and measured by the appreciation of others who receive the individual’s gifts.
This individual contribution, while having its origin in consciousness, manifests and works through language and is shared through one’s narration of experience, through infusing the collective web of language with the individual will and experience. It is for this reason that I have tried to call attention to the importance of making room for the user’s experience, including in its apophatic or ineffable dimensions, and in avoiding development according to a determined relationship with language, in order to allow for a relationship with the technologies of production of language and text that is continuously and consciously informed by the whole of individual experience.
Such a neglectful language politics is made possible by converging political agendas between so-called neoliberal actors on one hand and democratic-eco-socialist sensibilities on the other, with the need for predictability in human evolution uniting them. The so-called neoliberal group, informed by materialist mechanism which considers the experience of individual consciousness to be an illusion, maintains that suffering can be alleviated through inclusive material redundancy, with the body as technology forced into a virtual transformation through deep technological penetration of reproduction and language, total dematerialization accompanied by further despiritualization in the secular-materialist tradition, a process that, it is promised, will engender a more intelligent posthuman life form. The material nature of the human being is revealed in his willingness to enlist his own being in market flows, as we can observe in the development of ATs for the visually impaired, that contribute to bringing about this dematerialization based on equalizing mechanical objectives like “sight”.
A second group, however different their political ambitions, considers suffering to be a consequence of material utility arising from physical freedom, but this group, in its belief of dualism, endeavors to thwart any effort to free human utility from the democratic state-controlled ethics of materialization, and its collective language (and consciousness), as a way for collective material redundancy to occur. The substantive equality for which this group advocates only makes the current materialization more equal according to present material criteria, which assumes that suffering is of an exclusively material origin and results in blindness being relegated to a deficit frame rather than celebrated as a valid way of perceiving.
Yet a third way seeks to heal suffering through a concomitant dematerialization, through transhumanist technology and the individual visibility for which it allows, and respiritualization, through a politics of choice and free association based on affinity, in a way that places at its center the freedom of the individual to will their attention, including and especially as concerns language use, to becoming ever more the world. One might find meaning in the experience of going somewhere and wish to be exempt from the narration of a noisy AT during that time, for example.
This position incorporates demands for inclusion, but not on the level of utility of the collective group, with emphasis instead placed on the individual user’s choice of orientation of attention, of disposition to the light, a spiritual freedom believed to precede the material freedom that has been achieved through national-secular materialization. Accordingly, it hopes to bring about an end to all forms of group domination such as gender, since there would be no value to be found in maintaining the physical materializing nation state in a world of fully-visible individuals. Language is retired as a requirement for collective belonging, and knowledge is viewed as knowing from the direct experience of being (in) the world, which in being articulated has the effect of renewing language.
Because the neoliberal view of the major players has the technology and needs the market, the question is about what the evolution from the physical utility of the citizen body to its virtual utility will be. This is why the ethics of ATs for the visually impaired are so important for the future of all human evolution, to know whether virtual utility will be only a mimesis of existing (and previously useful) physical sense organs such as the eyes and the body, or whether the relationship of the latter to the world can be expanded, to be informed by the experience of alternative, emerging dispositions to the light.
This is in contrast with the view of patient organizations which hope to include the blind into a common development agenda based on a collective identity, but in doing so, paradoxically naturalize "sight" (and, by extension, gender) in a continued saga of symbolic domination that maintains the morality of reproduction (and materialization) of the physical collective through placing future-value ever more intensely on the manipulation of objects in the present.
Kühlewind writes that “the world, including human beings and their consciousness, is not originally a world of things but a world of words; that, fundamentally, it is structured like a text and can therefore be read as a text” (1992, 13). He continues on to say that “we can perceive phenomena for which we have concepts or ideas – or for which such concepts or ideas can be developed in the course of observation,” and as we try to apply this principle to “the observation of everyday consciousness,” the “first step in the process of observation is to distinguish between conscious cognition – guided by questioning – and the given image, which is the object of investigation and results from earlier (…) cognition. A further distinction would differentiate between the planes of the present and the past in consciousness – for instance, by distinguishing between the activity of thinking and the (already past) thoughts that are the results of this activity” (1992, 15).
His view expresses the centrality of the “I” to conscious cognition and as a means to pursue a greater monism in the world. Furthering monism and transitioning meaning from dualism may be seen as critical to ending gender and various other forms of material domination, since the sense of mystery engendered by who/what one is not, that unbridgeable gulf between self and other, inevitably leads to the desire to possess the other.
Haraway recommends putting an end to such desire by embracing hybrid life forms, such as the cyborg, and celebrating the potential technological hybridity it offers for regeneration rather than reproduction.She views language as central to this aim, since “writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late twentieth century. Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly (…) That is why cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution (…)” (1991, 176).
Texts are certainly central to translating the boundary object, but the point of political and philosophical contention is revealed when we venture to ask by whom such texts are produced, and according to what telos. Specifically, what is the relationship of the individual self to the production of texts?
For Haraway, the autonomous conscious “self” or the concept of the free individual is part and parcel of the dualist tradition.The question is not how to be fluidly with machines, but rather a question of recognizing that “the machine is us” (1991, 180). Accordingly, the noise for which she advocates has to do with using language for keeping perception (consciousness) at the level of her belief that it is the object, without space for a meta-awareness that could suggest that consciousness in fact creates the object (and the machine). Such pollution of perception through language as noise culminates in a materialist monism that is effectively without the possibility for hierarchy because no reflective consciousness can stand outside the noise and speak about it. “Taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology,” writes Haraway, “means refusing an anti-science metaphysics” (1991, 181). Accordingly, the ethics of science is confined to the qualities of objects (including human beings) quantitatively measured and known through the limitations of the current physical senses, a task at which machines excel. Since no one can purport by their unique experience to stand outside of such certainty, such experience being invalidated as illusory, change can finally proceed according to an unspoken telos of material equalization, made palatable (and moral) through sensorial pleasure.
Haraway’s beliefs about the nature of the self, the role of language, and the ethics of science, situated in the eco-socialist tradition, are in contrast to those expressed by spiritual thinkers who seek to bring metaphysics to science through a greater attention to individual consciousness. In their view, gender is not the proper of desire but rather of collective material utility, so the urgency in technological development is not an egalitarian management of objects and bodies but rather a doing away with any such collective management, especially as it manifests through collective (national) language. The hope is that technology might become merged with the individual will whose perception is not limited to current physical interactions with objects and others, but rather is infinitely creative before forms, owing to developed inner or spiritual perception. Technology as a tool for revelation is viewed as essential to this aim.The result is a spiritual rather than a material telos for the person, leading to a spiritual monism established according to a hierarchy of inner qualities rather than an ethics of outer equalization, consistent with the belief in an original spiritual origin of the world rather than a material origin, that consciousness precedes matter. Injustice, it is believed, is not found in the existence of hierarchy but rather in the unjust criteria of collective utility according to which current hierarchy has been established. As concerns language, these contrasting worldviews, the metaphysical and the material, yield two very different possibilities: either language as noise, with individual participation confined to fixed, computational limits (that may include, among other strategies, the censorship of certain words that do not point to material equalization (e.g. ‘self’, 'choice')), or language as reconciliation of thought with conscious experience, that words might be freely chosen by a thinker in a way that could lead to a mimesis of words with an emergent spiritual reality. Such a reality, for example in the Gospel of Saint John, has often been referred to as the Logos, Zajonc reminds us (21), with language among human beings (“the Word”) imagined as its incarnate form, along with light itself. Words point humanity towards a possible existence, however metaphysical or materialist, in a way that the human being becomes word and the incarnation of the Logos (220). We become the texts we produce.
On Becoming Through Light and Language
In his book, Catching the Light, Zajonc undertakes a daunting task: telling the story of light, both from the perspective of the history of science and through the history of ideas, retracing how this elusive element of life has been grasped by evolving human consciousness across time. This approach is born of Zajonc’s belief in the inseparability of the “outer light of nature” and the “inner light of the mind” (7), the former representing science, and the latter, spirituality. Zajonc’s own life is a testament to such a marriage: he holds three degrees in physics from the University of Michigan and has also served as the president for the Dalai Lama’s Mind and Life Institute as well as the General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society. During his 37-year appointment at Amherst, he incorporated contemplative practices such as meditation into his classes and worked to encourage a renewed epistemology in higher education as president of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. In this inaugural work, he first invites the reader to explore what can really be known scientifically of the banal phenomena of light and mind on which all pursuits of knowledge depend, and as for the yet unknown, to be open to the knowledge and insights that emerge through individual contemplative practice.
The first of twelve chapters is devoted to unsettling any certainty we may have about our sense of sight as a sufficient basis for understanding the mind’s perception of light. We are introduced to two of the first cases of congenitally blind individuals who underwent surgery to regain vision. Both patients’ doctors were shocked to learn that their patients had to be educated to see after the success of their operations. Zajonc offers this as proof that “vision requires far more than a functioning physical organ. Without an inner light, without a formative visual imagination, we are blind” (5). One of the patients even came to neglect sight, preferring to continue to live as a blind person because it required less effort of him. This is explained by the fact that there exists a critical period in childhood during which our ability to see develops. Accordingly, Zajonc concludes that “the cognitive capacities we now possess define our world (…) the light of the mind must flow into and marry with the light of nature to bring forth a world” (6).
Naturally, such an understanding of how our own sight develops leads us to desire a greater understanding about how exactly the light of the world works. Zajonc embarks on a history of ideas about the light of nature, sharing stories from the Zoroastrian god of light, Ahura Mazda, or the Egyptian sun god, Ra. Many of their ideas about light inspired inventors and philosophers alike, and Zajonc chronicles the resulting inventions, often through helpful illustrations, like Johannes Kepler’s “geometrical explanation for the camera obscura” (31), Father Francesco Maria Grimaldi of Bologna’s discovery of diffraction (108), or the inverted world of the philosopher posited by Descartes (33). The latter, believing “mechanical stimuli” to be “perceived by a spiritual principle within man” which “reached all the way into the body but could not of itself complete the process of vision”, requiring first a “spiritual principle (res cogitans)”, inaugurated a new epoch in the history of light and mind since “the light of the eye (…) remained (…) retreated from the body (…) as a disembodied spirit, a vestige of the past” (34), rather than an active co-creator of the world.
Descartes’ dualist view of spirit and cognition replaced popular Hermeticist and Cabalistic thought and set the stage for modern-day materialist philosophers such as Thomas Huxley or David Hubel, who believed perception to be simply a “state of the physical brain” (35). Because “mind is an illusion”, it follows that education and social institutions should be redesigned to “serve the brain, not an antiquated notion of ‘spiritual man’” (35). Zajonc considers this turn in neurophysiology and psychology to be a grave error of what he calls “an idolatry of the brain” and wishes to remind us of a time before quantum physics when many scientists also entertained such an idolatrous view of light itself. From Newton, Huygens, and Young, to Euler, Faraday, Maxwell, and Einstein, the history of science is full of competing theories of light, whether as material ether, as etheric wave, or as vibration. The error of idolatry happens when we remove the light from its position of constant movement and place it under our stable gaze, as if to define it through capture (and, by extension, life itself). If “each stage of scientific discovery has its idol era” (342), Zajonc invites us to consider present-day views about the brain as the sole origin of mind. If “the characteristics of a culture are mirrored in the image of light it has crafted” (8), what can be said about the image of mind and light in our societies today? He cautions us not be satisfied that academics seem to have reached a consensus view on the neurobiological nature of mind, as history suggests that the popularity of an idea by no means guarantees its validity. As an example, he offers Newton’s theory of optics, which was “accepted without philosophical sophistication” in academia following the publication in 1704 of Newton’s theory of optics, Opticks (88).
In the 18thcentury, the trend was towards “mechanical models of unseen realities: these were the features of the mental world” (113), then, in the 19th century, the most popular scientific worldview was that of “the universe (…) filled with material objects, between which stretched several elusive material ethers whose motions conveyed the forces of gravity, light, heath, electricity, and magnetism from one object to another” (133). Finally, quantum realism emerged and reminded us that what we took to be the “primary qualities” of things, “unambiguous and irreducible attributes of reality”, do not, in fact, exist for light itself: light, “as an enduring, well-defined, local entity, vanishes (…) in its place, a subtle, entangled object evolves, holding all four of its quantum qualities suspended within itself, until the fatal act of measurement” (315). That is, our human measurement.
Citing the work of Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner, Zajonc suggests that “the passage from that subtle, entangled object to sense reality is miraculous, made possible only by the active agency of the mind. (…) The miracle of reduction (…) takes place by the action of mind in the moment of cognition. Only when one fully includes its role (…) can one account for knowledge” (314). Such a focus on movement leads Zajonc to share Goethe’s worldview of “gentle empiricism” which seeks to incorporate moving perception in knowledge creation. “By active engagement with the world”, we experience “self-transformation (Bildung)” and learn to see ever more anew, Goethe believed (204-205). His “participatory science” endeavored to train human beings to see ideas within the context of the moving light, which sees human beings before they are able to see the objects illumined.
If “evolution has occurred in the context of light, and over time, the body has responded with the organ of sight” (341), we might wonder what future organs will be developed by human beings. In the final chapter, Zajonc does not hide his hope that such organs will be developed as a result of a renewed focus on spiritual life. No amount of light, he is convinced, can avail us of the importance of mind in understanding it, and such an understanding is necessarily informed by our spiritual disposition to ourselves and the world. He shares Rudolf Steiner’s belief that today’s light is actually the product of the moral dispositions of the past: that “the natural world around us grows out of the moral world within us” (222). This means that “the physical world is the fruit of the moral world. (…)” (221).
Zajonc concludes by inviting us to concentrate more on the light and less on measurement of objects. “Holding to light, not to the objects it illumines, is the point,” he writes. “We need time to work with it, live with it, think about it, and see into it (…) Once we have learned to see light, surely everything else will follow” (342-343).
Accordingly, Merleau-Ponty in Le Visible et l’Invisible, proposes that the stakes of perception are not to be found in studying intentionality or a posteriori essences, but in the eventfulness of each of us being part of what he calls the “flesh of the world”, turned back onto itself as it were (a strange situation that may have resulted in Descartes’ dualism but need not remain there). Our experience is often marked by a faith in our visual perception (foi perceptive) of reality that tends to hide the essential role of perception itself in being, to the point of reducing perception to another perceivable object. Johnson explains that:
“for Merleau-Ponty, perception and expression must be understood as dimensions of a wider originating event of sense, one that is ontologically more primordial than either a sense-giving subject or a sense-bearing object. Subject and object (…) are abstractions from an original unitary dimension of what Merleau-Ponty calls nature, or the “flesh of the world”. (…) The subject or self is interwoven with the world and its objects while nonetheless being also a divergence or gap in the being of nature that makes possible its experiential presence to things. (…) I am encompassed by a range of appearances, then, that are more than merely sensible – they appear as a certain direction of meaning (sens), such that in the intertwining of self and world I am always already engaged with, and by, appearances that are expressive, that solicit and address me. I am able to respond to these solicitations and be an embodied giving expression to the world, a saying of what “wants” to be said, because I am the opening within which the world appears. Hence, things can find their echo in me, and I am the power to understand and say them.” (2017, 694)
Kühlewind espouses a similar view of immanent perception which he considers central to a knowledge of the logos and also under threat from the “ego-consciousness”:
“real knowing of the Logos is prevented as long as it is seen from the outside. Because cognizing remains unrealized and unexperienced, one cannot cognize. Cognizing in the deepest depths means simultaneous identity and distinction of I and the world, and this occurs only for an “I”. Therefore, to become of the Logos is to become aware of the inner light, the light of the word. (...) Yet it is also true self-consciousness, by which the non-cognizing element, ego-consciousness, recedes. The speaker first reveals himself in human beings in the process of thinking. The intuition of the Logos is simultaneously the intuition of the inner logos. Man awakens in the word. The invisible I-am-the-I-am-there – the living, present God – becomes present in and through man.” (1985, 23)
Lusseyran has written extensively about the dangers of confusing the ego with the “I” and considers visual impairment to be a gift because his experience is that visual deficiency allows greater development of the “I” and distrust of appearances.The space between the inner and outer worlds opened up by blindness, for him, is an invitation to take seriously the reality of the “I”.
In his collection of essays, Against the Pollution of the I, written in the late fifties and first published in French by Editions Triades in 1972 under the title Contre la pollution du moi, Lusseyran reflects on the lessons learned from the major events that shaped his life: becoming blind at age seven after a violent accident, struggling to find employment as a teacher when the state education system excluded people with disabilities, the decision to join the French resistance movement during WWII at age 14, and the experience of the Buchenwald concentration camp from which he was released in 1945 after eighteen months. Lusseyran’s story ended tragically in a car accident at age 46, just before the original publication of this collection. Readers interested in a detailed, emotional autobiography will be disappointed, because the author is less interested in anecdotes than with getting to the bottom of the deep philosophical questions elicited by his unique lived experience.
The collection begins with an account of his early life told across two “blinding” events: the first, personal, at age 7, and the second, social, at age 14, when he understood before many others who were “blind” to the rise of national socialism what a society guided by such beliefs would become. Lusseyran experiences the loss of sight, both his own sight and society’s ability to “see”. His goal, in writing these essays, is to reveal “to the greatest number of my fellow men” that “realm of universal experience” which can be found at “the depths” to which blindness predisposes (26).
Upon becoming blind, Lusseyran was surprised to find that light still existed within (27), but quickly learned that feelings of anger, fear, or sorrow would cause him to stumble and hurt himself in the external world because he had not orientated his attention towards this “inner light”, which demands a disposition of trust and love (28). To encourage the blind to develop such a relationship, Lusseyran advises the sighted not to pity the blind, but rather to “show them what their loss brings them” (29). He distinguishes between those practical skills which the blind must acquire, such as fluency in Braille, in order to continue to be part of society, and the new perceptive ability, particularly useful in discerning the goodness of others, that the blind quickly acquire. “My blindness,” writes Lusseyran, “saved me from one great misery: that of living with egotists or fools (…) they never came to me” (30-31).
The author sees this perceptive ability as a result of the development of the attention exercised in seeking to “see” an exterior object or person. “Every single tree projected its form, its weight, its movement (…) I could indicate its trunk, the place where its first branches started, even when several feet away,” he remembers (32). This attention further reveals that “the world exerts pressure on us from the distance”, that “the universe consists of pressure”, and “every object and every living being reveals itself to us at first by a kind of quiet yet unmistakable pressure that indicates its intention and its form” (32). This feeling of pressure is accompanied by a voice, whether from a human or the sound of wind brushing a tree, that conveys figure, rhythm, and intention (33). The “correspondence is so exact,” assures Lusseyran, “that when I walked arm in arm with a friend along the paths of the Alps, I knew the landscape and could sometimes describe it with surprising clarity (…) when I summoned all my attention” (33). If only all people could do this, he writes, “they would suddenly see that the world is entirely different from what they had believed it to be (…) all science would become obsolete in a single moment, and we should enter into (…) immediate cognition” (33).
Lusseyran writes that the German occupation of his native France was akin to a “second blindness” (34). Listening to German media, he could understand before his fellow countrymen that the ideas being circulated would eventually lead to the end of freedom. “There was no other reason”, he writes, “for my entering the resistance movement. But there was the difficulty of how to go about it” (35). His started his own resistance group, only to be betrayed by one of his comrades in 1944 and sent to Buchenwald where he worked as an interpreter among camp members. While there, he was impressed by an older spiritual man for whom the camp was “only an adventure” which he felt “did not concern him in a fundamental way” (158). This man represented the strength of an active and developed I. Lusseyran came to understand that the absence of freedom that defined the Holocaust was not a problem of faulty morality, but the logical consequence of a generalized underdevelopment of the I in the national population.
Lusseyran concludes that, “the fate of the blind community is the fate of all minorities. It is of no importance whether these minorities are of national, religious, or physical origin. At the very best they are tolerated. They are almost never understood.” (41) He believes that society must choose to value the unique sight of the blind, which makes them “experts (…) in the realm of the invisible” (47) and enables them to “experience with an irresistible force the wonderful mutual exchange between the inner and the outer worlds” (59). He promises that, “if we regard blindness as another state of perception, another realm of experience, everything becomes possible” (47).
The experience of the sighted makes them vulnerable to confusing the surface of things (and people) with their inner nature. The danger of this naïve “cognition (…) lies in the nature of seeing itself, in its quickness, in its usefulness (…) especially (…) when we use it for knowing other people” (55). The act of seeing replaces the I and leads to an idolatry of things that inhibits attention and maintains the “prejudice that (…) elevates seeing to its all-powerful position” (71): the belief that external material reality exists independently of our control, that we exist passively and among ourselves as products of this reality, rather than as active creators of it through the I.
Lusseyran’s essays, beyond their literary merit, would be valuable to anyone wrestling with the ethics of technologies and education for the blind and visually impaired. In a field where transformation is driven by a sighted deficit mentality, Lusseyran invites us to consider that “the time has come to compare our experiences” (48), arguing that such a comparison could “accomplish valuable work” in allowing the limits of perception to be explored and known (65). We are challenged to ask to what extent do the technologies and education we provide for the blind allow for such a comparison to take place, while addressing the practical demands of everyday life. To what extent is the student’s inner light taken seriously, the free becoming of theirIpolluted with our ego-based development objectives?To be clear, Lusseyran believes that human beings cannot be reduced to machines, “for they possess an I” (120), “someone watching deep within (…) who sees nothing because he allows seeing” (101), and is sure to displease all who, like Donna Haraway, advocate for the negation of the self.
One wonders, in conclusion, how Lusseyran would view modern ATs for the blind like the ViaOpta apps of this analysis. Certainly the space they occupy could be used for advertising, Moreover, they reduce the capacity to orientate attention towards an unmediated presence with the world since they solicit the user’s attention for specific functions. These functions are often tainted with reductionism and fail to honor both perception and objects as parts of a larger whole. “Seeing” the world in this reductionist way is in contrast with “seeing” through intuition, which as a perceptive style requires presence because it is simultaneously, as Merleau-Ponty wrote in the Phénoménologie de la Perception, a living and making of reality that is neither a state nor an act.
I am afraid the apps analyzed here could be charged with all of the above shortcomings. Most challenging of all is that they are a reminder of the participation of non-human actors in the becoming logos. But are they too not also necessarily part of the flesh of the world? In La Prose du Monde, Merleau-Ponty pays tribute to the regenerative qualities of language made possible through the meaning of parole (“le langage parlant”), or language that is mimetic with the living act of thinking itself as it manifests in the mind of the speaker or author, rather than just a series of descriptive, communicative signs between consciousnesses (“le langage parlé”) (1969, 17). Specifically, he writes that the voice in which words are spoken pull us into the author’s mind (1969, 19), and therein lies the regenerative and mimetic quality of language. “As long as language truly functions,” he writes, “it is not a simple invitation to discover in oneself meanings that already exist there. It is a ruse by which the writer or speaker, touching on these meanings, makes them seem strange, and then draws us into his own harmonious resolution that from that moment on we consider as our own. From him to us, there are only pure relations of mind to mind” (1969, 21). Perhaps the beauty of the ViaOpta apps is this very strangeness of their language, sometimes random, always logical, and the way they encourage us to understand our own perception, whether sighted or blind, and capacity for language in a new way. The fear of the machine gives way to a hybridity that admits artificial intelligence and mechanical perception as just another actor born of a human consciousness now past, a nagging ghost with whom we must now co-exist as part of the unified flesh of the world, in complicity rather than in competition, provided that we seize this opportunity to be human in the space we hold, in the words we speak, in ever more intuitive and imaginative ways.
This challenge particularly concerns education and specifically education for the blind because the authors who narrate the world for the blind child are increasing ATs, detritus fallen out of a past way of seeing the world, and integration of ATs in the teacher-student relationship, in keeping with governance necessity, is promoted in educational praxis (see De Freitas et al. 2009; Smith et al. 2009; Mulloy et al. 2014; Wong et al. 2016; Zhou et al. 2011). Children whether sighted or blind learn by imitation, a reality that should encourage us to attend not only to the technical competence of their teachers in helping them use ATs, but also to the extent to which teachers participate in the becoming logos in ever intuitive and imaginative ways themselves, and the space afforded to them for doing so in the student-AT relationship.
We also need to attend to the space afforded to the child to act on their knowledge, which I understand as insight from one’s own interactions in the world, with objects and others. As Simone Weil writes: “the most important part of education: to teach the meaning of 'to know' (in the scientific sense)” (xi). Are blind children allowed space to know, and is this knowing allowed to infuse their relationship to language? How do ATs complement rather than replace such space? It seems to me that space (distance from transformative processes) and time (speed in thinking/acting) are variables that can be interrogated to better understand the freedom granted to the blind child to decide how and when, given the proliferation of ATs, to will their attention to objects and others, and how and when to use language.
The question of moral technology, as I understand it, is to imagine how education might now proceed in a way that allows attention to be channeled towards yet unknown objectives freely discerned by the individual learner, including as they feel compelled to act through empathy and compassion for the betterment of others and the earth, and how these objectives might be allowed to bubble up into the language that binds us. Such freedom of attention and responsibility to language could result in the development of entirely new organs of perception. For example, children who have been given space to develop their individuality in a sincere and deep way are able to perceive and appreciate the presence of individuality, however latent or neglected, in others. Consequently, they are able to co-exist with them in an entirely free way, including when others do not believe in the existence of themselves or in the importance of a politics of choice for others who do have this experience. I fear that the converse cannot be said to be true: where the “I” is not developed, fear ensues and the unfree collective is mobilized to subordinate new thought to the material now. An unfree way of seeing objects in the light is enforced in education to impede the speech and pillage the space of those who know themselves to exist by the grace of light, to think by the grace of thought. We might think of competency-based education as seeking to develop individual visibility vis-à-vis the ability to manipulate objects in the light, and concomitantly to develop mastery of the language needed to describe such manipulation. And I am not arguing against any of that. But what is to ensure in the transformative space of education today global individual visibility vis-à-vis the diversity of dispositions to the light itself?Moral technology could help us develop additional senses for recognizing such dispositions and how they work through language, and I understand ATs for the blind as an opportunity to take seriously a disposition of non-duality as a guiding value in the pursuit of knowledge. Nothing less than the recognition that, as Zajonc reminds us, “it can never be a question of separating the moral from the physical (…) we are co-creators of the world not only through the deeds of our hands but, in even greater measure, through the spiritual impulses we foster inwardly” (221).
Bibliography
Agmon, Maayan, Sa’ar Amalia, and Araten-Bergman Tal. 2016. “The person in the disabled body: a perspective on culture and personhood from the margins.” International Journal for Equity in Health15 (1): 147-158.
Benjamin, Walter. (1977) 1979 “Doctrine of the Similar.” In Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Herman Schweppenhaüser, 204-210. Frankfurt am Main. Reprinted in New German Critique, Special Walter Benjamin Issue 17: 65-69.
Brennan, Cianan. 2017. “Technology is the great equaliser' - how two apps for those with impaired sight are levelling the playing field.” The Journalwebsite, July 16. Accessed April 27, 2019.
De Abreu, Maria José. 2013.“Technological Indeterminacy: Medium, Threat, Temporality.” Anthropological Theory13 (3): 267-284.
De Freitas Alves, Cassia Cristiane, Gelse Beatriz Martins Monteiro, Suzana Rabello, Maria Elisabete Rodrigues Freire Gasparetto, Keila Monteiro de Carvalho. 2009. “Assistive technology applied to education of students with visual impairment.” Revista Panamericana de Salud Publica26 (2): 148–152.
Hammer, Gili. 2013. “‘This is the anthropologist, and she is sighted’: Ethnographic Research with Blind Women.” Disability Studies Quarterly33 (2): 4.
Haraway, Donna J. 1991. “A Cyborg Manifesto.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. New York: Routledge.
Johnson, David. W. 2017. “Acting-Intuition and the Achievement of Perception: Merleau-Ponty with Nishida.” Philosophy East and West67 (3): 693-709.
Kühlewind, Georg. 1984. Stages of Consciousness: Meditations on The Boundaries of the Soul. Translated by Maria St. Goar. Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Press.
Kühlewind, Georg. 1985.Becoming Aware of the Logos: The Way of St. John the Evangelist. Translated by Friedemann Schwarzkopf. Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Press.
Kühlewind, Georg. 1992. The Logos-Structure of the World: Language as Model of Reality. Translated by Friedemann-Eckart Schwarzkopf. Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Books.
Kühlewind, Georg. 2008. The Light of the “I”: Guidelines for Meditation. Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books.
Lusseyran, Jacques. 1999. Against the Pollution of the I: Selected Writings of Jacques Lusseyrand. Translated by Rob Baker. New York, New York: Parabola Books.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1945. Phénoménologie de la Perception. Paris: Gallimard.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. Le Visible et l’Invisible. Paris: Gallimard.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1969. La Prose du Monde. Paris: Gallimard.
Mulloy, Austin, Cindy Gevarter, Megan Hopkins, Kevin Sutherland, and Ramdoss Sathiyaprakash. 2014. “Assistive Technology for Students with Visual Impairments and Blindness.” In Assistive Technologies for People with Diverse Disabilities, edited by Guilio E. Lancioni and Nirbhay N. Singh, 113-156. New York, NY: Springer.
Novartis. ViaOpta Appswebsite. Accessed April 27, 2019.
“Novartis and Microsoft unveil the ViaOpta Hello app for Windows 10 PC,” YouTube video, 1:48, posted by “Microsoft Spain,” November 30, 2017,
“Object recognition by ARWorks,” YouTube video, 2:29, posted by “ARWorks,” May 8, 2016,
Pharma Guy. “ViaOpta Nav for iPhone by Novartis Now on Apple Watch. Yes, but…” Pharma Marketing(blog). June 30, 2015.
http://www.pharma-mkting.com/blog/viaopta-nav-for-iphone-by-novartis-now/
Pultarova, Tereza. 2015. “Blindness in a high-tech age (Design and Production Assistive Technology).” Engineering & Technology10 (12): 52-54.
https://doi.org/10.1049/et.2016.1205
Sauer, Dirk. “Novartis unveils a new app to empower people with blindness and/or severe visual impairment.” Windows Experience(blog). November 30, 2017.
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/11/30/novartis-unveils-new-app-empower-people-blindness-severe-visual-impairment/
Shoroog, Khenkar, Alsulaiman Hanan, Ismail Shahad, Fairaq Alaa, Jarraya Salma Kammoun, Ben-Abdallah Hanêne. 2016. “Envision: Assisted Navigation of Visually Impaired Smartphone Users.” Procedia Computer Science 100: 128-135.
Smith, Derrick W., Pat Kelley, Nancy Maushak, Nora Shirley-Griffin, and William Lan. 2009. “Assistive Technology Competencies for Teachers of Students with Visual Impairments.” Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness 103 (8): 457-469.
Star, Susan Leigh and James R. Griesemer. (1989) 1999. “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translation’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-19.” Reprinted in The Science Studies Reader, edited by M. Biagioli, 505-524. New York, Routledge.
Sutton. 2017. “Novartis launches new vision assistance apps.”Irish Medical Times51(20): 36. https://www.imt.ie/news/healthcare-news/novartis-launches-new-vision-assistance-apps-01-08-2017/
Taussig, Michael. 2015. The Corn Wolf. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press,
“The power of empathy through augmented reality: ViaOpta Simulator app,” YouTube video, 1:25, posted by “Novartis,” April 25, 2016,
“Via Opta Daily – an everyday app for the visually impaired,” YouTube video, 0:45, posted by “Novartis,” October 2, 2014,
“Via Opta Nav – a navigation app to assist those with vision impairment,” YouTube video, 0:42, posted by “Novartis,” October 2, 2014,
“Via Opta Nav – first smartwatch app for the visually impaired,” YouTube video, 1:00, posted by “Novartis,” June 29, 2015,
Weil, Simone. 1959. Waiting for God.Trans. Emma Craufurd. New York, NY: Capricorn Books.
Wong, Meng, and Libby Cohen. 2016. “Access and Challenges of Assistive Technology Application: Experience of Teachers of Students with Visual Impairments in Singapore.” Disability, CBR & Inclusive Development 26(4): 138-154.
Zajonc, Arthur. 1995. Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind.Oxford: OUP.
Zhou, Li, Amy T. Parker, Derrick W. Smith, and Nora Griffin-Shirley. 2011. “Assistive Technology for Students with Visual Impairments: Challenges and Needs in Teachers' Preparation Programs and Practice.” Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness105 (4): 197-210.
