Salience and Blindness
A Haptic Hike on Gins Mountain
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9264148 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Marie-Dominique Garnier (0000-0003-3289-2034, Université Paris Cité, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 104-2 |
| Publication date | 2016-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Revue de géographie alpine (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0035-1121 • E-ISSN: 1760-7426 |
| Publisher | OpenEdition (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.4000/rga.3453 |
| OpenAlex | W2529201045 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 9 |
This paper attempts to follow an improbable ridge line between architecture, geography and linguistics, between the optic and haptic ends of the concept of salience, through a reading of Helen Keller Or Arakawa, Madeline Gins’s 1994 essay-cum-joint-biography partly devoted to “salience” approached through the blind figure of Helen Keller (1880-1968). In a chapter titled “Or Mountains Or Lines”, prominent features envisaged from a sighted perception give way, under the condition of blindness, to saddle-points, swivel-areas and moments of stylistic tentativeness when words and/or syntax begins to fail. Salience, revisited through Keller’s apprehension of mountains as vaporous and mobile masses, leads to tentativeness in writing and to what I here call “failience” in discourse: the failure to stabilise discursive referents, the unsettling reversibility of syntactic lines based, for example, on the swivel-point of an “-ing” form. At work in Gins’s writing is the invention of a cathectic, tactile grasp of the world through langage. In order to ease access to a “faulty” perception, Gins invites her readers to transit through the writing of blind cartographer William Prescott, in particular through his “tactile”, linear mapping of the Andes Cordillera, approached as a mobile rhizome rather than as a collection of fixed, “raised” points. Mapping, under conditions of blindness, implies wander lines as much as lines of (thin) air
Apprehension · Cognitive psychology · Linguistics · Perception · Salience (neuroscience) · Sociology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Philosophy · Psychology · Religious Tourism and Spaces · Travel Writing and Literature
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |