"Blindness Gain" as Worldmaking: Audio Description as a New "partage du sensible"

Abstract

IN THIS ARTICLE we use our experiences of co-creating creative audio descriptions at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris to suggest that the worldmaking practices of challenge, collaboration, action, and dialogue offer a means to call into question the traditional ways of accessing museum and gallery content that still prevail in (French) society.1 We define “disability’s worldmaking” in the museum or art gallery as a two-part process. First, we challenge the ‘givenness’ of the hierarchies, relationships, and assumptions that govern visitor experience in the museum. Second, we offer an alternative model of visitor engagement where active and dialogic co-creation provides an inclusive alternative to ocularcentric museum experiences. Together, these acts of worldmaking promise an alternative mode of being in the museum that suggests a new politics of access. By going beyond current understandings of ‘inclusion,’ our project does not limit itself to giving disabled people a museum experience analogous to that of non-disabled people. Instead, it explores and celebrates alternative modes of engaging with art that do more than merely echo normative museum experiences and which, more broadly, open up a new way of making society. Our definition of worldmaking is a counterpoint to Jacques Rancière’s concept of “le partage du sensible” and is informed by the concept of “blindness gain.” In Rancière’s words, le partage du sensible as a political concept is “ce système d’évidences sensibles qui donne à voir en même temps l’existence d’un commun et les découpages qui y définissent les places et les parts respectives.”2 Elsewhere, he elaborates on this definition, describing it as “la façon dont les formes d’inclusion et d’exclusion qui définissent la participation à une vie commune sont d’abord configurées au sein même de l’expérience sensible de la vie.”3 In other words, according to Rancière, there is “une esthétique de la politique”: the assignment of a place to each person in society is manifested through the sensory experience itself, and, for him, particularly in a division between visibility and invisibility; audibility and inaudibility: those who participate in public life are visible and audible, while those who do not are invisible and inaudible (kept hidden and silent within the private sphere). Given that, for Rancière, the realm of art is a privileged place of sensory experience, it is therefore also a privileged place for le partage du sensible, which expresses who has a place in society and who does not. We argue that, nowadays, it is in the museum