Abstract
According to Ernst Gombrich, cartoons provide us the chance to “study the use of symbols in a circumscribed context [and] find out what role the image may play in the household of our mind” (Gombrich 1973, 190). This paper looks at some underexplored implications and outcomes of Ernst Gombrich’s conceptual schemata when such a schemata is applied to cartoons. While we might easily avoid defamatory reference when picking out a subject in writing or speech, cartoon depictions, especially those unaccompanied by speech bubbles or captions, often rely on a visual symbolism typified by the warping of some features the removal of others, and the manifestation of some visual trope or other, more easily lend themselves to defamatory reference. While harms to the referent are many in cases of defamatory cartoons, this paper focuses on the harms to the viewers of such cartoons by the depicter’s message and mode of representation, unique to the cartoon form. I will focus on the harms of misinformation of the viewer by the visual schemata (Gombrich 1960) present in certain cartoons, and the way this misinformative visual schemata (Ibid) may also restrict the possibility of conceptual revisions in its viewership. Harms of this kind come out uniquely in cartoons via norms of cartooning (as a particularly stylized and symbolic mode of visual representation) and the norms of interaction employed in the act of viewing a cartoon. As we’ll see in our case study of the infamous Jyllands Posten cartoons of Muhammad the Prophet, even in cases where a cartoon representation bears no visual similarity to its referent, viewers can easily and reliably pick out the referent by calling to mind, in our focal case, the defamatory stereotypes, stock figures and icons inextricably linked with the referent. I argue that the damage to viewers of these sorts of depictions lies not in the fact that the viewer manages to pick out the intended referent of the depiction but what tools they use to pick out the referent and how such tools of reference (mis)inform their understanding of the referent they’ve picked out.
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Notes
By cartoon, I will mean something drawn, illustrated, or animated in a particular, styled display. There is a fine-grained distinction which philosophers of comics draw between comics and cartoons and different varieties within each form. Where to draw the line between the two is a hotly disputed subject, but the distinction won’t do much for my paper, so I’ll leave this issue aside for now. For more information on defining comics, see Meskin (2016) and related work by Cook (2011), Cook (2012), and Meskin et al. (2016).
“The artist, no less than the writer, needs a vocabulary before he can embark on a “copy” of reality”.
(Gombrich, 1960: 87).
“[E]ven the shape of the new vessel will somehow belong to the same family of forms as those the craftsman has seen, that his representation of ‘everything that exists in nature’ will still be linked with those representations that were handed on to him by his teachers” (Gombrich, 1960: 25).
Norms of cartooning, for example, include the norm that blood is not to be shed in cartoons of the Sunday comic strip variety, modes of depicted subject expression, including fumetti of speech and thought, who, by their frame style, separate from contents, convey indicators of the kind of emotion they’re meant to convey, as well as modes of action, including sphericasia, plewds, maladicta, and symbolia (Walker, (1980) 2000). Regarding norms of the particular style of depiction within the cartoon style that can be used to facilitate and convey contents,styles may include but are not limited to warping of the features in any number of the typical technical styles of cartoon depiction, including the use of maladictia, muscloma, tagatons, blurgits, sphericasia, agitrons, briffits, hites, and emanata which depict the body, cognitive capacity, character trope, and mode of expression in an exaggerated form, respectively (Ibid).
Dehumanization has taken on a slew of meanings since the start of the 1800s, ranging from “Verbally likening others to non-human animals or inanimate objects,” “Denying the subjectivity, individuality, agency, or distinctively human attributes of others,” “Conceiving of others as inanimate objects,” “Conceiving of others as less human than members of one’s in-group,” and, more recently, “Conceiving of others as subhuman creatures”. For the sake of this paper, Othering will not be limited to treating the subject as less than or sub-human but can, alternately, manifest itself as treatment of the subject as other than human. See LeMoncheck (1985); Haslam (2013); and Smith (2016) for more on this distinction.
I want to note a distinction between picking on the referent in ways that make them out as either ‘less than human’ and ‘less than person’, as these are vitally separable phenomena that can have crucially different implications. Namely, in some varieties of dehumanization, non-persons are at least granted a human visual form, but in other forms of dehumanization, even the human visual form is not granted to the subject. Othering all by itself doesn’t necessarily lead to feelings of fear and a desire to annihilate, however. For example, depicting a person as a flower or a mouse dehumanizes them, but this kind of dehumanization doesn’t make us fear the person for the flower or mouse-like depiction they’re meant to embody.
I intentionally do not describe the representation as “monster”, as this term loads in additional traits to its referent, which often renders the monster a sign or signal of warning. See Lewis and Jane Gordon’s Of Divine Warning (Gordon 2009).
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Gregg, M. The Unique Depictive Damage of Gombrichian Schemata in Cartoons. Philosophia 51, 1309–1331 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00608-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00608-7