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.